The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right political party in the United Kingdom formed as a splinter group from the National Front by John Tyndall in 1982 and was led by Nick Griffin from September 1999 to July 2014. Its current chairman is Adam Walker. The BNP platform is centred on the advocacy of "firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home", as well as the repeal of anti-discrimination legislation. It restricted membership to "indigenous British" people until a 2010 legal challenge to its constitution.

Foundation (1982)

The British National Party was founded by the extreme-right political activist John Tyndall, who had been involved in neo-Nazi groups since the late 1950s. He had led the far-right National Front (NF) throughout most of the 1970s, although resigned in 1980, complaining that homosexuals like Martin Webster held senior positions within the party. He established his own rival group, the New National Front (NNF), in June 1980, hoping that his breakaway group could eventually be re-merged back into the NF. In January 1981, Tyndall was contacted by the far right activist Ray Hill, who was in reality a spy for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. Hill suggested that Tyndall establish a new political party through which he could unite many smaller extreme-right groups. While Hill's real intention had been to cause further schism among the British far right, Tyndall liked the idea. Tyndall made suggestions of unity to a number of other small extreme-right groups and together they established a Committee for Nationalist Unity (CNU) in January 1982. In March 1982, the CNU held a conference at the Charing Cross Hotel. The fifty extreme-rightists in attendance agreed that they would establish a new political party, to be known as the British National Party.

Tyndall was to be the leader of this new party, with the majority of its members coming from the NNF, although others were defectors from the NF, British Movement, British Democratic Party, and Nationalist Party. The party was formerly launched at a press conference held in a Victoria hotel on 7 April 1982. It was therefore dominated by ex-NF members and inherited that party's tradition of racial nationalism. Tyndall had led the NF on two occasions, and prior to that had been involved in several neo-Nazi groups, having been involved in the National Socialist Movement during the early 1960s and then founded his own Greater Britain Movement in 1964. Most of the BNP's leading activists, such as Charles Parker, David Bruce, Richard Edmonds, and John Peacock, had previously been senior figures in the NF. Tyndall later remarked that there was "scarcely any difference [between the BNP and NF] in ideology or policy save in the minutest detail". He described the party as being the third serious attempt to build such a movement in Britain, following those of the NF and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists before that. Under Tyndall's leadership the party was neo-Nazi in orientation and engaged in nostalgia for Nazi Germany.

The British National Party was founded in 1982 following a split within the far right National Front (NF) two years before. The NF had organised marches in an attempt to raise its profile, which sometimes led to violent clashes with political opponents such as the Anti-Nazi League. Following a poor showing at the 1979 general election, internal factional division heightened within the NF. This culminated in chairman John Tyndall leaving the party in 1980, and founding the New National Front (NNF), which became the BNP two years later. According to Spearhead, a magazine produced by Tyndall, the split within the NF was initially intended to be temporary. Members of Tyndall's NNF wished to modernise and break with fascism, blaming the old NF for its lack of popular appeal.

Tyndall's new BNP absorbed the membership of the British Democratic Party, a small British nationalist party led by Anthony Reed Herbert which was attempting to distance itself from neo-Nazism, and which had itself earlier split from the NF. Also joining were members of the Constitutional Movement, another NF splinter group who had distanced themselves from fascism and violent subcultures such as football hooliganism. These smaller nationalist parties attempting to modernise their image joined Tyndall's NNF through the Committee for Nationalist Unity (1981), which acted as a front to draw members from similar modernising nationalist organizations. However, despite Tyndall's attempt to distance the BNP from fascism, several individuals of the disintegrating British Movement were allowed to join. At its formation in 1982, the BNP had 2500 members, most of whom had joined from the Constitutional Movement through the Committee for Nationalist Unity. Eddy Morrison and his minor Leeds-based nationalist party merged with the BNP later that year.

Early years (1983–1990) Rather than seeking electoral victories, the BNP focused on long-term institutional growth. At the 1983 election, its membership was below 2000, and by 1988 this had dropped to 1000. It adopted a key tactic of the NF, that of street marches and rallies, believing that these attracted publicity and new recruits as well as boosting the morale of existing members. The BNP's first march took place in London to mark Saint George's Day 1982, with 400 to 500 activists in attendance. These marches often involved clashes with anti-fascist protesters and resulted in multiple arrests, thus cementing the connection between the BNP and both political violence and older fascist groups in the public eye. As a result, BNP organisers began to prefer holding indoor rallies, although street marches continued to be held throughout the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1986, Tyndall and John Morse were imprisoned for inciting racial hatred.

The BNP's early appearance in the electoral arena was "irregular and intermittent", and for the first twenty years of its existence, it faced consistent electoral failure. Such failure was shared by other neo-Nazi parties across Europe; while European populations were often highly critical of immigration, they were unlikely to endorse overt racial prejudice, and they rarely supported the idea of overthrowing the liberal democratic system of governance. When it did take part in elections, it was largely in the hope that the concomitant publicity would bring them new recruits. Throughout this period, the party suffered from low finances and personnel. In the 1983 general election it stood candidates in 54 seats although was only able to launch campaigns in five of them. Of these candidates, 40% had previously stood for the NF at the 1979 general election. The BNP gained 14,000 votes and averaged a vote share of 0.6% in the seats it had contested, however had been able to air a party political broadcast for the first time.

After the Representation of the People Act 1985 raised the cost of a candidate's electoral deposit to £500, the BNP adopted a policy of "very limited involvement" in elections. The party leadership also recognised that the rhetoric on restricting immigration then embraced by the Conservative Party government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was likely to reduce their chances of success. Believing that a campaign would threaten the party's financial security, it officially abstained in the 1987 general election. In the 1992 general election the party stood 13 candidates. At the 1993 local elections, the BNP gained one council seat—won by Derek Beackon in the East London town of Millwall—after a campaign that targeted the anger of local whites over the perceived preferential treatment received by Bangladeshi migrants in social housing. However, following an anti-BNP campaign launched by local religious groups and the Anti-Nazi League it lost this seat during the 1994 local elections. In the 1997 general election, it contested 55 seats and gained an average 1.4% of the vote.

In the early 1990s, the paramilitary group Combat 18 (C18)—its name a reference to Adolf Hitler—was formed to protect BNP events from anti-fascists. In 1992, C18 carried out attacks on left-wing targets like an anarchist bookshop and the headquarters of the Morning Star. Tyndall was angered by C18's growing influence on the BNP's street activities, and by August 1993, C18 activists were physically clashing with other BNP members. In December 1993, Tyndall issued a bulletin to BNP branches declaring C18 to be a proscribed organisation, furthermore suggesting that it may have been established by agents of the state to discredit the party. To counter the group's influence among militant British nationalists, he secured the American white nationalist militant William Pierce as a guest speaker at the BNP's annual rally in November 1995.

In the early 1990s, a group of "modernisers" emerged within the party who favoured a move towards a more electorally palatable strategy and an emphasis on building grassroots support to win local elections. They focused on community-based campaigning among the white working-class populations of London's East End, an area in which many of them lived. Utilising the slogan "Rights for Whites", this involved playing to anxieties regarding neighbouring immigrant and ethnic minority communities. They also called for similar tactics to be employed in those white working-class communities in Northern England which were adjacent to Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, and for the party to promote rural issues to gain traction in the countryside.

The modernisers produced a magazine titled Patriot in which they stressed the importance of "suits, smiles and good presentation". They were impressed by the electoral gains made by a number of extreme-right parties in continental Europe—such as Jörg Haider's Freedom Party of Austria and Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front—which had been achieved by both distancing themselves from anti-democratic ideas and towards populism and by switching focus from biological racism to the perceived cultural incompatibility of different racial groups. The modernisers succeeded in introducing some reforms: the BNP's newspaper for instance changed its slogan from "For Race and Nation" to "Voice of the British People". The party nevertheless did not lose its racial nationalist ideology and retained its links to violence-prone extra-parliamentary extreme-right groups such as Blood & Honour. Tyndall opposed many of the modernisers' ideas and sought to stem their growing influence in the party, declaring that "we should not be looking for ways of applying ideological cosmetic surgery to ourselves in order to make our features more appealing to the public".

In 1983, Tyndall sought to make an electoral impact by fielding 53 candidates in the 1983 general election, which guaranteed a free party broadcast. This broadcast featured Tyndall flanked by two British flags, and included footage of the Brixton riot, a violent clash between predominantly black local residents and the police. All of the BNP's candidates combined – including Tyndall and his wife Valerie – achieved only 14,621 votes and as a result they lost all of their deposits. It was revealed afterwards that the BNP Deputy Chairman Ray Hill had been working as a mole on behalf of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. During the mid-1980s, Tyndall's BNP absorbed numerous existing NF Flag Group branches including Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow. The party also began to develop friendly relations with the Federation of Conservative Students. The BNP also made contacts elsewhere on Europe, particularly with Flemish nationalists of the radical Odal Group, which succeeded the Order of Flemish Militants.