Hannan doesn’t know his right from his left. Quelle surprise!

I’ve heard it all before. The Nazis were ‘socialist’ because they had the word “socialist” in their name – Nationalsozialistiche Deutscher Arbeiter Partei. It is a smear and it isn’t a well-thought out smear either. The clue to the Nazis extreme right ideology is in the word “National”. But then, those people who referred to the Nazis as ‘socialists’ deliberately ignored the corporatist nature of the Nazi state for the sake of fallacious reasoning. The Nazis were no friends of the working class or the trades unions and neither are the BNP.

So when I had a peek at Hannan’s blog, I saw him pretty much repeating the same lie as the US right wingers I had encountered on Delphi Forums. In the title he declares that “The far- Left BNP has never supported the monarchy“. For someone who likes to pat himself on the back for his classical education, he seems to be a remarkably thick individual.  After all, didn’t David Cameron this week tell the US media that Britain was a “junior partner” during WWII? I wonder how Norman Tebbit reacted to that bit of news?  Maybe in Hannan’s eyes, Franco was a socialist too? How about Oswald Moseley? A lefty? Didn’t Edward VIII want Moseley to run the country as a fascist state?

What is ‘left’ about the BNP? Precisely nothing. Left wing parties don’t advocate repatriation, voluntary or otherwise. Left wing parties don’t claim to look after the rights of the “indigenous British‘, meaning white British.  Left wing parties don’t offer explicitly racist policies as a ‘solution’ to economic problems. More importantly left-wing parties aren’t corporatist – the BNP is very much a corporatist party. Even the extreme right wing union Solidarity cannot be considered syndicalist since it embraces corporatism – which rather contradicts the ostensible raison d’etre of a trade union.

Unless I am very much mistaken, Enoch Powell (who is Dan’s idol) was a member of the Conservative Party when he made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But Powell wasn’t the only Tory in the 60’s to express such views. On 5 April 1963 on the BBC’s Any Questions the flamboyant Tory MP, Gerald Nabarro made this remark,

“How would you feel if your daughter wanted to marry a big buck nigger with the prospect of coffee-coloured grandchildren”?

The former Tory MP, John Townend, talked of ‘niggers in woodpiles’. Yet, Dan would get his knickers in a twist if someone suggested to him that the Monday Club, Conservative Way Forward or Enoch Powell were fascists. Is it because the BNP are an extreme right wing party that he wants to make the spurious claim that they are ‘left’  so that the Tories may appear ‘softer’? If that is the case, then it doesn’t work. The BNP, like UKIP and the Tories are on the right of the poltical spectrum and no matter how hard you try, there is no way the BNP can ever appear to be a left wing party – particularly when its public school educated leader uses the phrase “indigenous British” as a codeword for ‘white’.

But is Hannan is trying to claim that the BNP are a left wing party because some bloke-in-a-pub wrote a blog on a website attacking the Queen?  The site that he links to is not an official BNP website. It claims to “support the BNP and to speak in defence of the United Kingdom’s indigenous population…” How does he know that this is, as he claims, a “prominent BNP supporting site”? To be honest, I’ve never heard of the Green Arrow and I’m pretty up-to-date when it comes to Britain’s fashos. But my question is, where does that place those Tories who regard themselves as republicans? I guess Dan forgot about them.

This New Statesman article was written in reply to Norman Tebbit’s identical claim that the BNP is a ‘left wing’ party.

A word of warning to Hannan and others who want to repeat this lie: this is not the United States and people in this country won’t fall for your smear tactics. Most people in Britain know the difference between the right and left and most people know that the BNP are fascists.

Conservative Clubs up and down the country welcomed members of the National Front – it was one of Britain’s worst kept secrets. Indeed some members of the NF would often participate in the Monday Club.  This Time article from 1973 says

More recently the Monday Club has been torn by internal rebellion; there is some evidence that members of Britain’s small, neo-fascist National Front are moving to take over some of the club’s branches.

Okay, that was 1973 and a lot of NF members were expelled but there is little to distinguish the Monday Club from the NF or indeed, the BNP who were formed as a splinter from the NF. Their ideologies are quite similar too: Britain for the [white] British.

In the US, the terms right and left have been generally replaced by the words “conservative” and “liberal”. I remember once correcting someone who said that Stalin was a ‘liberal’. He was a nationalist (socialism in one country) and an authoritarian bully, that makes him little different to a reactionary conservative – like Augusto Pinochet.

For all the talk about the end of ideology and the end of the right/left dichotomy, we are still stuck with right/left whether we like it or not. But to describe an avowedly fascist party as ‘left wing’ truly beggars belief.

Finally, I once referred to Thatcher as ‘fascist’ in the 1980’s. An old socialist overheard me, pulled me over and gave me a good telling off. “She’s not a fascist”, he said. “She’s a reactionary conservative, there’s a big difference”. He was right. Pity some Tories can’t learn a similar lesson. No?

Edited to add: Since the general election in May, Nick Griffin has lost a good deal of support  and many are calling for him to resign. It should come as no surprise that there are some serious splits in the party. The Green Arrow actively calls for Griffin to step aside. This blogger isn’t a fan of the Green Arrow.

With no BNP website due to Griffins ineptitude/corruption and downright maliciousness, people are turning to the Green Arrow forum/blog to have their say, unfortunately due to the obvious ineptitude of Paul Morris’s, the imbercile and long time Griffinworld lickspittles, leadership (sic), they can’t fully have their say there either.

I like the way this bonehead spells the word ‘imbecile’.

On Nothing British, they urge the BNP to distance itself from the monarchy-hating Green Arrow.

Yesterday, Nothing British exposed the BNP-supporting Green Arrow blog, run by Paul Morris, for calling Her Majesty a “liar and traitor to her own people” and called for “treason” and “sedition”.

Someone clearly hasn’t done their research. Eh, Dan?