Nick Griffin: profile of BNP Party leader, British National Party T-Shirts Online


BNP Party leader Profile - Nick Griffin
British National Party T-Shirts Online

Nick Griffin has led the British National Party - BNP to controversial victories in the European elections, winning its first two seats.
Cambridge University-educated Mr Griffin cuts a figure which at first sight appears far removed from the skinhead stereotype of the 1970s far-right activist.
Articulate and always in a suit, Mr Griffin embodies the BNP's controversial attempts to legitimise itself as a credible political force since he took the helm in 1999.
Over the past decade he has tried to portray himself as a mainstream political leader, apparently modelling his party's image on the successes of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and the late Jorg Haider in Austria.
The strategy apparently proved successful, with BNP candidate Richard Barnbrook elected to the Greater London Assembly last year and Mr Griffin winning one of the party's first two seats in the European Parliament today.
But only last month, Mr Griffin was forced to bow out of attending a Buckingham Palace garden party, after the controversial invitation led to London Mayor Boris Johnson and senior members of the GLA accusing the BNP of exploiting the situation for publicity.
Those who claim the party's image makeover simply masks its old-style thuggish core say you need look no further than the hulking bouncers who surround him everywhere he goes.
One commentator called him "the most dangerous figure on the far right of British politics since Sir Oswald Mosley". Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
Mr Griffin, who was born in 1959, has a long history in British politics dating back to the height of the National Front (NF) as a feared organisation in the 1970s.
He was reportedly first exposed to the far right when he was taken to an NF meeting by his Tory councillor father when he was 15.
Mr Griffin became an activist while he was studying law at Cambridge and had a long involvement with the organisation during its most notorious period. He is alleged to have once travelled to Libya on a fundraising mission.
He left the NF in 1989 and joined the BNP in 1995, soon editing its magazine. Mr Griffin became known as Holocaust Denier, once describing the Holocaust as "the hoax of the 20th century".
In 1997 he co-authored a pamphlet about Jewish conspiracies to brainwash people in Britain and was found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred.
He was given a two-year suspended prison sentence.
In 1999 he ousted the far-right stalwart and BNP founder John Tyndall from the leadership and set about his attempts to portray the organisation as a haven for the disaffected working populations of Britain's cities.
In 2006, Mr Griffin, along with party activist Mark Collett, was cleared of race hate charges relating to speeches he made describing Islam as a "wicked, vicious faith".
Last year, the BNP asked police to investigate after its entire party membership list was published on the internet.
Mr Griffin, who is a father of four, was brought up in north London and rural Suffolk.
As a teenager he won a sixth-form scholarship to a public school in Southwold, where he was one of only a handful of boys, before taking a law degree at Cambridge, where he also gained a boxing blue.
He now lives in a isolated house on a smallholding near Welshpool in mid-Wales with his district nurse wife Jackie.
The couple have been together for more than 20 years and their older children are now also heavily involved with the BNP.
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