The British National Party took another step in its quest for electoral respectability yesterday after staging a self-styled annual party conference.
The event, held at an hotel in Blackpool, was no ordinary political conference, with the BNP tightly controlling accreditation to prevent infiltration.
According to the party’s website, 250 places were available but restricted to people with two years’ continuous membership who had to be approved by two BNP officials as a “good regular activist”. The two-day event included a black-tie dinner and training sessions on recruiting, strategy and tactics for next May’s local elections.
There were further policy discussions on the case for an English parliament, banning the hijab and the BNP’s stance on the “off-shoring” of British jobs, single-sex civil partnerships and whether British troops should be withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. A group of members used the occasion to announce that they were leaving to join another far-right splinter group, the England First Party, in protest at the BNP chairman, Nick Griffin.
They were led by Sharon Ebanks, who won a council seat for the BNP in Birmingham in the May elections but had to stand down over voting irregularities. She later claimed that she was forced to leave the BNP, which campaigns for the repatriation of immigrants, after it emerged that her father was black.
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Opponents have nevertheless been unsettled by recent successes by the BNP, which gained 32 council seats this year, taking its total number of councillors to 49.
United Against Fascism, an anti-racism umbrella group, mounted a demonstration in Blackpool on Saturday against the conference, but Lancashire Constabulary said that the protest was peaceful.