to political party’. As Copsey reveals this transformation was far from inevitable as the BNP engaged in a bitter struggle for the ‘soul of racial nationalism’ with the National Front to overtake its rival as the ‘brand name’ of British fascism.
Central to Copsey’s study is power struggle between BNP founder John Tyndall who ruled the party as his personal fiefdom and his erstwhile protégé Nick Griffin who succeeded in ousting his former mentor in 1999. By untangling the roots of this struggle Copsey is able to show that this was a contest reflecting the tension between ideological ‘credibility’ and popular ‘legitimacy’ within British fascism rather than a desire to jettison its core values. Indeed as Copsey meticulously documents Griffin was every bit as committed to preserving the BNP’s ideological credibility as his former mentor though, unlike Tyndall, he was savvy enough to realise that if the party were ever to ascend from the political ghetto it had to ‘modernise’. Ironically only the year before Griffin had been resolutely opposed to modernising tendencies within the BNP.
By constructing a sophisticated intellectual and methodological scaffold erected upon the foundations of Roger Griffin’s Weberian ‘ideal type,’ Copsey is able to proffer a calm and measured examination of Griffin’s ‘flexible communication strategy’ and in doing so to penetrate the BNP’s (somewhat thin) veneer of respectability in order to irrefutably define the party as ‘fascist’.
If there is any criticism to made of Copsey’s timely study it is perhaps that too much space is accorded to solitary election of a BNP councillor in 1993 and not enough to the dynamics underlying more recent BNP victories, particularly in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, which would certainly benefit from similar microscopic scrutiny. Further editions of this important work will no doubt readjust this imbalance something Copsey has in fact already begun to address through his recent contribution to British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Palgrave 2005), which offers a more detailed examination of the Labour Party response to the rise of the BNP in Burnley.
Although the reasons for the underlying rise of the BNP certainly give pause for thought Copsey’s sober stocktaking of its progress to 2003 puts matters into perspective. Although it had amassed seventeen council seats since May 2003, progress unrivalled in the annals of British fascism, the BNP’s seventeen council seats still only represent one tenth of one percent of all the council seats in Britain. The paucity of this achievement is all the more stark when Copsey examines the progress of the BNP through a comparative European focus demonstrating just how far the party still has to travel if it is to achieve the ‘legitimacy’ which so completely eludes it at present. Given