Question Author
AOG, Tebbit has long campaigned to have thew BNP rebranded as a left wing part. There was his Daily Telegraph letter...
Left-wing BNP
Sir - It is of some comfort that the Labour Party at least, even if not yet the Tories, has woken up to the threat posed by the BNP, because it has ceased to understand or listen to its own supporters when they express their concerns about multiculturalism, the levels of immigration and lack of integration that are affecting our great cities.
However, it remains of concern that even The Daily Telegraph (Comment, April 18) persists in so misunderstanding the BNP as to describe it as "an extreme Right-wing party". I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies.
On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to "use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality", to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.
Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union.
So what is "extreme Right-wing" about the BNP?
Lord Tebbit, London SW1