The Vacuum on the Right

What does one even do with cretins like Nick Griffin and Rupert Lowe?

My original supposition about Griffin was that having been brought up in "the movement" he was simply the BNP's answer to Tony Blair or, later on, David Cameron. The National Front had gone through so many different nationalist, semi-nationalist or nationalist-adjacent ideologies and pseudo-ideologies in its time that the man couldn't possibly believe all of it. What exactly does the phrase "folk community" mean in the 21st century? What exactly does "peak oil" have to do with the plight of British farmers? And so on. Clearly his attempt to "modernise" the BNP was born out of the same mixture of ambition and bored, frustrated entitlement that had motivated those other more "mainstream" modernisers in the Labour Party and the "Tory" Party.

And there was indeed plenty of space out there on the Right. The sheer political inadequacy of William Hague's campaign to "save the pound" (when in truth it was never in any danger) and the sheer weirdness of the IDS plan to make the Tories care about "social justice" (because... why?) meant that for most of the 2000s the Conservative Party was a political basket case. And things certainly didn't improve under David "Too-Posh-to-Putsch" Cameron. Any new, vaguely energetic, vaguely organised "right-of-centre" party ought to have done very well in such a politically target-rich environment.

On reflection though, it would appear that Griffin's reforms to the BNP were indeed more cosmetic than substantial. (The Pimlico Journal has a potted history of the British "far Right" from 1999-2010 that is surprisingly eye-opening.) Griffin in retrospect was more of a Michael Portillo than a Blair or a Cameron. The BNP, in other words, was always de facto a strict neo-Nazi larp. Griffin himself has always been an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitlerism. Other issues of national interest such as the monarchy, the European Union, the fate of what's left of the British Empire, Islamism and the Special Relationship interested him and his followers other not at all or only peripherally.

The post-Cameron, post-Boris vacuum on the Right persists though, and whereas various non-Nazi cranks and narcissists have tried to fill it in recent years (and recent months), the total lack amongst any of them of anything even approaching a conservative ideology, let alone a practical programme for government, has meant that any successor political movement on the political Right is only ever be held together by the personality of its leader.

The fact that someone with no ideas whatsoever like Rupert Lowe - whose plan for national palingenesis involves a government-sponsored scheme to have Englishwomen artificially inseminated* - is currently an MP in his own made-up party only gives historical testimony to that.

*It's not that surprising, given that he's bankrolled by Elon Musk - who is fast becoming the Right's answer to George Soros.