How Farage took on ‘the skinheads and geezers’ of the far-Right and won

Reform leader Nigel Farage on the campaign trail in Clacton - Jason Bye

In June 2009, with the last Labour government nearing its end, Britain went to the polls to elect 72 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs).

The far-Right British National Party, led by Nick Griffin, received 943,598 votes and returned its first two MEPs to Brussels. For every 10 votes for the governing Labour Party, the BNP received four votes. It seemed that Griffin was on the march.

There was another significant first in that election, though. The UK Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage, received 2,498,226 votes and returned 13 MEPs: the first time in a nationwide election that the ruling party was outpolled by a party that had no members of parliament.

Since then Farage and Griffin’s fortunes have gone in opposite directions. The latest incarnation of Farage’s political project, Reform UK, is snapping at the heels of the Conservative Party in general election polls and Farage himself appears to be on the brink of a parliamentary seat.

The BNP, meanwhile, has all but disappeared, and has not put up a candidate for any local or national election since 2019.

Farage believes the person who deserves the most credit for destroying the BNP is himself, and he regards it as one of his proudest achievements, along with Brexit.

“I think I’ve done a service to the country in getting rid of the far-Right,” he tells The Telegraph. “No one has done more to get rid of them than me. Peter Hain and others wanted to ban them, but I beat them by winning the argument.”

He is particularly proud of the fact that Reform’s biggest donor during the election campaign is a British Muslim entrepreneur.

Farage was furious, then, to discover that volunteers in his Clacton campaign office have been secretly recorded making what he describes as “reprehensible” racist comments about the Prime Minister, on the same day that support for a Reform candidate has been withdrawn for failing to declare his previous membership of the BNP.

Andrew Parker, a Reform volunteer, was filmed making the remarks by Channel 4's undercover reporter - Channel 4

It comes after a candidate in Derbyshire was suspended in May after sharing a social media post from a former organiser of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, and earlier this month the Reform candidate standing against Kemi Badenoch resigned from the party after it emerged he had urged people in the past to vote for the BNP.

Reform UK had been braced for more bad news about some of its candidates being too close to far-Right groups after it accused a vetting company it had hired of failing to do its job.

It is also true, though, that political parties cannot legislate for what their supporters or members might have believed in the past: Sir Keir Starmer, for example, is a former Trotskyist who once questioned whether the police should have any role in civil society.

Farage believes the reason the BNP has shrivelled away is not because people with racist views have attached themselves to Reform (or its predecessor parties) but because people who supported the BNP out of “frustration” with mainstream parties – rather than racism – have been given a voice.

Farage, who helped found Ukip in 1993 after leaving the Conservative Party, was elected as its leader in 2006 and set about ending Britain’s membership of the EU by getting elected to the European Parliament and exposing its shortcomings from within.

As Farage’s stock rose, the BNP saw its own popularity fall. In 2012, three years after that high water mark European vote for Griffin’s party, it suffered a dramatic slump, losing all of its seats in the local elections after getting barely a tenth of the votes it had received four years earlier. The following year it only fielded 99 candidates in that year’s local elections but failed to win a single seat.

“The BNP was beating Ukip in every election,” Farage says. “I was urged for years to merge the party with the BNP, but instead I banned any current or former members of the BNP from joining Ukip, which is probably the least libertarian thing I’ve ever done.

“Then Paul Nuttall [his then deputy] and I decided to go after the BNP vote by telling people who were frustrated but who did not agree with their deeply racist agenda: ‘come to us’. Almost overnight, we took two thirds of their vote.”

Ahead of the 2014 European Parliament elections Farage fought a bitter battle with the BNP, whose activists he dismissed as “skinheads and a geezer with a loudhailer”.

Farage said at the time: “Despite their leaflets saying that a vote for Ukip would result in a Muslim neighbour, I am confident voters will know the difference between a patriotic party and a truly nasty party, which is what the BNP is.”

In the 2014 European election, Griffin lost his own seat in the European Parliament and had no doubt who was to blame.

“I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve spoken to who say ‘we really like the BNP but we are voting Ukip because there is more chance they will stop immigration’,” Griffin said at the time.

“People are going to be very disappointed when they find out what Ukip really stands for and that huge vote is going to come back to us,” he added. It didn’t.

Nick Griffin resigned as leader of the BNP not long after the party suffered heavy losses at the 2012 local council elections - Geoff Pugh

Griffin resigned as leader two months later after a round of in-fighting and by 2015 the BNP had just 500 members, less than an eighth of the number it had had two years earlier.

In the 2010 general election, the BNP had fielded 338 candidates and received a total of 563,743 votes; by 2015 it could only muster eight candidates who received 1,667 votes between them, a decline of 99.7 per cent.

Ukip received almost 3.9 million votes in 2015, the third most of any party, though it was unable to convert its popularity into any seats in parliament.

The far-Right had not completely disappeared, of course, and in 2016 Farage abandoned a proposed march on the Supreme Court, which was determining whether parliament had to authorise the triggering of Brexit, amid reports it would be hijacked by the BNP and another far-Right group, the English Defence League (EDL).

By 2018, Farage was so concerned that Ukip itself was being infiltrated by the far-Right that he resigned his membership of the party he co-founded.

Gerard Batten, who had become the leader of the party that year (Farage had stood down in 2016 to get his “life back” after successfully campaigning for a Leave vote in the EU referendum), had appointed the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson as an adviser.

Farage said at the time that Batten “seems to be pretty obsessed with the issue of Islam, not just Islamic extremism, but Islam, and Ukip wasn’t founded to be a party fighting a religious crusade.

“[He is] also obsessed with this figure Tommy Robinson.”

Former EDL leader Tommy Robinson was appointed as an adviser to Ukip in 2018 by then leader Gerard Batten - David Parry/PA

Under Batten, he said, Ukip was attracting people with criminal records, “some pretty serious” and he was “dragging Ukip away from being an electoral party into a party of street activism”.

Ukip still exists, and no longer has a ban on current or former members of the BNP joining its ranks. It has suffered a decline akin to that of the BNP, receiving just 22,817 votes at the 2019 election rather than the millions it got in 2015, losing its deposit in every seat it contested.

“It always frustrates me that The Guardian and others don’t see what a good job I’ve done against the far-Right,” says Farage. “If I see genuine extremism, I always get rid of it.”

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