Far-right politics, fascism and neo-Nazism A far-right or extreme-right party, the NF has both commonalities and differences with older far-right groups. Political scientists and historians characterise it as fascist, or
neo-fascist, with the historian
Martin Durham stating that the NF—like France's
National Front and Germany's
The Republicans—represented "the direct descendants of classical fascism". The political psychologist Michael Billig notes that the NF displayed many of fascism's recurring traits: an emphasis on nationalism and racism, an anti-Marxist stance,
statism and support for private enterprise, and a hostile view of democracy and personal freedom. Rejecting the term "fascist" to describe itself, the NF sought to conceal its connections to older fascist movements, denying its leaders' previous fascist activities. It claimed that it could not be fascist because it took part in elections; the political scientist Stan Taylor argues that this claim was obsolete, for many earlier fascist parties—including the BUF, the German
Nazi Party and the Italian
National Fascist Party—also contested elections. In avoiding the "fascist" label, the NF was typical of fascist groups operating after the Second World War; having to contend with the legacy of the war and the
Holocaust, they tried to hide their intellectual pedigrees from voters. As with many political extremists, the image the NF presented to the public was more moderate than the ideology of its inner core of members. As noted by Billig, the NF's "ideological core and its genocidal tendencies, are hidden" so as not to scare off potential recruits sympathetic to its nationalism and anti-immigration stance but not its antisemitic conspiracy theories. While noting that the party's views on race departed considerably "from what is normal or acceptable to the average citizen" in the UK, the political scientist Nigel Fielding observes that many of its other views were grounded in what would be considered "popular common-sense opinion" across the political right.
Factions During its history, the NF contained various factions with distinct ideological positions. From the party's early days until the 1980 Tyndall/Webster split, its ideology was dominated by the ex-GBM faction. According to Thurlow, the ex-GBM faction oversaw "an attempt to portray the essentials of Nazi ideology in more rational language and seemingly reasonable arguments", while Wilkinson observed that this faction's leadership was "deeply imbued with Nazi ideas" and retained "intimate connections" with both domestic and foreign neo-Nazi groups. Taylor also regarded the NF of the 1970s as a Nazi organisation because of its fixation on antisemitic conspiracy theories. In his words, the NF's "full ideology" was, "in a large number of respects", identical to the original German Nazism. According to Thurlow, the members of the "Populist" faction that challenged the ex-GBM faction's dominance in the late 1970s were "pseudo-Conservative racial populists", representing the party's "non-fascist and ostensibly more democratic element". After Tyndall and Webster were ousted and replaced by Brons and Anderson, a new faction took control whose members regarded themselves as Strasserite, drawing inspiration from German Nazi Party members
Otto Strasser and
Gregor Strasser. This faction embraced the Third Position ideology and drew inspiration from
Muammar Gaddafi's
Third International Theory.
Ethnic nationalism, racism and eugenics The National Front is a
British nationalist party; its early policy statements declared that it "pledged to work for the restoration of full national sovereignty for Britain in all affairs". It rejected
internationalism and thus opposed both
liberalism and
communism, contrasting their internationalist espousal of
universal values with its view that nations should have their own distinct values. Labelling itself a
racial nationalist party, the NF's concept of nationalism was bound up with that of race. NF members typically referred to themselves as "racialists", with Durham stating that the NF was "undeniably a racist organisation". The party claimed that humanity divides into biologically distinct
races with their own physical and social characteristics. Although some of its published material referred only to "white" and "black" races, elsewhere it listed various racial groups, among them the "Nordics", "Caucasoids", "Negroids", "Semites" and "Turco-Armonoids". It claimed that within racial groups can be found "nations", a form of "race within a race"; many party activists nevertheless used the terms "race" and "nation" interchangeably. The NF claimed the existence of a distinct British racial "nation", all the members of which shared common interests;
Welsh and
Scottish nationalisms were condemned as threats to British racial unity. It viewed class as a false distinction among the British nation, rejecting the concept of
class war as "nonsense", and—like most fascist groups—tried to attract support across class boundaries. For the NF,
patriotism was deemed essential to the cohesion of the British nation, with nationalism regarded as a vital component of patriotism. Members regarded themselves as patriots, and the party made heavy use of British patriotic symbols like the
Union Flag and
Remembrance Day. Fielding believed that the "dialectic of insiders and outsiders" was the "linchpin of its ideology", and noted that the NF's "rigid boundaries between in-group and out-group" were typical of the far-right. In its 1974 electoral manifesto, the NF called for a "vigorous birth-rate" among the white British, claiming that any ensuing overpopulation of the UK could be resolved by emigration to the
British Commonwealth. Tyndall defended Nazi Germany's
lebensraum policy, and under his leadership the NF promoted
imperialist views about expanding British territory to create "living space" for the country's growing population. The party also promoted
eugenics, calling for the improvement of the quality as well as the quantity of the white British people. Under Tyndall, it called for the sterilisation of those with genetically transmittable disabilities. By 2011, the party's website was utilising the
Fourteen Words slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
White supremacism A
white supremacist party, the NF rejected the concept of
racial equality. It argued that different races can be ranked hierarchically based on differing abilities, and that the "higher races" compete for world domination. It believed that
racial segregation was natural and ordained by God, but that non-whites had been encouraged to migrate to Britain and other white-majority countries to breed with the indigenous inhabitants and thus bring about "
white genocide" through assimilation. It opposed inter-racial marriage and
miscegenation—typically referring to the latter as "mongrelisation"—and displayed particular anxiety about black men seducing white women. It claimed its racial prejudice arose from a natural desire for racial preservation rather than hatred of other races. The NF claimed that most non-white racial groups were inferior to "Caucasoids and Mongoloids". In the mid-1970s, Tyndall used
Spearhead to claim that "the negro has a smaller brain and a much less complex cerebral structure" than whites; in the early 1980s,
Nationalism Today carried articles maintaining that black Africans had lower average IQs than whites and thus were unfit "to go to white schools" or "live in white society". Its published material presented black people as dirty and unhygienic, infected with disease and incapable of governing themselves.
Spearhead featured references to black people being
cannibals; at least one article claimed they ate dirt and faeces. The NF sought academic support for its views, placing great importance on
scientific racist publications. Its booklist offered academic and quasi-academic books endorsing scientific racism; early party literature often referenced the work of
Hans Eysenck,
William Shockley,
Arthur Jensen and
Richard Herrnstein, while
Spearhead and other NF publications repeatedly cited articles from the
Mankind Quarterly. In citing these studies, the party claimed that its views were scientific, although Fielding observed that the NF's racial views relied "as much on blind assertion, on faith, as on 'scientific' sources".
Anti-immigrationism and repatriation The cornerstone of the Front's manifesto since 1974 has been the compulsory deportation of all non-white immigrants and their descendants, as well as the white British partners in mixed-race relationships. It stated that the "repatriation" process could take ten years, adding that before deportation, non-whites would be stripped of British citizenship and placed behind white Britons when it came to access to welfare, education and housing. It accompanied this with a call to prohibit future non-white migration to Britain. In the 1970s the NF stated that it did not oppose the arrival of white immigrants from Commonwealth countries, but called for "firm controls" on the migration of whites from elsewhere. During its first decade, the party emphasised the claim that it was the politicians who enabled immigration—rather than migrants themselves—who were to blame. In 1969, it stated: "Your enemies are not the coloured immigrants, but the British government which let them come in hundreds of thousands." It claimed that Labour had promoted migration to boost their vote and that Conservatives had seen migrants as cheap labour. Its early publications generally avoided derogatory terms for non-whites like "wog" or "nigger", although such language appeared at party rallies. As it developed, the NF press included racially inflammatory headlines like "Black Savages Terrorize Old Folk" and "Asians Import Bizarre Sex-Murder Rites", also comparing non-white migrants to vermin by describing areas as "immigrant-infested". The NF linked other issues to race and immigration, targeting concerns among the white British about immigrants being competition for jobs, housing and welfare. Common NF claims included that immigrants carried diseases like
leprosy and
tuberculosis, that they were a burden on the
National Health Service (NHS), and that incompetent migrant staff were detrimental to the NHS. It claimed that immigrants evaded taxes and that they were arrogant, aggressive and unhygienic in the workplace. It maintained that blacks were a source of crime, and that black pupils eroded school quality.
Antisemitism and Holocaust denial The NF is
antisemitic. It claimed that Jews form a biologically distinct race—one of the world's "higher races"—and that they seek to destroy the white "Caucasoid" race. The Front alleged that a Jewish cabal orchestrated non-white migration into Britain, hoping to weaken the white race through racial mixing, as well as through internationalism and encouraging internal division. The party propagated the
conspiracy theory that Jews did this to plunge other "higher races" in disarray so that they would be left dominant. As mentioned in
Spearhead, this achieved, "the Jewish nation would be the only surviving ethnically identifiable population group amid a mongrelised world population", the latter being easier for Jews to control. This conspiracy theory owed much to the 19th-century Russian antisemitic forgery
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and was previously articulated by the BUF. Whereas the BUF explicitly claimed Jews were behind this global conspiracy, the NF were aware of considerable public disapproval of antisemitism following the Holocaust so used code-words and
dogwhistles such as "Money Power", "internationalist", "cosmopolitan", "alien", "rootless", "shifty", "money-lenders" and "usurers" instead of "Jews". In the 1970s, the NF denied it was "antisemitic". Instead, the party called itself "
anti-Zionist", and claimed to oppose "Zionists" rather than all Jews. Within the NF, the word "
Zionism" was not used in the commonly understood manner, which is to describe the ideology promoting the formation of a Jewish state, but rather applied to the alleged Jewish cabal secretly manipulating the world. For instance, one issue of
Spearhead stated that "the twin evils of International Finance and International Communism" are "perhaps better described as International Zionism". Fielding observed that party members used the term "Zionist" indiscriminately, often against any critics. Many of the Front's central members, among them Chesterton, Tyndall and Webster, had long histories of antisemitism before joining the party. For instance, in 1963, Tyndall claimed that "Jewry is a world pest wherever it is found in the world today. The Jews are more clever and more financially powerful than other people and have to be eradicated before they destroy the Aryan peoples." In an early edition of
Spearhead, Tyndall stated: "if Britain were to become Jew-clean she would have no nigger neighbours to worry about ... It is the Jews who are our misfortune: T-h-e J-e-w-s. Do you hear me? THE JEWS?" While some of its senior members had previously called for a genocide of the Jews, the party itself engaged in
Holocaust denial, referring to the Holocaust as "the six million myth". It is possible that most senior NF figures were aware that the Holocaust really happened, but denied its occurrence for tactical reasons, hoping that the spread of Holocaust denial would facilitate a more positive attitude toward Nazi Germany among Britain's population.
Government and the state '' of
Muammar Gaddafi (pictured). During the 1970s, the Front alleged that the UK's
liberal democracy was "bogus democracy" and declared that it would forge "a genuinely democratic political system", utilising referendums on major issues. In making claims such as that "true democracy is that which is representative of the will of the people", the NF espoused
populist rhetoric. Fielding nevertheless believed that "the essence of the NF ideology is incompatible with democracy" and instead reflected an "elitist tendency" at odds with its "populist rhetoric". The NF saw democracy as a luxury that was subordinate to the preservation of the nation. In
Spearhead, Tyndall stated that although he would support parliamentary democracy if he thought it in the
national interest, "the survival, and the national recovery of Britain stand as top priority over all. We will support whatever political methods are necessary to attain that end." He called for governance by a strong leader, an individual unencumbered by political parties and elections so that they could focus on the national interest rather than the interests of sub-groups or short-term considerations. In
Spearhead, Tyndall stated that "it is only in banana republics, where the 'sophisticated' Western institutions of a multi- or two-party system, powerful trade unions and a 'free' press have not yet taken root, that there is still scope for men of real personality and decision to emerge and truly lead." Fielding believed that had the NF achieved political office it would have marginalised parliament and governed in a
totalitarian manner. Under its Strasserite leadership during the 1980s, the NF adopted a different position on governance, influenced heavily by the Third International Theory propounded by Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi in
The Green Book. It promoted the establishment of communal political structures, with street councils, area councils, county councils and a National People's Council "for each of the British Nations". In its view of this future, the British population would be armed and trained in military tactics, allowing for the establishment of local militias rather than a state-controlled professional army.
International institutions and relations Regarding international institutions as part of the Jewish conspiracy's plan for a
one world government, the Front opposed UK membership of the
United Nations and the
European Economic Community (EEC). To replace the EEC, the NF called for stronger UK links with the "White countries" of the British Commonwealth, namely Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but also the white-minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. According to the Front, this would "strengthen the ethnic, cultural and family ties between peoples of British stock all over the world". It stated that an NF-led UK would not remain allied to the United States because the latter was dominated by the Jewish conspiracy, and called for withdrawal from the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with Britain instead boosting its defensive capabilities through nuclear weaponry. During the 1970s, the Front was
British unionist, advocating for the unity of the United Kingdom. From the late 1960s onward, it supported the
Ulster Unionists, deeming
Irish republicanism a communist conspiracy to undermine British unity. The NF argued that the UK had been too soft in dealing with militant Irish republicans; it argued that military courts should replace civil ones, that
Provisional Irish Republican Army members should be interned and that those guilty of sabotage or murder should be executed. In the early 1970s it alleged that the Irish Republic was harbouring republican militants, "an act of war" that required trade sanctions. In that decade the NF endorsed the
Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, but many Ulster Unionists were suspicious of the NF; in 1973 the
Ulster Defence Association proscribed it as "a neo-Nazi movement". In 1985 – by which time Strasserites dominated the party – the NF called on Northern Ireland to declare independence in response to the
Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Economic policy During the 1970s, the Front identified as neither
capitalist nor
socialist, advocating an economic system drawing on both. It endorsed
private enterprise but rejected
laissez-faire capitalism, claiming that the latter places the interests of business above that of the nation. It promoted economic nationalism, calling for maximum national self-sufficiency and a rejection of international free trade. By this approach it wished to separate Britain from the international financial system, which it believed was controlled by the Jewish conspiracy. It opposed foreign ownership of British industry, endorsing
protectionist and
monetarist policies, advocating the state control of banking and financial services, and calling for a state bank to provide interest-free loans to fund
municipal housing construction. These economic views were common across Britain's far-right, being akin, for example, to those of the BUF. After the Strasserite faction took control in the 1980s, the NF adopted
distributist policies, maintaining the emphasis on an economic system neither capitalist nor socialist. In the party's material from 1980, it claimed that "Capitalism and Communism" were "twin evils" to be overcome by "Revolutionary Nationalism". In keeping with the Strasserites' distributism, the 1980s NF called for large business and industry to be redistributed into a tripartite system: small privately owned enterprises, workers' co-operatives and, in the case of financial institutions and heavy industry, nationalised enterprises. To solve unemployment, the party stated that it would encourage urban-to-rural migration, with heavily mechanised agriculture being replaced by small, labour-intensive farms.
Social issues march in 2007. The party has tried to protest against various Pride parades in the past. The NF adopted a strong stance against liberal and socially permissive policies, claiming that what it perceived as the growing permissiveness of British society was orchestrated by the Jewish conspiracy. Tyndall called for a moral "regeneration" penetrating "every sphere of work and leisure", including prohibitions on "art, literature or entertainment by which public moral standards might be endangered". Although placing little importance on religion, during the 1970s, the party claimed that God had set forth absolute moral values. The party opposed changes to traditional
gender roles.
Spearhead stated that the NF saw "the feminine role as principally one of wife, mother and home maker". In the party's first year, it largely ignored the
1967 Abortion Act that legalised
abortion, although by 1974 had adopted an
anti-abortion stance, stating that abortions should only be legal in medical emergencies. According to Tyndall, the legalisation of abortion was part of a conspiracy to reduce white British births. The issue decreased in resonance within the party during the early 1980s but was re-emphasised when the Strasserites took control. The party condemned
homosexuality, mixed-race marriages, and prostitution. In the 1970s the NF claimed that the teaching profession was full of "communists", and stated that under an NF government all teachers deemed unsuitable would be fired. That decade, it stressed that education should be suited to the varying abilities of students although did not outright condemn
comprehensive schooling. It called for greater emphasis on examinations and sporting competitions, with a rejection of "slapdash Leftwing-inspired teaching fads". It stated that it would emphasise the teaching of British history to encourage patriotism while expanding science and technology in the curriculum at the expense of the
social sciences. The Front exalted self-sufficiency, asserting that the individual should be willing to serve the state and that citizens' rights should be subordinate to their duties. During the 1970s, the Front criticised the UK's
welfare state, stating that it wanted to end the perception of the UK as a "loafer's paradise". From its early years the NF promoted a tough stance on law and order, calling for harsher criminal sentencing, tougher prisons, and the reintroduction of both
capital punishment, and
national service. Emphasising self-responsibility, it rejected the idea that an individual's misdeeds should be attributed to their societal background. ==Organisation and structure==