BNP

[Michael Z]

They aren't flourishing (unless a handful of councillers counts) if you want to see a flourishing ultra-right wing fascist party try France, but the problem is that just one counciller a council poisions the political climate in the area and makes ethnic minorites very, very afraid.

The thing that makes me very sad is that in European politics, for some reason issues of national sovereignty and independence get mixed up with racism and fascism.  Can't a nation be independent AND have racial tolerance and equality?  We Americans (the 0.01% who actually pay attention to world politics) scratch our heads at this.

The crucial difference is that, whereas America is united by one domineering national identity, Europe consists of roughly 40-50 different nations which all have unique different histories lasting back several centuries. So if one nation decides to be 'indepedent' it de facto becomes unaccepting and therefore intolerant of its next door neighbours.

In other words, we're all too closely crammed in next to each other to adopt some kind of nationalist ideology. The last big nationalistic experiment conducted by a European nation resulted in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.

[Michael Z]

Well, they run on anti-development platforms.

As a rule they run on race+any local issue that can get them elected.
Anti-development platforms are usually very good for that...

Exactly. The BNP are basically trying to mask their extreme agenda behind a veil of Populism, which is more or less what the Nazis did in Germany. They adopted a highly populist platform because they knew it would get them elected - not all Germans who voted for Hitler did so because of his anti-Semitic views, they did so because they thought it would get them a job.

(This is actually one of the reasons the Nazis are sometimes mistaken for a Socialist party, since they adopted partly socialist policies in order to pander to left-leaning parts of the electorate.)

The BNP are hoping they can have the same effect by talking about whatever's "popular" right now, and effectively trying to divert attention from their real goals.