Is the BNP Left or Right?

The editor of the Telegraph 'blogs, Damian Thompson, is insistent that the British National Party (BNP) is "far right", in direct contradiction to regular Telegraph blogger Daniel Hannan's claim that they are on the "far left".

Indeed, even his headline shows this as an attempted refutation of the Hannan view.

Actually, they are both wrong to some extent, as the Political Compass of significant Britain-wide political parties reminds us (see graphic at right, click on it to enlarge). Dan is the nearer, though, and is partly correct: the BNP is of the Left, but not the far Left.

The temptation is to regard a party of extreme views (as a number of the BNP's are in reality, however they dress them up) as therefore being on the far fringes; but that is one-dimensional thinking. That mode of thought also allows for devising one's own interpretations of what the political left/right axis really means. Indeed, it hasn't been entirely consistent since the terminology was first adopted over two and a quarter centuries ago.

All of this is why the two-dimensional Political Compass, as illustrated above, is so useful. It correctly shows (almost) all the mainstream GB-wide parties in place, including the BNP as hugely authoritarian (the Y-axis) but only a little to the left of centre (the X-axis). In fact, their policies are a mixture of traditionally Left and Right in economic and social terms, which becomes clear if one looks at them closely.

The exception to strictly correct placement on the Compass, by the way, is New Labour, who positioned themselves in public view as "the acceptable face of Conservatism" and seemed to carry on the preceding Conservative government's policies in some areas. Those included the economic methodology established by Ken Clarke who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the use of the private sector for contracted-out public services, as a couple of obvious examples.

Some of us in the country were well aware that this was only an apparent stance, camouflaging all the dodgy stuff going on behind the scenes. We now know much of that, of course, but it wasn't widely known known when the above diagram was produced.

New Labour's actual Communitarian overarching policy, concealing the old Labour rot beneath a thin veneer of apparent respectability, would place them far more to the left than they are shown. In the post-Blair era we have discovered just how far that really should be: just about in the Communist position at the far left, as all that has been discovered about the Labour movement's actual plans for Britain have revealed.

Whether it was the Frankfurt School social engineering policies that have been implemented during the past decade, with their express intention of wrecking our society, or the actual Communist Union barons who have been dictating policy and (in some cases) slotted into safe Labour seats in Parliament, all of that was the intention all along. They have also been vastly more authoritarian than the Conservatives have been; and of course the latter are now becoming far more Libertarian in outlook, one step at a time but the trend is already clear.

Therefore, we can conclude that (a) the BNP are of the Left but not all that far; and (b) New Labour were in reality a lot further to the left than the BNP.

I think this is useful to know, in order to have a proper perspective on the British political scene...