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Is it ethical to support the BNP?

Our ethical columnist explains why the far-right party are greener than most - it's their dreadful supporters that are the problem.

Ethan Greenhart

Topics Politics

Dear Ethan,

I hope you will forgive the anonymous nature of this email, but I am about to ask you a very embarrassing question… Is it ethical to support the British National Party??! Please don’t think that I am mad or fascistic or from Tower Hamlets. I am none of those horrendous things. But the more I read the BNP’s green-tinted manifestos, the more I think they’re on to something… and I even voted for them in the local elections last week. Oh god, is that bad? Help me!

Anon,
Somewhere in England

Dear Anon,

Okay, let’s get one thing straight. The BNP are a nasty gang of fascists and racists and lumpen workers with bad hair, nicotine-stained figures and children called Chelsea and Fred. They are impolite, frequently quite ugly, and they think nothing of walking through litter-strewn streets with ‘dangerous’ dogs. They drink alcohol, they smoke roll-ups, they urinate in public, they say things like ‘Hitler had a point’, and they shop in Somerfield, which is a poor man’s Tesco: all bad lighting, cheap chicken, flat Cola and depressed single mums in clingy leggings walloping their children with sticks. Clearly nobody of an ethical bent would want anything to do with such a motley crew.

And yet, and yet… As you point out, Anon, they are environmentally friendly! Well, the party’s message is environmentally friendly; some of its supporters aren’t, of course. You only have to wander through Bermondsey or Burnley (bring a mobile phone with the emergency services on speed dial) to see that the BNP’s core supporters are eco-ignorant. They graffiti walls with chemically enhanced spray paint, drop grease-stained chip-wrapper paper with abandon, and no sooner does a caring official from the local council erect a new see-saw or tree than some four-year-old feral child called Kylie has demolished it with a few well-aimed, demented kicks from her pink high heels. Most of these people should be taken into care or sectioned or interned, depending on their age, IQ, TQ (Tattoo Quotient), and Body Mass Index.

But the political party they support – or rather worship; most of them do not have the literacy and cognitive skills for intelligent political engagement, though they can normally manage to mark an ‘X’ on a ballot paper – has some very admirable policies. It’s true, it’s true! The BNP is green – greener, in fact, than many other parties. Ultimately, their aim is to protect England’s green and pleasant lands from the carbon bootprint of immigrants, foreign corporations and other wicked elements – and what’s not to like about that? If only they could get shot of their skinheads and rotund-bellied, beer-swilling supporters – and disassociate themselves from that most vile specimen of humanity: the football hooligan – then their appeal could easily spread beyond Hackney into Hampstead and Highgate, where I know many a brave and brilliant greenie who would nod in violent agreement with much of what the BNP says.

Consider immigration. Yes, yes, the boys of the BNP can be a bit harsh on immigrants sometimes, spreading stories about how they steal our jobs and eat our swans. (If any immigrant has eaten a swan, they should instantaneously be arrested, tried and possibly executed for Crimes Against Aviankind.) Yet who can disagree when the BNP says that immigration is giving rise to a ‘tidal wave of concrete’ as more roads and houses are built to house poor families from Namibia, Botswana or Timbuktu? Yes, we all feel sorry for you, guys, but if we help you then we will destroy the planet. Are immigrants really so selfish, Anon, that they think vast amounts of carbon should be farted out in the construction of Barratt eyesore homes and long streaks of steaming, stinking, dark black tarmac on Gaia’s face just so they can find somewhere to live and drive their Datsuns and rickshaws? Unbelievable.

When the BNP points out that ‘our countryside is vanishing beneath a tidal wave of concrete’ as more and more houses are built, and ‘the biggest reason all these new houses are needed is immigration’, are they not right, Anon? Well, if you don’t believe the BNP, listen instead to some true, green-hearted, tippety-top, non-skinhead experts who have been saying the same thing for donkey’s years (argh, I hate that speciesist phrase!). ‘Immigration is creating an environmental disaster’, potentially turning Britain into a ‘tarmac desert’, says the BNP. Yep. The green-leaning, Jonathon Porritt-supported Optimum Population Trust couldn’t have put it better. Mass immigration is ‘a route to environmental collapse’ says the OPT; ‘levels of net inward migration are causing rapid environmental deterioration’. Like the BNP, the OPT wants zero net immigration to save the environment. And since we cannot yet vote for the OPT – when are you guys gonna stand in elections?! Come on! – we may as well give our vote to the closest alternative: the British National Party.

The BNP also says we shouldn’t be scared of pointing out the dangers of immigration. Or as my buddy Mark Lynas put it, brave and committed greens must now openly address ‘rising levels of immigration’ which are contributing to ‘urban overcrowding and rural overdevelopment’. Yep, it’s that ‘tarmac desert’ again, as the BNP so poetically described it. The BNP says immigration destroys ‘habitats’. It’s so true. One of my favourite green writers – the inestimable David Nicholson-Lord – makes the same point again and again in his jottings. While there may be ‘libertarian and maybe humanitarian objections to immigration controls’, says Lordy, ‘there are far more potent libertarian and humanitarian objections to overcrowding, resource conflicts, shortages and rationing – let alone loss of homes or habitats to climate change’. Exactly! If you are a REAL libertarian then you should immediately call for the shutting down and severe policing of Britain’s borders in order to keep out the swarming mass of tarmac harbingers and wannabe car-drivers who would turn our green and pleasant land into a brown and unpleasant land. (I mean ‘brown’ as in brownfield building! I’m not racist; I’m just opposed to all forms of immigration.)

Anon, the true aim of the BNP is to protect and preserve ‘real England’ and ‘real Britain’, the land of nice men and women (most of them white but not all of them) who buy their carrots in little shops, have a pint in a decent locally-owned English pub, and who show some respect for the countryside. The BNP is sick and tired of foreignness, whether it’s habitat- and home-destroying immigrants or big foreign corporations or the Americanisation and Sinophisation of our shopping, eating, drinking and screwing habits. And isn’t that what we ethicists are sick of, too? My drinking buddy Paul Kingsnorth (by ‘drinking’ I mean we occasionally share an ENGLISH beer in an ENGLISH pub served by an ENGLISH woman in an ENGLISH-made apron – none of that foreign shite for us, thank you!) has written a book called Real England in which he, too, puts forward a nationalist case against the foreignisation and corruption of England. I have heard that many BNP members are frantically reading the book (some of them had to take literacy lessons first) and are considering making it into the bible of their movement.

So, Anon, worry not about voting for the BNP. When it comes down to it, they were the best representatives of the ethical outlook in last week’s local elections. Hell, if they could shake off their image as chip-eating, non-organic denim-wearing, suede-headed bovver boys, I might even vote for them myself next time! Nick Griffin, take note.

Ethan Greenhart is here to answer all your questions about ethical living in the twenty-first century. Email him at {encode=”Ethan.Greenhart@spiked-online.com” title=”Ethan.Greenhart@spiked-online.com”}. Read his earlier columns here

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Topics Politics

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