page_title: History of the British National Party
section_title: Foundation: 1982
hierarchical_section_title: History of the British National Party / Foundation: 1982
caption_attribution_description: English: National Front march in Yorkshire, Great Britain. 1970s.
context_page_description: The British National Party is a far-right political party in the United Kingdom formed as a splinter group from the National Front by John Tyndall in 1982 and was led by Nick Griffin from September 1999 to July 2014. Its current chairman is Adam Walker. The BNP platform is centred on the advocacy of "firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home", as well as the repeal of anti-discrimination legislation. It restricted membership to "indigenous British" people until a 2010 legal challenge to its constitution.
context_section_description: The British National Party was founded by the extreme-right political activist John Tyndall, who had been involved in Neo-Nazi groups since the late 1950s. He had led the far-right National Front (NF) throughout most of the 1970s, although resigned in 1980, complaining that homosexuals like Martin Webster held senior positions within the party.  He established his own rival group, the New National Front (NNF), in June 1980, hoping that his breakaway group could eventually be re-merged back into the NF. In January 1981, Tyndall was contacted by the far right activist Ray Hill, who was in reality a spy for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. Hill suggested that Tyndall establish a new political party through which he could unite many smaller extreme-right groups. While Hill's real intention had been to cause further schism among the British far right, Tyndall liked the idea. Tyndall made suggestions of unity to a number of other small extreme-right groups and together they established a Committee for Nationalist Unity (CNU) in January 1982. In March 1982 the CNU held a conference at Charing Cross Hotel. The fifty extreme-rightists in attendance agreed that they would establish a new political party, to be known as the British National Party.
  Tyndall was to be the leader of this new party, with the majority of its members coming from the NNF, although others were defectors from the NF, British Movement, British Democratic Party, and Nationalist Party. The party was formerly launched at a press conference held in a Victoria hotel on 7 April 1982. It was therefore dominated by ex-NF members and inherited that party's tradition of racial nationalism. Tyndall had led the NF on two occasions, and prior to that had been involved in several Neo-Nazi groups, having been involved in the National Socialist Movement during the early 1960s and then founded his own Greater Britain Movement in 1964.
  Most of the BNP's leading activists, such as Charles Parker, David Bruce, Richard Edmonds, and John Peacock, had previously been senior figures in the NF. Tyndall later remarked that there was "scarcely any difference [between the BNP and NF] in ideology or policy save in the minutest detail". He described the party as being the third serious attempt to built such a movement in Britain, following those of the NF and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists before that. Under Tyndall's leadership the party was Neo-Nazi in orientation and engaged in nostalgia for Nazi Germany.
  The British National Party was founded in 1982 following a split within the far right National Front (NF) two years before. The NF had organised marches in an attempt to raise its profile, which sometimes led to violent clashes with political opponents such as the Anti-Nazi League. After a poor showing at the 1979 general election, internal factional division heightened within the NF. This culminated in chairman John Tyndall leaving the party in 1980, and founding the New National Front (NNF), which became the BNP two years later. According to Spearhead, a magazine produced by Tyndall, the split within the NF was initially intended to be temporary.  Members of Tyndall's NNF wished to modernise and break with fascism, blaming the old NF for its lack of popular appeal.
  Tyndall's new BNP absorbed the membership of the British Democratic Party, a small British nationalist party led by Anthony Reed Herbert which was attempting to distance itself from neo-nazism, and which had itself earlier split from the NF. Also joining were members of the Constitutional Movement, another NF splinter group who had distanced themselves from fascism and violent subcultures such as football hooliganism. These smaller nationalist parties attempting to modernise their image joined Tyndall's NNF through the Committee for Nationalist Unity (1981), which acted as a front to draw members from similar modernising nationalist organizations. However, despite Tyndall's attempt to distance the BNP from fascism, several individuals of the disintegrating British Movement were allowed to join. At its for
caption: National Front march from the 1970s.  The movement from which the BNP would emerge by 1982.
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