Michael Gove: The evil at the heart of this list of names, and shame

Published on Saturday 22 November 2008 18:37

SOMEONE published – and they were all damned. The posting of the entire BNP membership roster on the internet (give or take a few names) has been replete with ironies.

The party which considers all Brussels legislation an alien imposition on good old Anglo-Saxon liberties has rushed to embrace the European Convention on Human Rights to protect its members' privacy. The party which said it would advance on the back of "well-directed boots and fists" now lives in fear of intimidation. And the party which is supposed to embody the Fhrerprinzip of unquestioning leader worship is now a furious, feuding, fearful mass of individuals whose faith in their own messianic leader has been profoundly shaken.

As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. But the publication of these names does not signal the End of Nasty Nick. The BNP's leader, Nick Griffin, may be many things but he is certainly not a political amateur. The day after his membership names were released he popped up to assert that this cloud had a good old English sterling silver lining. The revelation that the BNP membership now included clergymen, scientists, retired army officers and lawyers was proof that his was no skinhead movement of the streets but a respectable, nationalist movement. Under his leadership, he asserted, the BNP had become more moderate and the proof of the pudding was in the outing.

And there is a risk that Griffin may have his wish. His party thrives on publicity. Every name revealed of someone doing something halfway respectable helps mainstream a party previously associated with ugly and barely suppressed violence. Every columnist asserting that the BNP is addressing fears the principal parties ignore risks helping legitimise Griffin as a fearless truth-teller speaking up for an old working class increasingly left behind by globalisation. This cut-price Mussolini can proclaim himself the Cassandra of the hour. And all this publicity precedes local and European elections in which the BNP hopes to make itself the vehicle for a protest vote made at once more fearful, and more insular, by the global recession.

This combination of factors now risks, in the greatest irony of all, turning the BNP's greatest humiliation so far into a prelude to its biggest advance. Which is why it is important to remember just what the BNP really is. At its heart. It is not a movement of disheartened, working class voters, bewildered by global capital's fickleness, nor is it a society of nostalgic solicitors and mildly eccentric vicars who dream of an England before chicken tikka massala.

It's a Nazi party. Pure and simple. It believes in racial purity and its leaders are simply incapable of abandoning an ideology of pure wickedness.

When you penetrate to the heart of what the BNP's leaders say and believe, you discover that their racism is much more than a reaction to recent immigration levels, or a plea for a return to a Britain of their youth. It is even bleaker and more blinkered, familiar to us from history and remarkable in its persistence. Griffin is an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. When the country elected Tony Blair in 1997, he published a pamphlet, alleging Jewish control of our mass media, called The Mind Benders.

He has argued that belief in the Holocaust is no more sustainable than belief that the world is flat and the extermination of six million is a mix of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter-day witch hysteria. When the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving, acknowledged that some Jewish lives may have been lost in a programme of Nazi elimination he was denounced by Griffin for weakening. "True Revisionists", he argued, would "not be fooled by this new twist to the Hoax of the Twentieth century".

There aren't many people in British public life who can claim to have been sickened by Irving's moderation. And that tells you almost all you need to know about the ideological moorings of Griffin and his party. Holocaust denial was the itch he could not resist scratching, the hate which had to speak its name.

And Holocaust denial is not some recondite matter, some intellectual eccentricity scarcely worthy of our attention. It is both the beating heart of extreme right politics, its animating energy, and it is also a clear and present danger to millions. Holocaust deniers, or revisionists as they coyly style themselves, from David Irving to the Australian Frederick Toben, who was released from custody this week, are the rock stars of racism, feted by fascists everywhere. Minimising Nazi war crimes is the stock in trade of extreme rightists everywhere, from the late Jrg Haider to Le Pen and Griffin. They have to attack the history which made us pledge "never again" so their ideology can advance, again. And it is no coincidence that the one politician currently in power who wants to use the resources of his state to visit violence on the Jewish people – Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – is himself a Holocaust denier. Indeed, Iran has been a haven for Holocaust deniers and has hosted conferences to promote their beliefs.

Look at any internet site devoted to the ideology of denial, like Irving's, and you find a web of connections to extreme right fantasising and anti-Israel propaganda. The toxic cocktail so fashionable in the Thirties is being mixed again. Which is why our duty, at this time, is to teach the next generation about the unique horror of the Holocaust and write in support of the Jewish people and all minorities under assault from prejudice. We must carry on publishing the truth. Or we shall all be damned.

• Michael Gove is Shadow Secretary of State for Children