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Introduction
The ascent to power of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was widely seen as sounding a death-knell for far-right extremism in Britain. By the end of 1980, John Tyndall, the leader of the National Front (NF), had left the party, which was subsequently plunged into an organisational schism. In 1982, Tyndall embarked on a new political venture with the formation of the British National Party (BNP), but the organisation exerted little influence in a political era dominated by Thatcherism. As far-right parties began to make significant gains across Western and Northern Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, Britain became something of an anomaly, with the BNP remaining a marginal political actor. Even the BNP victory in Tower Hamlets in 1993 was regarded as something of a 'false dawn' (Copsey, 2004). Indeed, a collection of essays into right-wing extremism in Britain in the mid-1990s was concerned less with the success than the 'failure of British fascism' (Cronin, 1996). However, since 2001, the BNP has made electoral advances that have served to question Britain's anomalous status. Although remaining a peripheral political actor at the national level, the BNP has made significant local breakthroughs, most noticeably in Barking and Dagenham, Stoke-on-Trent, Epping Forest and Burnley. It is on the emergence of the BNP in Burnley, where the party secured its first elected representatives for almost a decade in 2002, that this paper will focus.
The Emergence of the BNP
Following his election as leader of the BNP in 1999, Nick Griffin has undertaken a rapid 'modernisation' of the party (Eatwell, 1998, 2004; Copsey, 2004, 2007). Modelling itself on the Front National and its brand of national-populism, the BNP has increasingly moved away from the more overt extremism that had been displayed by the party under its former leader. In search of greater degrees of 'respectability' and 'legitimacy', Griffin has sought to cloak the more esoteric ideological elements of the BNP, such as holocaust denial and the compulsory repatriation of 'immigrants', beneath a safer, community-based politics which focuses on 'Rights for Whites', and the more immediate and everyday concerns of residents. Adopting tactics pioneered by the Liberal Democrats, the BNP have taken to the streets within local communities, focusing intensively on accessing local grievances, and then tailoring material in...