It depends what kind of person you ask, to put it bluntly.
They are popular enough to win some local council seats and be in the
running for seats in parliament. Enough in the running to worry some
moderates. That is still less than 1% of any popular vote tho.
The party was formed from more overtly Nazi groups such as the "Greater
Britain Movement" and the "National Front". It's founder called Mein
Kampf the party's "bible". The BNP takes a (relatively) more moderate,
political approach, but still stays true to it's roots, it's leader calling the
Holocaust the "Holohoax" in the late '90s. Since then, however,
anti-sematism has been completely replaced by anti-islamism
and anti-immigration ideals. A prominent party member summed
up the new anti-islam and the BNPs breed of false moderation well:
Quote:
|
We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with. If we were to attack some other ethnic group — some people say we should attack the Jews … But … we've got to get to power. And if that was an issue we chose to bang on about when the press don't talk about it … the public would just think we were barking mad. They'd just think oh, you're attacking Jews just because you want to attack Jews. You're attacking this group of powerful Zionists just because you want to take poor Manny Cohen the tailor and shove him in a gas chamber. That's what the public would think. It wouldn't get us anywhere other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box; the public would think "extremist crank lunatics, nothing to do with me." And we wouldn't get power.
|
Naturally, this makes them very much despised by the majority of decent folk.