The Spectator’s Notes | 29 April 2006

The last time there was a scare about the BNP was in the 1970s. People thought that the Labour government was ignoring them about immigration, and started to vote for the National Front, as it was then known. It was to head this off, in early 1978, that Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition, famously intervened. She dismissed the National Front as both nasty and socialist (people forget that the word Nazi means National Socialist). But people feared, she said, that Britain ‘might be rather swamped by a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy …that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to …be rather hostile to those coming in’. ‘We are a British nation,’ she went on, ‘with British characteristics.’ This talk and the promise (fulfilled in office) of tighter immigration controls kept the National Front/BNP at the margins throughout the 1980s.