I never had the slightest sympathy with the British National Party (BNP), and I don’t believe it was ever supported by anything other than a tiny minority on the outer fringes of the very far right. Their Wikipedia entry describes the party as being founded by former National Front members, and as being fascist and neo fascist. It created Combat-18, a paramilitary body with a name based on Adolph Hitler's initials (A and H being the 1st and 8th letters of the alphabet). The party has been ‘inactive’ since 2019, and that isn’t a surprise for reasons that will soon be obvious.
I mention this because someone has pointed out the similarities between the policies of the BNP on immigration and those of the current Tory and Reform leaderships. At first, I couldn't believe it was true, but sure enough, tucked away on page 14 of the 2005 BNP manifesto is this paragraph:
"To ensure that we do not become a minority in our own homeland, and that the native British peoples of our islands retain their culture and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of all bogus asylum seekers, all criminal entrants and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants and their descendants who are legally here are afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question."
You will immediately recognise the parallels between what the BNP called for twenty years ago and what both Reform and the Tories are now proposing. And if you think the BNP’s policy was the most extreme, you would be wrong. Farage and Badenoch, engaged in an arms race to see who can offer the most brutal policy, have now overtaken the BNP in sheer nastiness:
The politics of migration have shifted so far to the extreme right, the Conservatives and Reform now have a more hardline policy on deporting legal British residents than... the British National Party did in 2005— Joseph Evans (@josephevans.bsky.social) 7 October 2025 at 14:02
As Professor Jonathan Portes points out, the difference is that the BNP were proposing a voluntary scheme with financial incentives. That is too soft nowadays. Both the Tories and Reform UK plan to make it the law of the land and achieve the same ends by force.
Reform says they will scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which gives access to benefits, and deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants here legally over a five year period. Farage accepts the policy would split families and remove people integrated in their communities, "but that's why we're giving people advance notice of what's coming".
Meanwhile, the Tories intend to rebrand the Home Office's immigration enforcement unit as a "Removals Force" akin to ICE in the USA and give the new unit a "mandate" to remove at least 150,000 people each year, totalling 750,000 during the five-year lifetime of a Parliament.
I’m using links to BBC reports here just to show that I’m not making all this up or pulling some daft fake news stories circulating on Twitter. These really are the policies of the two main right-wing parties in the United Kingdom in 2025. They are Gestapo-like and wouldn't have been out of place in Germany in the 1930s.
If someone had told me twenty years ago that Nigel Farage would be headed for Downing Street - in any role - and that his policy concerning legal immigrants would be forced mass repatriation, I would have laughed. The idea would have been ridiculous. And suggesting Tory policy would be even more extreme, I would have called for men in white coats. But here we are.
You can see why the BNP are now a spent force in British politics. Farage and Badenoch have made them irrelevant by adopting their approach to immigrants, with added malice.
Robert Jenrick, the MP for Newark and a Tory leadership candidate in October last year, still apparently harbouring secre ambitions to run against Badenoch again, has come in for criticism after he complained at a Conservative dinner, about "not seeing another white face" in the neighbourhood of Handsworth in Birmingham." He said it was not the kind of country he wanted to live in due to a lack of integration, before saying it was not about skin colour or faith. The Bishop of Birmingham accused him of “stoking division.”
If Enoch Powell were still alive today, he would easily find a place in today's Conservative Party, and might even be seen as a moderating influence. Think about that. We have come a very long way in the wrong direction over the last thirty years.
Who do I blame for it all? Nigel Farage. He has a lot to answer for. To think he did it without once exercising any real power in this country is stunning. Farage has turned the ravings of the shaven-headed thugs and racists of the far-right into mainstream politics, destroying the Conservative Party in the process and is now well on the way to destroying Britain.
He could easily be the prime minister in less than four years, and then the damage will really begin.
