“Anyone who objects to multi-culturalism is called a bigot; anyone who wants to curb immigration is called a racist; anyone who objects to the Islamisation of Britain is called an Islamophobe; anyone who wants to leave the EU and regain the power of national self-government is called a xenophobe; anyone, in short, who wants to retain Britain’s national identity rooted in the shared particulars of religion, law, history, traditions and culture and its powers as a self-governing nation finds themselves ostracised as a pariah….

“Working-class areas are particularly vulnerable to the BNP because they bear the full brunt of these policies. They are areas of very high immigration where the transformation of the ethnic, religious and cultural landscape has made indigenous inhabitants feel strangers in their own country…. The willed loss of control of this country’s borders, the blind eye to Islamisation, the refusal to allow the people to vote against the Lisbon treaty and the surrender of self-government to the EU – these are the things that have brought the BNP electoral success.”

Melanie Phillips’s blog, 8 June 2009

Not that Mel is exactly an expert on the BNP, of course. According to her, “they will not allow black people or Jews to be members”, which rather overlooks the fact that the BNP actually have a councillor of Jewish origin – one Patricia Richardson, who has sat on Epping Forest District Council for the last five years.

And as we’ve pointed out in the past, Phillips omits to mention one important factor in the rise of the BNP – the legitimisation of their racist politics by bigoted right-wing commentators like herself whose anti-Muslim tirades are often barely distinguishable from the sort of thing you might read in a BNP propaganda leaflet.