Tristan Cork, a reporter on our sister paper the Western Daily Press, offers a personal view on the BNP.

The mood is rebellious. The times are unprecedented. We’re all sick of the way MPs from all parties have had their snouts in the trough, milking a system for all it’s worth, taking tens of thousands of pounds of our money for moats and wisteria, tennis courts and furniture.

The mood is rebellious. The times are unprecedented. We’re all sick of the way MPs from all parties have had their snouts in the trough, milking a system for all it’s worth, taking tens of thousands of pounds of our money for moats and wisteria, tennis courts and furniture.

We all suspected they did this, didn’t we? We all knew deep down that they were quietly told to treat their expenses as a second income, in place of a pay rise. We’re all now wondering two things, aren’t we? The first: is there anything that MPs actually have to pay for themselves, out of their proper wages? The second: There’s an election coming up and we’re going to give it to the blighters, eh? All right, it’s a European election, not a general one, but it’s all we can do to register our fury, anger and discontent.

Support for “fringe” parties is rising, and among them is the British National Party. Their website is apparently more visited than the websites of the three main parties put together. The party is claiming 10,000 calls a day to its call centre.

The mainstream political parties and mainstream media hate the BNP. Their way of dealing with them is to ignore them. When a BNP candidate is invited to share an election meeting platform, the other parties refuse to take part. The BNP leaders struggle to get on TV and the radio. They are the lepers of the political world.

But we don’t live in a world of four TV channels, BBC radio and a few national newspapers any more, and the BNP, through grassroots work and a glossy-ish website, have achieved a cult underground status as a kind of respectable rebel. They are, perhaps even more than UKIP, seen increasingly as a viable protest vote. Go on, admit you’re thinking you might vote for them, just to spite those main- stream parties and send them a message.

I don’t agree with ostracising the BNP. That has created martyr- status for a group who should be allowed to say what they believe on an equal footing. Then we can really see what they’re all about.

But what is the BNP actually saying? What do they think? What are their policies? What, if you do it, are you actually voting for?

Everyone thinks the BNP is racist. Its members say they aren’t. Its website all but begs their supporters not to use the “R” word and to deny it when it’s used against them, to use “acceptable” language instead.

Immigration is their top policy – by that I mean top on their list. Much of what they say, many people would agree with – deporting foreign nationals who commit crime, for example. This, actually, should happen now – it’s only the Government’s and the legal system’s incompetence that has allowed foreign criminals to stay or come straight back in.

Their biggest difference from all those other parties who are now trying to talk tough on immigration is this: the BNP would stop all immigration and then “encourage” immigrants to return to their native lands.

That encouragement would also include financial incentives both for the individual and the country taking them “back”, and the incentives would re- place all foreign aid. So a country like, say, Malawi, which receives British Government money to help children orphaned by Aids, would see their money go to, erm, India, to help cope with the flood of people of south Asian descent returning. Because, of course, the BNP doesn’t just mean foreigners being repat- riated. In fact, when talking about foreign people from, say, Germany or Greece, they are part of a European “family”.

In fact, the BNP means people born in Bristol or Corsham, or Stroud, or Taunton, whose parents were born there, and whose grandparents might well have been born there. They, you see, might well be offered tens of thousands of pounds to go “back” to, say, Barbados or Bangladesh – somewhere they might never have been before – because it’s where their grandfather came from.

By my reckoning more than half the England football team would be offered money to “return” to somewhere else.

I reckon we’d be left with Terry, Gerrard, Carrick, Crouch and Barry, while watching Theo Walcott, Rio Ferdinand and the rest all playing against England for, um, well, Mr Nick Griffin, where would they go?

On the website, there’s a broad brush approach to everything else from schools (tougher discipline), the economy (actually fairly anti-capitalist, and closer to the Greens, or even the anarcho- communist collectivists who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, bizarrely enough), and the environment (again, pretty Green).

The BNP, like UKIP, wants us out of the EU. Fair enough. But here’s the rub. It is its avowed intention, once out of the EU, to create a federation of Britain, to which the Republic of Ireland would be invited back to join.

Now that is just plain odd. If the racist, “send ’em back” policies on immigrants hark back to the 1950s and 60s, then this Britain and Ireland stuff turns the clock back even further.

At least they’ve got an “ideology” section on their website, eh? Something the three main parties appear to have ditched. That section’s main article is an essay which includes this, just for anyone who thinks the BNP have changed; that they’re not really racist any more, that they’re “acceptable” now.

This is from Dave Baxter: “But even ignoring the debate as to what extent values are learned or innate, the fact is that an African Negro born here will still be a Negro. Even if his speech and manners were perfect English, he would remain – however impolite it may be to point out – someone of a different race.

“Many blacks and Asians might well identify with this country, but that no more makes them British than they would be Japanese if they were born in that country.

“Just as not two people are identical, then no two races are the same; they differ not only in physical characteristics but in mental ability… Our youth are being indoctrinated with a message that is leading them to commit self-inflicted genocide through race-mixing.”

You vote for them, and you vote for that.