'When we get to power our opponents will be swept away like flies.'
John Tyndall, BNP founder and former leader.

Clearly, in a free and democratic society, we should accept a wide diversity of views including those with which we strongly disagree. It would be wrong to censor or criminalise views which, however offensive to many, do not infringe on the rights of others. However, many forms of extremist expression, especially race hate, do infringe on the rights of those attacked, to live their lives free of discrimination, fear and hurt.

Nazis use the guise of democracy in order to deny people their democratic rights. Hitler suppressed any opposition to the Nazi regime and policed every aspect of people’s lives. Books were burned, meetings smashed up and democracy crushed as the Nazis imposed their rule on German society.

The tragedy is that many people believed the Nazis could be stopped by debate, and that it was undemocratic to deny them their intellectual freedom. History should have taught us a stern lesson.

Every time a racist speaks it gives confidence to thugs who attack and murder blacks, Asians and Jews. After the nazi BNP member Derek Beackon was elected in the East End of London racist attacks in the area soared by 300 percent. In the area around the BNP HQ there have been four racist murders and 210 percent increase in racist attacks.

It is not harmless to let a racist or nazi speak out. It is disastrous. It creates divisions in our society instead of harmony and unity. It gives confidence to the hard core of nazis who want to crush democracy and deny us any equal rights. That is why nazis must be denied a platform for their racist ideas whose purpose is the oppression of others.

Since the Holocaust the nazis have had great difficulty in building mass support for their organisations and ideas. They know that if they openly declare themselves they will immediately repel all but a tiny number of hardcore fascists.

Therefore nazis across Europe have presented a respectable face in order to win electoral support. They appeal to voters who they know would not support fascism, while at the same time signalling to their hardcore nazi supporters that the final objective remains on course.

They tap the resentment and disillusion with mainstream political parties. In public they insist that they are democratic. And they seek to prepare the ground for a wider acceptance of an openly fascist agenda. To this end they continually try to legitimise Hitler, Mussolini and the other fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, and they downplay and deny the Holocaust.

Nazis stand in elections so that they will be better placed to abolish them in the future. They hope to use the mask of democracy to conceal their nazi face, until they have the strength and numbers to march out into the open to deal with their opponents by any means. That is why we must unmask them and deny them a platform.

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