The BNP wasn't a fascist organisation.
As the BNP's own Language and Concepts Discipline manual advised, Griffin wished his party to be perceived as a "rightwing populist party" that espoused "right-of-centre views traditional to ordinary working people who are not leftists'. In fact, throughout its existence, the BNP has remained profoundly fascist, dedicated to a "revolution" that would make Britain an ethnically "pure" society. The BNP had its roots in the most extreme sections of Britain's far right. Griffin developed his own personal ideology from a concoction of "leftwing" nazism, racist mysticism and ideas borrowed from the French Front National about how to pursue cultural hegemony in order to win political power.
After taking over the BNP, he attempted to fashion a respectable public image behind which these ideas could be hidden. Yet even as the BNP tried to distance itself in public from violence, it still attracted supporters who harboured fantasies about armed conflict. In 2006, former BNP member Robert Cottage was jailed for stockpiling explosive chemicals at his Lancashire home. Another ex-member, Terence Gavan, was jailed in 2010 for hoarding guns and homemade bombs in his bedroom.
A rise in reported hate crime followed the election of BNP councillors in the West Midlands, London and Essex. What's more, while the BNP attracted a layer of working-class support, it kept some roots in the middle classes, the traditional bedrock of fascism. Griffin was the privately educated son of a businessman; party members included company directors, computing entrepreneurs, bankers and estate agents. The genesis of the EDL indicates similar foundations. It has enjoyed the perception, reflected across the national media, of being a spontaneous expression of working-class anger. The origin of this group, which was conceived in a £500,000 apartment and shaped by a group of anti-Muslim ideologues including a director of a City investment fund and a property developer, suggest a more complex picture. The EDL has displayed increasingly fascist-like behaviour, targeting not only Muslims but leftwing movements too.