American Friends of the BNP

Since January 1999, a support group to promote the aims of the British National Party has been in operation in the United States. The American Friends of the BNP (AFBNP) was founded by Mark Cotterill, a former BNP southwest local organiser. Cotterill, who now lives in the US, was first active in far-right politics as southwest organiser for the National Front. He has also acted as the American distributor for Right Now!, the right-wing Conservative quarterly.

The inspiration behind the AFBNP is the success of the various American groups that support and raise money for Irish republic-anism. The BNP has followed suit, seeing American sympathisers as a fruitful recruiting ground for political support and most importantly for raising funds to help finance the BNP's election campaigns.

During the 1999 European elections, Cotterill raised thousands for the BNP election campaign. "The pitch is mainly racial", Cotterill has said. "This is just the start; the potential in America is huge". More money has been raised for the BNP since then.

Steve Cartwright, the BNP Scottish organiser, has written that considering the inroads that the SNP and IRA have made in the US in recent years, "it was now time to give decent Americans the opportunity to hear the British National Party message, and to contribute financially to future BNP campaigns".

As the BNP is itself responsible for setting up this group, via Cotterill, it may be in breach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in the United States in 1938. Ironically the act was passed to prevent people joining and raising funds for the German Nazi Party in the 1930s. Its terms require the registration of all foreign agents, defined as American individuals or organisations who act at the order, request, or direction of a foreign principal, a term that encompasses foreign political parties such as the BNP.

The AFBNP exists as a working group to promote and further the interests of the BNP in Britain. To illustrate the organic ties between the two groups, Nick Griffin told a meeting in Northern Ireland, "This will put the party in a unique position to wrest the hearts and minds of people from the clutches of the IRA. We will be exposing their true Marxist agenda, and their genocidal tactics. And we will be using the Internet, videos, and in due course commercial satellite TV, to reconnect growing numbers of Americans with their Ulster roots."

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires every agent to declare income received on behalf of the foreign principal, income that has not been officially declared by the AFBNP.

The purpose of the Act was to ensure that the US government would be informed of the identity of persons engaging in political activities for or on behalf of foreign political parties. But the AFBNP has not registered with the US Department of Justice.

The AFBNP may also be enabling the BNP to flout laws regulating the funding of political parties in Britain. The Neill Report, commissioned by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, concluded, "Political parties should... be banned from receiving foreign donations". Legislation based on this recommendation came into effect early in 2001. The BNP, which receives growing financial support from the AFBNP, would be hit hard by such a prohibition. It has therefore attempted to exploit a loophole in the law by channelling money through its Ulster branch and then passing it on to the national headquarters. Claiming that the new law exempts political parties in Northern Ireland from publishing their accounts, because of the risk of terrorist reprisals, the BNP hopes to avoid declaring foreign donations.

There also exists a deliberate loophole in the legislation to enable money to be passed legitimately between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, given that many parties in Ireland have branches in both. The AFBNP could therefore pass money to someone in the Republic, who could then pass it to the Ulster branch of the BNP, and from there to the BNP headquarters.

The speakers who have addressed meetings of the AFBNP indicate the extremism that still permeates the BNP. They include some of North America's foremost nazis, among them William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance and author of the notorious terrorist handbook, The Turner Diaries; Ed Fields, editor of the white supremacist The Truth At Last; Don Black, who runs the world's largest neo-nazi website; David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader; and Vincent Edwards, his campaign manager.