Report: Blood & Honour: Britain's Far-Right Militants

The Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), a right-leaning UK think tank, and Nothing British, an organization that "seeks to promote [liberal democratic] British values and combat political extremism and racism", this week released a report (dated January 2010) under the title "Blood & Honour: Britain's Far-Right Militants", authored by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Edmund Standing, with a foreword by Denis MacShane, a Labour Party member of parliament and former Minister of State for Europe.

The full text is available free of charge here:

www.socialcohesion.co.uk/files/1266837784_1.pdf

Excerpts: "Blood & Honour (B&H) is an international neo-Nazi network that has evolved from its original incarnation as a neo-Nazi music scene into a far-right franchise. Through music CDs and ideological texts, the B&H network reinforces and disseminates a violent 'white power' supremacist ideology. This ideology derives from Third Reich Nazism and, unlike some other far-right organisations, B&H seeks the creation of a 'Fourth Reich'. While it is not an organisation with official membership, B&H acts as a very effective international network through which to spread violent neo-Nazism [...], a number of recently convicted far-right terrorists were found to be followers of B&H music and literature [...].

"However, unlike Islamist terror, the neo-Nazi equivalent is still in an immature and ineffectual stage in the UK. [...] B&H is ostensibly a 'political' movement; but arguably it has far more in common with other violent ideological forms of extremism than it does with what is generally understood as 'politics', even of a nationalist variety. Certainly, as an explicitly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, fascist organisation, B&H constitutes an atavistic manifestation [...] outside the bounds of normal social and political interaction. The group, therefore, acts as a magnet to those who feel disenfranchised".

Endorsement: "This well-researched and forcefully written exposure of the threat to democracy posed by Blood & Honour is a wake-up call to all those liberals who complacently assume the militant far-right died with the National Front." (Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University)

Another CSC publication of possible interest in this context is "The BNP and the Online Fascist Network: an investigation into the online activities of British National Party members and online activists" by Edmund Standing, with an introduction by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (July 2009).

The full text is available free of charge here:

www.douglasmurray.co.uk/TheBNPandtheOnlineFascistNetwork.pdf