Nick Griffin, the leader of the anti-immigration British National Party (BNP), has been selected as one of the 15 representatives chosen to speak on behalf of the European Union at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen. The conference aims to reach agreement on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. In a recent speech Griffin said that "the anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology… Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao." On its website, the BNP states that "current evidence suggests that some of it may be man-made; even if this is not the case, then the principle of ‘better safe than sorry’ applies and we should try to minimise the emission of greenhouse gases and other pollutants." Toby Helm reports that "critics say Griffin addresses environmental issues when he believes he can use them to advance anti-immigration policies."