Under normal circumstances, the retirement of a local councillor would not make national news, let alone prompt the release of a commemorative tea towel.

But when Brian Parker announced he would not be seeking re-election at this week’s local elections in Pendle, east Lancashire, the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate was so delighted it knocked up a range of farewell memorabilia. Yours for £15: mugs and dishcloths boasting: “I helped defeat the BNP, 1993-2018.”

Yet in the cramped living room of his terraced house in Pendle, surrounded by Nazi history books, two incontinent Persian cats called Toffee and Fudge and a vintage motorbike, Parker insists the British National party (BNP) is not dead.



Brian Parker’s bookshelf at his home in Nelson. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

It’s true he is the last district councillor the far-right party has left, four years after former leader Nick Griffin – who turned the party into a temporarily credible electoral force after its foundation as a street-based successor organisation to the fascist and neo-Nazi National Front – lost his seat in the European parliament. And yes, he, the BNP’s longest-serving elected representative, is indeed retiring after 12 years – to look after his 90-year-old mother, he said.

“But this isn’t the end of the BNP. We will regroup and rise again,” he insists. Asked how the party would regenerate, he says it will probably take “mass riots” or a jihadist act of terror to recruit new members. “We did really well after the 7/7 bombings in London,” he says.



Anyone in any doubt about the values of the party that Parker has represented would have found a reminder this week in the statement issued by what remains of it over the Windrush affair. When Amber Rudd resigned as home secretary earlier this week over immigration removal targets, the party put out a statement pledging to give free plane tickets to Windrush “illegals”.

Adam Walker, Griffin’s successor as leader, said: “Far from being the ‘saviours of the nation’, coming to the aid of postwar Britain – as race hustlers like David Lammy, Sadiq Khan and Diane Abbott would have us think – these migrants travelled to Britain to seize for themselves opportunities at the expense of the British people.”

Parker claims that those views have not been altogether wiped from the political map. The 66-year-old says that the BNP still has parish councillors, such as in Heybridge in Essex, where the party took control in 2016. Exactly how many they number is unclear. “The British National party has dozens of councillors the length and breadth of the British Isles,” said David Furness, the party’s press officer. He ignored a request for the total, saying instead: “Because our members are true patriots they are honoured to serve their communities in the much under-appreciated positions as community, parish and town councillors.”



Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate, says that this is nonsense. “The idea that the BNP is a viable party because some people got on parish councils uncontested two or three years ago is a joke. There are no functioning branches any more and apart from updating their website they no longer do any campaigns.”

Parker, a former lorry driver with a taste for 70s knitwear, concedes that his local branch, Burnley and Pendle, doesn’t operate any more. The party would be more popular if it weren’t for government-backed “saboteurs”, he grumbles. “They keep infiltrating the party,” he csays, sitting in an armchair in front of a bookshelf featuring the Illustrated History of the Gestapo displayed front-on like a Waterstone’s recommendation, a huge swastika on the cover.

He believes that the members who got the party in trouble – such as the London assembly candidate who wrote on his blog that “women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible ordeal” – were government plants, designed to discredit the BNP.

When the Guardian called around unannounced recently, Parker was working on an election leaflet with another BNP member, John Rowe. A former town councillor with a wiry bob, a Cornish accent and a habit of rhapsodising about black ex-girlfriends (“She was from Malawi... We’re not against immigrants, we’re against immigration”), Rowe is standing as an independent in the Manchester ward of Crumpsall this time round.

Though Parker is not contesting his home ward of Marsden, he still hopes to influence the result. He’d tried and failed to get first Ukip and then the National Front to stand in his place and so is giving his support, likely to be unwelcome, to Labour candidate Laura Blackburn in her two-horse race with the Conservatives.

Rowe had helped him write a letter they distributed to 1,500 households in Marsden, a mostly white suburb sprawled across a hill above the former mill town of Nelson. “It’s not my place to tell you how to vote, but as your councillor I never had any cooperation from the Conservative party in Pendle,” he wrote, saying that Labour’s Blackburn would be “effective in working for the improvement of this ward irrespective of the party”.

Parker was first elected in 2006, which was the middle of the BNP’s purple period. Over the next three years the party won 55 district council seats, including 12 in Barking and Dagenham, plus its first county council seat in Lancashire and another on the London assembly. The BNP achieved nearly 1m votes in the 2009 European parliament election, in which Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected as MEPs.

Twelve years on, Parker is the BNP’s last man standing. In the streets where he lives, voters do not appear to have changed their minds on immigration. “I’ll tell you exactly why I voted BNP,” says a plasterer working on a council estate opposite Marsden’s park this week. “The town has been overrun by immigrants who don’t contribute to society. If they fit in I’ve got no problem but when they exclude themselves and have a community within a community and don’t integrate, I do.”

Pendle borough council’s Marsden ward. One of the BNP’s most successful stunts involved party-branded skips being delivered to take away the rubbish for free. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The estate, a BNP stronghold, was once plagued by flytippers. Andrew Stephenson, the local MP, remembers one of the BNP’s most successful stunts, which involved party-branded skips being delivered to take away the rubbish for free. “Needless to say, residents loved it ... you’ve got to admit it was a genius political idea,” says Stephenson.

Following his election to parliament in 2010, Stephenson spent a summer knocking on doors in Marsden to understand the BNP’s appeal.

“The thing that surprised me was that there were a lot of young, single mothers, people who wouldn’t strike you as at all racist in any shape or form, who felt their voices weren’t being heard,” said Stephenson. “They were being marginalised and they thought nobody spoke for them and the BNP had captured that disillusionment with politics and everything else.”

Unlike his colleagues elsewhere who were invariably booted out after one term, Parker did put the hours in, concedes Stephenson. “I’d knock on doors and people would say: ‘Brian comes around here, he collects the litter.’”

On his BNP profile page, Parker says that he wants to end “the Islamic colonisation of Britain”. And yet the local Conservatives, currently in opposition, have concluded that it is fruitless to attack him as a racist. “There’s no point. It doesn’t work,” said Tommy Cooney, who took one of the BNP’s two Marsden seats in 2012. “We hammer the electorate with localism. We steer clear of national issues and focus on the local instead.” That is, the holy trinity of local politics: bins, dog mess, pot holes.

Despite his hatred of immigration – he told the Guardian he would favour mass deportations by the army – Parker worked with local Asian councillors from the Labour party. In 2016 he had the deciding vote when the Tories tabled a vote of no confidence in the council leader, Labour’s Mohammed Iqbal, and chose Iqbal over the Tory white man.

If the weight of that decision is put into context by such party positions as the description of members of the Windrush generations as “illegals” who should leave the country, the wider matter remains of what will happen to the BNP’s votes.

“That’s the million dollar question,” said Stephenson. “I think one of the challenges we’ve got in Marsden is that the BNP signed up a lot of people who would traditionally not vote in local elections, and put them on a postal vote .... That means they are all in a few days time going to open their ballot papers and they are going to have a straight choice between Labour and Conservative. These people, who may have been voting BNP for 10, 12 years, are they going to tear that ballot paper up? Are they going to make a choice between the two main political parties? We don’t know.”

Hope Not Hate’s Lowles doesn’t believe they will switch their support to the non-democratic far-right: Britain First, National Action, what’s left of the English Defence League. For him, the danger lies in the consequences of Brexit.

“There is a link between economic pessimism and a hatred of the other. These people, BNP voters, are the most vocal Brexit voters, and they went from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic after the referendum. Our concern is that the areas where these people live, often the industrial towns, will be the ones hurt most. We don’t know yet how they will react but we know Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks [Ukip’s main financier] are planning a new populist movement. If the mainstream political parties, particularly on the left, aren’t ready for that, they will be in trouble.”