Nicholas John Griffin is a British far-right politician who
was chairman of the British National Party (BNP) from 1999 to 2014, and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for North West England from 2009 to 2014.
Griffin at a BNP conference, 2009
Richard Barnbrook (left) and Griffin at a press conference outside the Palace of Westminster in May 2009
Nick Griffin and Mark Collett leave Leeds Crown Court on 10 November 2006 after being found not guilty of charges of incitement to racial hatred at their retrial.
Protests outside BBC Television Centre ahead of Griffin's appearance on Question Time
The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right, British fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton, Cumbria, and is led by Adam Walker. A minor party, it has no elected representatives at any level of UK government. The party was founded in 1982, and reached its greatest level of success in the 2000s, when it had over fifty seats in local government, one seat on the London Assembly, and two Members of the European Parliament.
A National Front march from the 1970s, the movement from which the BNP emerged by 1982
Nick Griffin at a BNP press conference in Manchester in 2009
Anti-fascist protestors demonstrating against Griffin's appearance on Question Time in 2009
On taking over the party, Nick Griffin dropped its official espousal of the biological superiority of a Nordic race, instead emphasising the need for racial separatism to preserve global "ethno-pluralism".