The most hated man in Britain today is Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, regarded as a fascist party. It is certainly a racist political party, since it affirms the prior rights of the white British over immigrants and people of colour.

Everywhere he goes, Griffin is met by angry demonstrations and jeering crowds. Huge numbers assembled outside BBC Television Centre last week to object to his appearance on David Dimbleby's 'Question Time'. But Griffin does not need to be told he is the most loathed man in Britain. He said so himself.

Even the Queen, constitutionally pledged to a non-political position, has apparently condemned Mr Griffin, as has the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey.

The BBC insisted that since Nick Griffin has electoral support -- the BNP has two seats in the European Parliament, and a million votes -- it would be a breach of their remit not to allow him freedom of speech. But it was an odd programme, all the same, and the usual format was altered to focus almost entirely on the odium of Griffin and what he represents.

Griffin especially enraged the nation by insisting that were Winston Churchill alive, the BNP might be the only party he would be able to join. That idea has been denounced loudly by all right-thinking folk, including the historian Andrew Roberts. "Winston Churchill was never a racist," Roberts said.

But closer -- and cooler -- examination of the facts would reveal that Winston Churchill's ideas were not always at variance with those of the BNP.

Indeed, the odd thing about the rage against Griffin and the BNP is that, only a generation ago, most Englishmen would have agreed, broadly, with many of Griffin's ideas.

Churchill was never a fascist, but in the 1920s he did express admiration for Mussolini, who he thought was doing a grand job of pulling Italy together, and eradicating TB. Churchill was joined in his praise of Mussolini by George Bernard Shaw, Sir John Reith -- the founder of the BBC -- and the Irish academic, Prof Walter Starkie.

Churchill was certainly an imperialist, and proudly so. He thought the British Empire was the greatest force for enlightenment and even called Gandhi a "half-naked fakir". Churchill also fought fiercely against Germany for one primary reason -- because it threatened the British realm, which is what he cared most passionately about.

Neither was Churchill anti-Semitic, but, like many of his contemporaries, he was perfectly capable of making casual remarks about Jews that we would now consider offensive. When asked to make a contribution to a restaurant bill in the south of France, he quipped: "I don't carry money. I have a Jew to do that for me." (He had a Jewish agent who arranged his literary fees.) After the Bolshevik revolution, which he detested, Churchill suggested that Bolshevism was a "Jewish revolution" -- because young radicals like Trotsky were Jewish.

The BNP would be far too coarse for the likes of Winston Churchill. Their rough, proletarian ways, their ugly shaved skinheads, their crude use of the British flag, not to mention their custom of having aggressive Rottweiler dogs would not have been at all in Churchill's patrician style.

Nevertheless, on rational examination, what Nick Griffin and the BNP stand for is not hugely different from the England that Churchill, and his countrymen, once accepted.

Only a generation ago, it would have been common for the British to think of themselves as, primarily, a white and Protestant Christian nation. The historian Lindy Colley claimed that the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) axis was what made Britain, and subsequently, by derivation, America.

IT would have been common to regard Continental law as automatically inferior to British law (and there is still a residual feeling about this).

It would have been common to declare -- as Griffin declared on 'Question Time' -- that most ordinary people were repelled by the sight of two homosexual men kissing in public. It would have been common to say that immigration was a threat to the British way of life -- Churchill himself tried to bring in sterner immigration controls in 1955 -- and that Islam had no place in the life of the British nation.

None of these things can be said openly any more. As a set of values, they are seen as totally unacceptable. And some of them are, indeed, unacceptable -- or at least unkind, uncharitable and prejudiced.

But you can't help suspecting that some of the louder protestations against Nick Griffin and his BNP are fuelled by a massive dosage of cant, and an anxious collective desire to repudiate what was once held dear by many British traditions.

- Mary Kenny

Irish Independent