Ex-BNP official suspended by Tories
Posted by Mark Cotterill on April 19, 2023 · Leave a Comment
A former senior official in Nick Griffin’s BNP has been exposed in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party. The Tories have suspended Andy McBride from party membership, but he remains a Conservative candidate on the ballot paper for Bracknell Town Council in Berkshire.
During the late 2000s McBride became notorious as an especially factional and obstreperous BNP official. As regional organiser for South East England, he was a bitter enemy of H&D and sought to obstruct or even purge Griffin’s enemies from BNP ranks. His targets included well known supporters of former BNP leader John Tyndall, including the late Richard Edmonds and Warren Glass.
Now it is McBride himself who is being purged from his new party. He is accused not only of past roles in the BNP and Britain First, but of allegedly ‘racist’ posts on social media.
In 2011 McBride and his close ally, Ulster businessman Jim Dowson, resigned from the BNP and formed Britain First, together with former BNP official Paul Golding. Three years later, Dowson and McBride quit Britain First after a dispute with Golding. McBride made his way into the Conservative Party, while Dowson operates a series of Ulster-based fundraising enterprises alongside Nick Griffin.
McBride has written several garbled, ideologically incoherent replies to recent exposés by local newspapers. In his way, McBride is probably a sincere Christian whose politics are fundamentally reactionary and anti-Muslim rather than racial nationalist, but who ventures into colourful language and politically incorrect metaphors on social media.
The sad end to his political career shows that old-fashioned reactionaries have no future in today’s ‘woke’ Conservative Party. But equally, the fact that someone as ideologically vacuous as McBride ever became a BNP regional organiser is a damning indictment of the Griffin era.
