John Tyndall (far-right activist)

Tyndall's refusal to moderate the BNP's policies or image caused anger among a growing array of "modernisers" in the party, who ousted him in favour of Nick Griffin in 1999.

He called for the establishment of an authoritarian state which would deport all non-whites from the country, engage in a eugenics project, and re-establish the British Empire through the military conquest of parts of Africa.

[20] At a February 1957 by-election in Lewisham North, Tyndall aided the LEL campaign, during which he met another party member, John Bean, an industrial chemist.

[24] They wanted to be involved in a more radical party, one that would combine "nationalism" with "popular socialism" and which would reach out to the white working class through appeals against immigration from the Caribbean.

[36] Within the BNP, Tyndall established an elite group known as Spearhead, members of which wore military-style uniforms inspired by those of the Nazis and underwent paramilitary and ideological training.

[40] Tyndall and Jordan then regrouped around twenty members of Spearhead and formed the National Socialist Movement (NSM) on 20 April 1962, a date symbolically chosen as Hitler's birthday.

[48] Although the British authorities had prohibited the American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell from entering the UK, the NSM managed to smuggle him in via Ireland to attend a summer camp in August 1962.

[56] According to the political scientist Stan Taylor, the GBM reflected Tyndall's desire for "a specifically British variant of National Socialism".

[59] Tyndall tried to convince the WUNS to accept his GBM as its British representative, but Rockwell—concerned not to encourage schismatic dissenters in his own American Nazi Party—sided with Jordan and the NSM.

[64] Much of the material that Tyndall wrote for the journal was less openly neo-Nazi and extreme than his previous writings, something which may have resulted from caution surrounding the Race Relations Act 1965.

[61] The GBM engaged in several stunts to raise publicity; in 1964 for instance Webster assaulted the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta outside his London hotel while Tyndall hurled insults at him through a loudspeaker.

[71][72] It also dropped the insistence on armed takeovers present in his earlier thought, acknowledging the possibility that extreme-right nationalists could gain power through the British electoral process.

Encouraged by Webster and new confidante Richard Verrall, in the mid-1970s Tyndall returned to his openly hardline approach of promoting biological racist and antisemitic ideas.

Whereas the NF had a directorate which helped to guide the direction of the party and could replace the leader, Tyndall's new BNP gave full executive powers to the chairman.

[129] In December 1993, Tyndall issued a bulletin to BNP branches declaring C18 to be a proscribed organisation, furthermore suggesting that it may have been established by agents of the state to discredit the party.

[130] To counter C18's influence, he secured the American white nationalist militant William Pierce as a guest speaker at the BNP's annual rally in November 1995.

[134] Conversely, in the early 1990s a 'moderniser' faction emerged in the party that favoured a more electorally palatable strategy and an emphasis on building grassroots support to win local elections.

[135] They were impressed by Le Pen's move to disassociate his party from biological racism and focus on the perceived cultural incompatibility of different racial groups.

[151] But Griffin sought to restrain Tyndall's ongoing influence in the party, curtailing the distribution of Spearhead among BNP members and instead emphasising his own magazine, Identity, which was established in January 2000.

[153] He was also critical of Griffin's abandonment of the party's idea of compulsory removal of migrants and non-whites from the country, believing that if they stayed in a segregated system then Britain would resemble apartheid-era South Africa, which he did not think was preferable.

[156] During a proposed leadership challenge, Tyndall put forward his name, although withdrew it following the 2001 general election when Griffin led the BNP to a clear growth in electoral support.

[155] In turn, Griffin criticised Tyndall in the pages of Identity, claiming that the latter was committed to "the sub-Mosleyite wackiness of Arnold Leese's Imperial Fascist League and the Big Government mania of the 1930s".

[177] In 1981, Nigel Fielding stated that while Tyndall's views had "moderated remarkably", in the NF he had still "preserve[d] and defend[ed]" "those traits which were the hallmark" of earlier neo-Nazi groups.

[189] Tyndall strongly objected to interracial relationships and miscegenation and remarked in his book The Eleventh Hour: "I feel deeply sorry for the child of a mixed marriage, but I can have no sympathy whatever for the parents ...

"[190][191] In contrast to his views on non-white migration, he spoke positively of white immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states, regarding them as being racially similar and sharing the "same basic culture" as the British and were thus easily able to assimilate "within a generation or two".

[194] From earlier fascists like Chesterton, he had inherited a belief that there was a global conspiracy of Jews bent on world domination, opining that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (known since the 1920s to be a forgery) was genuine evidence for this.

[209] His approach rejected economic liberalism because it did not serve "the national interest", although still saw advantages in a capitalist system, looking favourably on individual enterprise.

[215] Arguing that Britain should establish a White Commonwealth bloc, Tyndall called for a better relationship with South Africa and Rhodesia (both of which practiced apartheid),[216] and urged those nations to permanently retain their systems of racial segregation.

[227] According to Trilling, Tyndall's "speeches were pompous but studied ... [he] copied the hand gestures, the rising delivery that ended in a crescendo of angry epithets [from Hitler] ...

[182] Despite his standing within the British far-right, The Telegraph noted that Tyndall's devotion to neo-Nazism "prevented his cause from acquiring the slightest veneer of political respectability.

In his youth, Tyndall read and was influenced by Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf .
Tyndall was one of the British neo-Nazis who established links with their American counterpart George Lincoln Rockwell (pictured).
Photograph of people carrying Union Flags, demonstrating outside a factory.
A National Front (NF) march during the 1970s, the precursor movement from which the British National Party (BNP) emerged by 1982
In 1999, Tyndall was replaced as BNP chairman by Nick Griffin (pictured at a BNP press conference in 2009).
Tyndall believed that there was a 'British race' that was part of a wider 'Nordic race' (distribution depicted in red in this 1916 map by Madison Grant ).