Advance UK’s candidate in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, Nick Buckley, is an unashamed and self -confessed admirer of former BNP leader Nick Griffin, one of the UK’s leading fascists and Holocaust deniers.
Buckley hosts a YouTube podcast called Nick Talks. A week ago, Nick Griffin was his guest, interviewed at length. But this wasn’t some detached current affairs interview.
This was a cosy, accommodating, even reverential platform for a man long associated with racism and fascist politics.
Misunderstood prophet
Throughout the conversation Buckley represents Griffin less as a disgraced extremist than as a misunderstood prophet, repeatedly suggesting that history has vindicated both the man and his party.
He begins by warmly welcoming his “amazing guest”. That sets the tone for the sycophantic bilge that follows and which occupies the next half an hour.
Buckley opens by confessing that he once saw Griffin as “the bogeyman… the new Hitler in a suit”, but says he now realises this was merely “propaganda” pushed by “the press [and] the politicians”.
He goes further, telling Griffin that he now feels “a little bit of a coward” for having been nervous about speaking to him in the past.
Victimhood
Buckley aligns himself with Griffin’s narrative of victimhood. He recalls attending council meetings which he claims were devoted to “how do we stop the BNP”, saying this is “not democracy” but “some sort of authoritarian regime”.
He reassures viewers, “I wasn’t a BNP supporter”, before completely undercutting that claim by admitting that after reading the BNP’s programme he agreed with “nine out of the ten” points and asking, rhetorically, “what is going on here?”
Buckley also actively advances Griffin’s claim of vindication. He asks whether Griffin now wakes up thinking, “I told you all… everything I said has come true”, and Griffin, needless to say, agrees: “the country now are basically where the BNP were 20 years ago”.
Unchallenged
Griffin’s argument, left almost entirely unchallenged, is that the BNP was persecuted not because of its politics but because it threatened a corrupt political and media establishment.
Buckley is a former local government officer who claims councils, particularly Labour-run ones, used illegal tactics to suppress the party, that the BBC and wider media smeared him as “far-right”, and that “elites” deliberately promoted UKIP to neutralise the BNP.
Griffin insists that the BNP was “ahead of the game” on immigration, grooming gangs, climate policy and foreign wars, portraying himself as the lone voice warning of disasters later acknowledged by all.
What is striking is not that Griffin repeats these claims – he has been doing so for years – but that Buckley treats them as common sense. Buckley’s interview offers little but glowing admiration, and a platform that recasts a rabid extremist movement as a brave truth-teller.
Groundwork
Buckley, a former Reform UK candidate for Manchester mayor, closes the interview by praising the BNP as having done “the groundwork to the change that hopefully is coming to this country”, and tells Griffin that figures like Farage “built their success on the back of your success”.
And Buckley is the man that Advance UK is offering to the people of Gorton and Denton as their prospective Member of Parliament.
