But if you ask me, the BNP have as much right to use the image of Churchill as anyone else. He didn't share their views on many issues (by the end of his life he'd become rather internationalist and pro-European, for instance) but he was an unrepentant racist who believed in the inherent superiority of white people.

Mind you, rather magnanimously, he did accept that "some negroids" were capable of "finding civilization in their little black hearts". Sounds like the kind of thing Nick Griffin might say, eh?

And despite our skin colour, what he had to say about the Irish was just as bigoted and patronising.

Of course, Churchill was very much a product of his environment and wasn't expressing outrageous views for the time, but truly Great individuals rise above the prejudices of their culture. Churchill didn't. He'd have felt quite at home -- on the issue of race if nothing else -- with the modern BNP.

Which is not to say that it's a bad thing that the military and the monarchy, or indeed anyone at all, rejects the attempts of the BNP to co-opt British culture and history. But if we are honest about it, the BNP represent a very clear historical trend within British politics and society. That there is the danger in them. If they were nothing more than a bunch of thuggish outsiders, after all, they'd find little sympathy for their views within the British working class.