Official National Front - Decline

Decline

The desire to build a Political Soldier leadership meant that the ONF was by its nature exclusive and limited. Membership in its strictest sense was effectively closed off with outsiders only allowed to become "Friends of the Movement" and full membership being only open to those chosen by the leadership. The ideas held less appeal for the racist skinheads that the ONF still had links with. The ONF saw the skinheads as a source of eager foot-soldiers for their revolutionary struggles, a factor that led the ONF to host Rock Against Communism concerts in the mid-1980s. However, disillusionment set in with the ONF's esoteric ideas and in 1987 sometime NF member and Skrewdriver singer Ian Stuart Donaldson joined with British Movement organiser Nicky Crane to set up Blood and Honour, initially as a magazine before developing it into a movement for White power bands independent of the parties. The departure of these groups also meant a loss of one of the ONF's main sources of revenue and the split proved fairly divisive with B&H supporters dubbing the ONF the "Nutty Fairy Party" due to their unusual ideas and rumours of homosexuality within the leadership. The split came at a bad time as membership had already been curtailed by the decision in 1986 to double the price of membership fees and to restrict membership to those considered worthy of Political Soldier status by the leadership. The group's devotion to the likes of Evola and Codreanu also damaged its chances as these thinkers were virtually unknown in Britain and as such the ONF's ideas were considered too foreign to be relevant to a British context.

In an attempt to gain much needed funds, Griffin and Holland travelled to Libya in 1988 in the hope of persuading Muammar Gaddafi to provide money to bankroll the ONF. However, the pair were able to secure only a consignment of copies of the colonel's political testament The Green Book, meaning that the group's financial woes were not alleviated. Breaking from its own ban on electoral activity, Harrington ran as a candidate in the Vauxhall by-election, 1989, during which his rival candidates included the Flag Group's Ted Budden, who confusingly was standing as a "National Front" candidate. Both men received derisory vote shares.

In 1989 Harrington, who was by then effective leader of the group, approached The Jewish Chronicle with a view to opening dialogue with the Jewish community. The move proved unpopular with Griffin and Holland who broke off in 1989 to form the International Third Position (ITP), which advocated anti-capitalist Strasserite views, as well as continuing anti-Zionism. With the ONF in disarray, Harrington (by then effective leader, although the ONF had eschewed an individual leader at their peak) wound up the group in January 1990 and reconstituted it, along with about fifty NF members, as the Third Way, which continued to offer a programme akin to that of the Political Soldier movement. The Flag Group, led by Martin Wingfield and Ian Anderson, reclaimed the NF name and identity and sought to reposition the NF once again by following the example of the base itself on the Front National, which was experiencing growth in France through right-wing populism.