Say you’re a very silly party, made up of very silly people. Say you believe in stupid things, like British jobs for British workers. Say you wouldn’t be at all unhappy to see the last of Jonny Foreigner, and to not have him come back at all. How would you go about getting some support?

Simple, you dredge up images of a major historical event, and hope that it evokes the right type of nationalism.

And what is the right sort of nationalism, I hear you ask? It’s the best type. The type where people of many different nationalities pull together. And if you can have Jonny Foreigner as the hero, all the better.

The British National Party has pulled off a bit of a blinder by fronting an anti-immigration campaign with a poster featuring a Spitfire belonging to 303 Squadron of the RAF – the “most effective Polish squadron during the Second World War”, as the Telegraph puts it.
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The last major example of the Polish coming over here and taking our jobs was, as the Telegraph notes, during the aforementioned Battle of Britain when their pilots accounted for 203 Luftwaffe aircraft – roughly “12 per cent of total German losses”.

The BNP then go on to defend themselves, in their own wonderful fashion. By comparing the Poles to Vietnamese and comparing sterling to rice.

I’m not an expert on anything, so I can’t comment on the Pole/Vietnamese comparison. But I think that they’re being well hard on the issue of rice. The way the pound is going these day, rice might be a better bet…