UK far-right figure now seeks ‘refuge’

The former head of the farright British National Party has said he is moving to Hungary to live under antiimmigration Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a “refugee” from western Europe. “There is already a sort of nationalist emigre community building up here. There’s French, there’s Italians, there’s Swedes and Brits as well,” Nick Griffin told a Hungarian website this weekend.

“So it’s only a trickle at present but I have no doubt at all that when the trouble really begins with Al-Qaeda and Isis in western Europe, that trickle is going to become a flood,” the 58-year-old told 444.hu. “And I hope that Hungary, the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, will welcome people who are genuine refugees from western Europe but keep out the liberals who have brought western Europe to this state in the first place.”

Orban sees immigration as a “poison” endangering Europe’s Christian culture and values. In February he offered refuge to anyone in western Europe looking to “find the Europe they have lost in their homelands”.

His government aims to confine all asylum-seekers currently in Hungary, and any new arrivals, to container camps at its southern border. They are free to leave only if they return to Serbia.

Griffin, BNP head from 1999 to 2014, was in Budapest for a “Stop Operation Soros!” conference aimed at halting the pro-refugee activities of Hungarian-born US financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. “I am very, very pleased that Hungary is taking a leading role in confronting the Soros problem,” Griffin said. Orban’s government “doesn’t want to commit national suicide. That’s very refreshing,” he said. Cambridge-educated Griffin said he hoped to move to Hungary, a member of the European Union which Britain is due to leave in 2019, in the next six months.