The think is that they just did not agree that the BNP was a racist party, rather that they where just taking a sensible approach to immigration to protect the interests of British citizens.
You may like to point out:
1) The BNP's stated aims and objectives, their core political principles, are explicitly racist.
2) Their constitution, which bars non-whites (and even some whites e.g Poles, Slavs etc) from membership, is explicitly racist
3) Their manifesto at the last general election promised "voluntary" repatriation for non-whites (although how "voluntary" that would be in practice is entirely another matter) and for those non-whites who chose to remain, they would no longer be defined as British and so would be stripped of their citizenship. Griffin is still claiming non-whites cannot be called British.
4) Their leaders both at national and regional level are racists -
Griffin has a criminal conviction for inciting race hatred from his time editing "The Rune" a viciously anti-Jewish Nazi magazine;
Brons (their other MEP) started out in a group called "The National Socialist Movement" before moving onto become leader of the NF at its most virulently racist period;
their "ideological officer", Arthur Kemp, is a South African admirer of the AWB (the neo-Nazi Afrikaner terrorist organisation), reportedly linked to apartheid-era SA intelligence and the assassination of ANC activist Chris Hani
The guy who hosts their website and founded and ran the Hereford branch of the BNP, Lambertus Nieuwhof, is another South African who was convicted in South Africa for an AWB terrorist attack in which he and others tried to blow up a church school full of (black) kids. Only their incompetence prevented a massacre as the 25kg bomb failed to go off. Seems it's not all foreign criminals the BNP have a problem with - just non-white ones
I could go on (and frequently have done)
In short, the BNP was founded by and is still run by vicious, violent racists, many of them with criminal convictions for racist violence, hooliganism, terrorism, drugs offences etc.
So I'd ask your friends, if this motley crew don't sound like racists, who the fuck actually do they think
would qualify as racists? It's like saying Hitler just took a bit of a strong line on that whole Jewish thing