enterprise, and a hostile view of democracy and personal freedom. Rejecting the term "fascist" to describe itself, the NF sought to conceal its connections to older fascist movements, denying its leaders' previous fascist activities. It claimed that it could not be fascist because it took part in elections; the political scientist Stan Taylor argues that this claim was obsolete, for many earlier fascist parties—including the BUF, the German Nazi Party and the Italian National Fascist Party—also contested elections. In avoiding the "fascist" label, the NF was typical of fascist groups operating after the Second World War; having to contend with the legacy of the war and the Holocaust, they tried to hide their intellectual pedigrees from voters. As with many political extremists, the image the NF presented to the public was more moderate than the ideology of its inner core of members. As noted by Billig, the NF's "ideological core and its genocidal tendencies, are hidden" so as not to scare off potential recruits sympathetic to its nationalism and anti-immigration stance but not its antisemitic conspiracy theories. While noting that the party's views on race departed considerably "from what is normal or acceptable to the average citizen" in the UK, the political scientist Nigel Fielding observes that many of its other views were grounded in what would be considered "popular common-sense opinion" across the political right. Factions During its history, the NF contained various factions with distinct ideological positions. From the party's early days until the 1980 Tyndall/Webster split, its ideology was dominated by the ex-GBM faction. According to Thurlow, the ex-GBM faction oversaw "an attempt to portray the essentials of Nazi ideology in more rational language and seemingly reasonable arguments", while Wilkinson observed that this faction's leadership was "deeply imbued with Nazi ideas" and retained "intimate connections" with both domestic and foreign neo-Nazi groups. Taylor also regarded the NF of the 1970s as a Nazi organisation because of its fixation on antisemitic conspiracy theories. In his words, the NF's "full ideology" was, "in a large number of respects", identical to the original German Nazism. According to Thurlow, the members of the "Populist" faction that challenged the ex-GBM faction's dominance in the late 1970s were "pseudo-Conservative racial populists", representing the party's "non-fascist and ostensibly more democratic element". After Tyndall and Webster were ousted and replaced by Brons and Anderson, a new faction took control whose members regarded themselves as Strasserite,