Candid opportunism from the BNP

The Wikipedia article on the British National Party attributes the following tidbit to party leader Nick Griffin, in a speech from March of this year. (I haven't verified the quotation against the video record of the speech, which is available through a link at Wikipedia, but the article appears to be a more or less even-handed one.)

We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with. If we were to attack some other ethnic group—some people say we should attack the Jews ... But ... we've got to get to power. And if that was an issue we chose to bang on about when the press don't talk about it ... the public would just think we were barking mad. They'd just think oh, you're attacking Jews just because you want to attack Jews. You're attacking this group of powerful Zionists just because you want to take poor Manny Cohen the tailor and shove him in a gas chamber. That's what the public would think. It wouldn't get us anywhere other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box; the public would think "extremist crank lunatics, nothing to do with me." And we wouldn't get power.

Isn't Griffin openly admitting here that the BNP's policies towards both Muslims and Jews are dictated simply by political expediency, and that he would be quite prepared to switch to a pro-Islamic and/or anti-Semitic line if this appeared more likely to win votes? (Much as fellow far-rightist Jean Marie Le Pen appears to have done, across the Channel.) What is the source of this imperative of achieving political power, running deeper than mere expedients such as the reviling of particular ethnic groups?

Such opportunism is probably par for the course in politics. But it seems a great deal more dangerous where the party in question is one which openly embraces radical policies—when it is outside the Establishment, which, if it no longer seriously holds any principles, remains predictable by reason of inertia.

See also:
      EU Referendum: BNP is the new mainstream
      Comments on the BNP constitution