BNP's website 'the most popular in politics'

12 April 2012

Nick Griffin of the BNP. The far-Right party has the UK's most visited political website

The British National Party has the UK's most visited political website, a study shows.

The far-Right group received 51 per cent of all hits to party sites last year - seven times more than the online pages run by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

It was also twice as popular as the Conservatives' main website.

The report, for the Centre for Policy Studies, claims the site has flourished because it allows visitors to leave messages and interact with one another.

Robert Colvile, who wrote the study, Politics, Policy and the Internet, says mainstream parties' websites suffer from a "failure of imagination".

"Although each of the major political parties has a solid online presence, none has really taken the internet by storm," he writes.

"Their websites remain a source of information rather than an online home for party members, activists and members of the public.

"This gap has been eagerly exploited."

But Robin Goad, of Hitwise, the online monitoring service which provided the figures, claims most visitors to the BNP site were "curious" rather than party supporters.

"Visits to a website are not the same as votes in an election," he added.

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