A millionaire Asian businessman who has applied to join the BNP said he was doing it to “fight them from the inside”.

Mo Chaudry, from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, said he wanted to take advantage of the enforced change to the party’s constitution to expose them.

BNP members voted to admit black and Asian people earlier this month after the party was threatened with an injunction by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Pakistan-born Mr Chaudry, who is worth £60 million, runs a string of businesses around Stoke-on-Trent, which has eight BNP members on the city council.

He said: “If they are open to all British people then I want to join.

“If they let me in I will fight them from the inside and make their life very difficult.

“People are not racist in Stoke-on-Trent and I have never experienced racism in my time here.

“The good people that don’t vote need to get off their backside and change things.”

Mr Chaudry, who applied to join the party online, condemned 78-year-old Rajinder Singh who is expected to become the party’s first non-white member.

He said: “It’s nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt. The BNP are using this man to give their party a veneer of respectability. They have no real interest in racial equality.

“This is a party whose very foundations are built on racial inequality. Nick Griffin on Question Time happily admitted sharing a stage with a Ku Klux Klan member.”