The tiny far-right British National Party has won three council seats in Burnley in local elections in England.
The election of Mr David Edwards, a civil engineer, to a two-year post on the council came as a particular shock since the seat he won does not represent the dilapidated housing estates which witnessed weeks of racial unrest last summer.
"It's a tremendous result for us, and all the more surprising because it is not in a run-down, poor estate that we might normally expect. He comes from a prosperous, rural area," BNP spokesman Mr Simon Bennett told reporters.
The party's other successful candidate, Ms Carol Hughes, a divorced carer, came third in her ward. Mr Terence Grogan also took a seat on the council after a fifth recount.
Buoyed by the shock success of French National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen in presidential elections, the British National Party (BNP) had hoped to overcome a disastrous history at the polls at local council and parliamentary level.
The party, whose paid-up members are counted in the hundreds and who lack any support in the mainstream media, have only ever won one council seat before, in the East End of London in 1993.
Minor scuffles between Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and BNP supporters broke out in the voting hall as the results was announced, although police reacted quickly to quell the protest.
"The BNP have tried to show themselves as respectable candidates, but they've already managed to show their true colours - they're just a bunch of thugs," said ANL national coordinator Ms Julie Waterson.
Turnouts were remarkably high compared with other local polls in recent years, at 50 per cent or above, suggesting many voters were concerned to keep extremists out of power.
Burnley, like nearby Oldham in the Manchester area, has a sizeable Asian population, mainly Pakistani and Kashmiris who arrived in the 1970s to work the now-defunct cotton mills of northern England.
High unemployment, poor housing and the presence of a hard core of white extremists were the backdrop to Britain's worst race riots in over a decade last summer.