For years, the British National Party has been derided as a bunch of fascist thugs. But they are winning votes from people who feel they are being ignored, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
ON A CHILLY Thursday morning in Barking in east London, the Spotted Dog has yet to open for its regular daytime trade, while pedestrians mill around the stalls on Station Parade that sell cheap clothes.
Usually ignored, Barking hit the headlines in 2006 when the British National Party (BNP) won 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham council, becoming the second-largest party in a local authority for the first time.
In all, the BNP won 52 seats on British local councils, though the numbers have fallen back since then due to bitter internal rivalries and some losses suffered in local elections the following year.
The outcome, coupled with a bitter recession and street demonstrations by far-right protesters this summer, raised fears that racism is coming once more to the fore. Police figures show an increase in racist attacks.
In June, the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, won a seat in the European Parliament for the North-West region, with 8 per cent of the vote, while his colleague, Andrew Brons, won in Yorkshire/Humberside.
RACISM IS nothing new in the UK. Once it was the Huguenots; then the Jews; then the Irish; then towards immigrants from the West Indies from the 1960s onwards; then Asians, and, more latterly, Eastern Europeans.
Seeking to exploit immigration and the public fury about MPs’ expenses, the BNP now aims to win seats in the House of Commons next year, even if the first-past-the-post voting system leaves it with an uphill task.
Speaking before his appearance on BBC's Question Timeon Thursday, Griffin said it would put the party into "the big time", though his performance was sometimes patchy and, often, weak.
Nevertheless, he cannot be ignored. The Labour MP for Barking, Margaret Hodge, has upset many in her party by arguing that, under Tony Blair, Labour left room for the BNP by abandoning working-class communities.
“Most importantly, people are voting for the far-right as a protest vote. They feel completely disconnected from and alienated by the Labour party and the mainstream political class,” she said.
Under Blair, she said, Labour headed for the political centre: “First, we’ve shied away from being bold and honest about our values. Under Tony Blair it almost became a badge of honour. Ideology no longer matters, people would say – it’s what works that counts.
"We were scared of losing the support of the centre ground that we need to win elections. But managerial competence is not a substitute for ideological conviction," she said this week, in an article for the left-wing magazine, Progress.
Essentially, the situation is exacerbated by immigration, but it is essentially about poverty, not race. In decades past, working-class communities had skilled jobs and social ties sustained by vigorous trade unions and allegiance to Labour. But the old jobs and the old ties have died. “They are living in places from where the jobs have simply left. They were the skilled, white working-class, but the jobs have moved on,” says Francis Davis of Blackfriars College, Oxford.
The departure of the jobs has led to a loss of self-respect, and of respect from others. Once proud, such communities have been “subjected to a sustained programme of social contempt” – from TV programmes and middle-class attitudes about “chavs”, says Margaret Thatcher’s former policy head, Ferdinand Mount.
This week, the secretary of state for communities and local government, John Denham, offered funding to targeted communities to help resentful locals vent their anger to local officials, rather than boost the BNP at the ballot box. Denham knows the difficulties at first hand. The district of Woolston in his Southampton constituency is a classic example of the ground in which the BNP is seeking to thrive. For years, most men in Woolston built Royal Navy ships for GEC. But GEC took the plant to Portsmouth – with money from the ministry of defence, which wanted to cut costs – leaving most of the workers behind.
Today, Woolston’s former skilled workers are unemployed, struggling to get work in the face of competition from Polish migrants on building sites and with students for part-time jobs in shops and security. The BNP, says Davis, “has come along with a certain narrative for people who are struggling and feeling vulnerable because of economic change and neighbourhood change.
“That narrative can be very compelling. Not least because they never actually say what they really mean. They talk in codes. One of the most outrageous things they say is that they are the Christian party: ie, that Christian means white. “When you are feeling vulnerable, that is as compelling a narrative as a radical iman can be for a young Banglasdeshi. It’s the same human emotion. It offers certainty in an age of uncertainty,” Davis says.
THE RACIAL TENSIONS, fuelled by jobs and housing shortages, are not just between black and white. Often, the worst are between white English and Eastern Europeans: the fact that the latter pay more tax than they claim in benefits cuts little ice with locals.
Some of the problems, says Mgr John Armitage, the Catholic vicar general in east London, one who has done much to build relations between faiths, have been caused by multi-culturalism: “In the past, people wanted to integrate. They wanted to keep their cultural identity, sure. The Irish did, but they also wanted to integrate. We have always had a history of immigration here, particularly into the East End. The problem now is the volume.”
More sophisticated than its National Front predecessor, the BNP today tends not to talk about race – though Griffin was forced into doing so on occasion during Question Time. Instead, it talks about identity. Its use of images of the Spitfire fighter aircraft, of Winston Churchill and of Britain's role in the second World War is designed to feed off the fears of some poor, white communities that their place in the world is being erased.
Though her policies did much to destroy it, Thatcher, in power, helped to maintain the identity of the working-class with an “intensely-expressed national sentiment”, says Prof Dick Hobbs of the London School of Economics (LSE).
“People are being encouraged to look backwards. That is a real problem. People did get jobs then, but our expectations were relatively low. Expectations have risen enormously since, and expectations are not being fulfilled.
“It is mixed with harking back to a golden age where you could leave your doors open, where everyone had jobs, where you were safe on the streets. These myths are based on folklore. It never happened. You could never leave your door open. If you did, it was because you had nothing to steal,” says Prof Hobbs, who teaches sociology at the LSE.
And the feeling that the world is changing too fast is shared by many who may be tempted by the BNP’s rhetoric is not going to go away, particularly with official estimates that 180,000 immigrants will arrive annually over the next 25 years.
Neither will the industrial changes that have made old skills superfluous be reversed, while poor education will hamper the communities targeted by the BNP from improving their lot, even if the economy improves.
“The mines are gone; the car factories, or most of them, are gone and they are not coming back,” says Prof Hobbs.
Nick Griffin may not have done well on Question Time, but his messages – some overt, some not so – have a ready and willing audience. The question now is whether that audience will put him and others into the Commons.
BBC 'QUESTION TIME': THE AFTERMATH
The programme was watched by eight million people – nearly three times the usual audience, according to BBC figures yesterday.
The former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, warned that Nick Griffin's appearance will spark racist attacks, and says the BBC will bear "moral responsibility".
The British National Party accused the BBC of changing the format, and of being unfair to Griffin. The BBC, said Griffin, is "part of a thoroughly unpleasant, ultra-leftist establishment which, as we have seen here tonight, doesn't even want the English to be recognised as an existing people".
Journalists are divided on whether he should have been allowed on the programme. The National Union of Journalists opposed it, saying the programme's format did not allow for a proper inquiry into Mr Griffin's views. However, the international press freedom organisation, Reporters Without Borders, said it "fully supported" the BBC, adding that the broadcaster had an "obligation" to interview all elected politicians "regardless of personal viewpoint".