VOTING FOR THE BNP IS ABOUT RAGE RATHER THAN RACE
by Rachel Sylvester
The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
April 18, 2006 Tuesday
Racism is no longer a black-and-white issue. A taxi driver told me
the other day that he was worried about the influx of “people with
a European complexion” coming into this country. With immigrants
arriving in Britain from Kosovo and Poland, as well as Somalia and
Bangladesh, newcomers these days are as likely to have a pink skin as
a brown one. And yet fear of change (whatever the colour of its face)
remains a powerful force.
A report from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, publicised yesterday,
claims that a quarter of voters in London are considering supporting
the British National Party in next month’s local elections. Margaret
Hodge, the employment minister, warned at the weekend that white,
working-class families in her Barking constituency were deserting
Labour for the far Right. Searchlight, the anti-fascist campaign group,
said recently that the BNP needs a swing of only five per cent to
win as many as 70 council seats on May 4.
There is, of course, a danger in talking up the threat from the BNP.
Nick Griffin, who likes to claim that he leads Britain’s fourth-largest
political party, must be basking in his 15 minutes of front-page
fame. I find it hard to believe that a sixth of people in this
tolerant, decent and middle-of-the-road country really will – as
the Rowntree report also claims – put an X in the far-Right box when
they fill in their ballot papers in two weeks’ time. A few may feel
emboldened to do so by the recent coverage.
The BNP deserves scorn rather than scare-mongering. Not only is it
utterly pernicious (a leaflet distributed by the party after the July
7 bombings said, “If only they had listened to the BNP”), it is also
useless if faced with the reality of power. When a handful of BNP
councillors were elected in Burnley in 2003, they failed to turn up
to the first budget debate, one of the most crucial moments in the
local government year. In Barking, a BNP councillor stood down after
eight months, telling his local paper: “Those meetings go right over
my head and there’s little point in me being there.” Another elected
representative left the party, claiming she had not realised it
propagated extremist views – in fact, she said, she had cited Nelson
Mandela as her political hero at her selection interview. Meanwhile,
Punch and Judy politics appear to be too timid for the BNP. One of its
councillors was forced to resign after smashing a bottle in the face
of a colleague and another has been convicted, since his election,
of attacking his wife and a police officer.
And yet the BNP cannot be completely laughed off. There is a new
professionalism to its campaigns that is beginning to worry the
mainstream parties. It has recently for the first time started to
send out carefully targeted direct mailshots.
Mr Griffin, the Cambridge-educated son of a farmer, has toned down
the extremist rhetoric and prefers to surround himself with pretty,
long-haired women, rather than tattooed, skinheaded men. Campaign
leaflets in white working-class areas describe the BNP as “the Labour
Party your grandfathers voted for”. Other literature says the party
is “people just like you making a difference”. To the irritation
of some members, the BNP has recently selected an ethnic minority
candidate – Sharif Abdel Bawad, who is described by the party as a
“totally assimilated Greek-Armenian”.
The BNP’s website now sells Make Poverty History-style wristbands
(printed with the slogan “English and proud”) and T-shirts emblazoned
with the words “cool to be white”. The party even has a fund-raising
campaign that urges supporters to donate the price of a pot of Earl
Grey tea – which is, its advertisement says, when combined with a
Garibaldi biscuit, the “perfectly British way to warm up a winter’s
afternoon”. The aim is to make the BNP unthreatening in a Coronation
Street sort of way.
There may be some exaggeration of the BNP’s appeal, but it is likely
that the far-Right party will win at least some extra seats in next
month’s council elections. And there is a danger that any victory,
however small, will be used to try to force the mainstream parties
away from the centre ground. Right-wingers will urge David Cameron
to blow the immigration dog whistle, used to such disastrous effect
by his predecessor Michael Howard; Left-wingers will tell Tony Blair
to do more to appeal to Labour’s white working-class core voters, who
feel neglected by their public school-educated leader’s love of Middle
England. It would be a mistake for either of them to follow the advice.
The truth is that support for the BNP is not really a protest vote
against a racially mixed society: it is a cry of rage about the
quality of life in some of the poorest areas in the country. There
is not much cheerleading for the far Right in the streets of Chelsea.
The BNP is exploiting a growing sense of frustration with genuine
problems: the lack of affordable housing, the increase in low-level
crime, the failure of inner-city schools, the loss of a sense of
identity among white working-class men following the collapse of
traditional industries. These failures are not really anything to
do with race – although, of course, the more people come to live in
an area, the more stretched local resources will be – but the BNP
has diverted a general sense of grievance into a specific feeling
of unfairness based on a perception that there is “us and them”. It
is true, for example, that asylum seekers in a way “jump the queue”
for council houses because they are destitute when they arrive in an
area, whereas those on a waiting list for a bigger home are not. The
solution is not to try to recreate a homogeneous white population but
to find more affordable housing, and speed up the way in which homes
are allocated to local people. The Government, and the Opposition
parties, should not try to ramp up the rhetoric on race, they need
to deal with the often appalling way in which too many people have
to live their lives.
In some white working-class areas, Labour has, as one Downing Street
adviser admitted to me yesterday, effectively run a “one-party state”
for too long. With no effective challenge from the Conservatives or the
Liberal Democrats, it has become complacent and its councillors have
resisted public service reform. The rise of the BNP should shock the
mainstream political parties out of their torpor. But it must not be
allowed to change the direction or the tone of British politics. That
really would be a victory for the extremists.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
