Why vote BNP?

The British National Party used to be practically, overtly racist. In the old days, it probably wouldn't have overstretched the mark to say they were the British equivalent of the political wing of the KKK. But the BNP has undergone something of a makeover. Now they say they're not racist and party leader Nick Griffin has actually done a pretty good job of keeping the worst of the BNP goons in line. Nick's personal profile was raised, probably, through a rather nasty prosecution alleging that he was "stirring up racial hatred" by verbally attacking the tenets of Islam. It was a very shoddy charge on a very shoddy law - and even though I expect he does have some very unpleasant views, he shouldn't have been threatened with jail for expressing them.

The BNP has been making grounds in local elections recently. They've done this under Griffin's leadership both by playing smart (being decent local councillors in some respects and understanding the non-race issues that local people are concerned about) and by playing mean (exploiting racial tensions). In today's Telegraph:

A recent study by social science think-thank, the Joseph Rowntree Trust suggests that the BNP is gaining further ground, if at least theoretically:

New research suggests that feelings of political disenfranchisement could drive up to a quarter of voters to support the far-Right British National Party.

Some of the places where the BNP has done well recently are white neighbourhoods which border on Asian (sub-continental) neighbourhoods in the ex-industrial North. For example after the riots in Bradford and Oldham in the summer of 2001, the BNP began consolidating gains.

Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for the Barking & Dagenham (London) area, said this weekend that 8 out of 10 white families might be tempted to vote for the BNP. Presumably that would be in the forthcoming local council elections in the first week of May. She would have picked this up while canvassing the local area for the local candidates, perhaps.

Some politicians are suggesting that the BNP is now a repository for protest votes, but that people don't necessarily want BNP representation. Well, maybe. But when you get to even a quarter of voters in local elections, that's no longer a protest vote. There's a real chance of BNP councillors getting elected.

So what are mainstream parties to do? Well, Labour wants to appeal to voters' sense of fairness, the British like fairness. That might work in the North. But I'm not sure that will work in parts of London. My understanding of some of the issues in Barking & Dagenham are:

• many of the people described as white "working class" aren't working, they are clients of the state and in some families, no one has worked in generations.
• these people are growing disenchanted with decades of Labour policy which has left them with poor education, poor work ethic and very poor prospects, indeed
  
• new people are moving into the area. They happen to be black Africans. They happen to be hard working. Their incomes are rising. They are aspirational and grasping success.

Fairness is not going to appeal to the poor, white voters in Barking & Dagenham. After all, the African immigrants are working hard and doing well, and that seems pretty fair already. The BNP knows how to deal with the politics of disenchantment, of resentment and inadequacy, by telling people what they want to hear - that they're somehow better than their harder working neighbours by virtue of their ethnicity alone.

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