What Just Happened? The fringe appeal of the BNP

I think it’s quite safe to say that the European and local government elections last week did not go well for the government. It comes as little surprise given the popularity of the current administration that they have suffered appalling electoral losses throughout the country, and that Conservatives have been the chief beneficiaries of their richly deserved discomfiture. However, a lot of the interest generated by this month’s poll has come from the performance of quite minor parties, specifically the UK Independence Party and that perennial irritation, the British National Party.

The main reasons for concern over the BNP’s modest success in any election are the party’s policies concerning immigration and non-white ethnic groups, which respectively they want to stop and persuade to leave, and in more recent years their hostility towards Islam, which they ironically see as hateful. Many of us who remember the 1980s also recall that the party was formed as a splinter group of the violently racist National Front; and that its current leader has stated that bricks and bats are reasonable tools for effecting political change.

In the past, members have argued that the Holocaust was not a systematic policy of extermination and that gas chambers were not used to effect it, which may have something to do with the fact that at least one member has expressed admiration for Hitler’s turgid rant, Mein Kampf

These are not the sort of people we want to be representing this country in an international forum, where they lack the power to effect any real change, but can embarrass us with the image of Britain that they project. I half expect any M.E.P. from the far right to start chanting ‘In-ger-land’ during important debates.

Let’s be quite clear on this: two seats for a right-wing party with racist tendencies do not herald the end of the civilised world or a rise in British racism. The British electoral turnout this year was poor even for a European Parliament election, and the supporters of fringe groups tend to be more motivated than mainstream voters. There is a tendency in this country for parties opposed to Britain’s EU membership to poll well in European Parliament elections, and the BNP falls into that category. The fact that UKIP obtained ten per-cent more of the vote than they did indicates that dissatisfaction with the European Union, and the unwaveringly pro-European policies of the three main parties have been a significant motivator in polling, certainly more so than a desire to see racial demographics turned back to those of 1950. However, nearly a million people clearly felt that the BNP was offering what they wanted, and the reasons why this might be so deserve to be considered.

Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats and John Cruddas of Labour have both offered possible motives for voting fascist: anger, frustration, a sense of alienation, a sense of powerlessness, and the failure of the government to address fears concerning key issues. Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, described the BNP as “…the ultimate protest vote.” Economic factors should also be considered: the swing of electoral opinion to extremes during times of economic uncertainty is well known.

There is, however, a more disturbing factor which many commentators have ignored: the right-wingers are no longer projecting the moronic, thuggish image that characterised them during the 1980s, and the BNP’s manifestoes for the latest European Parliament elections and the most recent British general election were calculated to appeal to a wide range of the disaffected. The BNP has jumped onto almost every bandwagon possible, from teaching programmes to preserve British languages, such as Welsh, Cornish and Manx, to animal protection measures, like the opposition of tail-docking in pedigree dogs and a policy to ban Kosher and Halal slaughtering. This latter policy stands as a good example of the attitude behind the manifesto: it tries to make it acceptable to suppress harmless expressions of religious identity by turning them into an issue of animal cruelty. It’s a transparent policy, but for those dull-witted enough to listen it’s a lot better than ‘they can’t bring their ‘eathen ways over ‘ere’.

The policy on crime as reported on the BNP’s website voices the concern of many people that criminals are offered more protection under British law than victims, and they have also re-invented themselves as the protectors of Christianity against media and government bias, and the encroachment of alien religions. I shan’t belabour the obvious irony of calling Christianity ‘indigenous’, but many Christians do feel that they are not accorded the same respect by official bodies as other religious groups, particularly Muslims. I have heard it said that the only way for a religion to be treated with respect in this country is for its adherents to react violently to all criticism, at which point Parliament and the BBC will handle them with kid gloves. I should point out that the Church of England has been quite clear and consistent in its denunciation of the BNP, and that none of the Christians I know are anywhere near voting for them.

The point is that some image grooming has taken place, and it’s coldly calculated to win over a wide range of fringe interest groups, while glossing over racist policies or putting them into a crude philosophical framework – primarily anti-globalist and anti-corporate – that makes it easier for electors to vote for them without feeling like bad people. The fascists have wised up, but I for one very much doubt that they’ve changed. If anything, this all reminds me of a German fringe party that smartened up its act to win power back in the late 1920s.

The results of last week’s election are no cause for panic, but they should be taken as a warning. Not all racists are morons. They have begun to realise that a policy of evicting non-whites will not win them significant support in a British poll. Labour have demonstrated just how far a party can get with a change of image, and as their support falls away not all of it will go to their mainstream rivals.

We should also wake up and understand that the European Parliament has authority over the British government, and although someone who wins less than seven per-cent of the vote stands no chance of winning a seat in the House of Commons, under the rules of proportional representation they can make their voices heard in the wider European forum. Those voices would be more easily silenced if the mainstream parties were not so apparently terrified of admitting the problems and challenges of multiculturalism, not all of which are caused by intransigent Anglo-Saxons. It is a sad fact that in many British cities there are cultural and linguistic ghettoes that are the source of as much intolerance and refusal to join society at large as can be found in a right-wing manifesto. For me to point out that British people will happily spend twenty years living in Spain without learning a word of Spanish only underlines how universally human it is to do this, but it is not healthy for society. It’s even been known for racially motivated crimes to be committed against Anglo-Saxons, and trying to pretend that this doesn’t happen gives ammunition to extremist groups and pours oil on the flames of insecurity.

Multiculturalism is a stupid term. Ever since they fanned out from Africa onward, humans have had more than one culture, and seldom have these coincided with political regions. The people who first started to call themselves ‘English’, for example, originally came from Saxony, Frisia and Scandinavia; the Celtic Britons were central-European in origin, and replaced the real natives of this island – who were themselves descended from immigrants – before recorded history. In the tenth century, at least five languages were spoken in North-West England alone. We drink beer and tea, neither of which originated here; our official religion comes from Palestine, and our alphabet from Italy. Our numeric system, which replaced an Italian model, is Arabic, and our language shares a common ancestor with Sanskrit and other Indian tongues, also containing borrowings from Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic and Greek.

Unfortunately, since the cultural history of Britain is not an educational priority in British schools, many British people continue to believe that the presence of people from other races and cultures is subverting the ethnic purity that we never had. This sort of idiocy is what gives rise to the ‘send ‘em home’ mentality that informs nationalist thinking, and it’s based on simple fear and ignorance: fear of change and the unfamiliar; ignorance of the very history and culture that bigots claim to revere.

The government, it has to be said, do not help this situation. Their policies on immigration and integration have been absurd and schizophrenic from the outset: on the one hand claiming that any attempt to limit the numbers of new migrants arriving each year is racist; on the other introducing mad and intolerant policies, like Jack Straw’s bizarre campaign against women going veiled into MPs’ offices. Extremist agitators are allowed to live here at the taxpayer’s expense, while the government has tried to deny citizenship to decorated Gurkha veterans. There is a balance to be struck between freedom of cultural expression and social cohesion, and in recent years a fear of racism has led us too far to the former.

Much of the uncertainty that fuels nationalist thinking has its roots in the fear that there are those among us who do not regard themselves as British, and therefore do not regard others in this country as fellow citizens. In recent years this has been forcibly brought home by various acts of terrorism by people who were born and educated in Britain, but who regarded themselves as culturally distinct. These are the other side of the BNP’s ugly coin, and need to be fought with equal determination. Both sides of this equation most detest the idea of integration: the insistence that they belong to the same society and must live together within it.

What must be done, and done soon, is for the reasonable concerns of disaffected voters to be addressed by sensible political parties, so that the extremes are just left with unworkable deportation policies and equally unworkable social isolation. Other than that, the best thing we can do is what the majority of people in this country are already doing: accept that our society is not what it was in the past or is in other countries and try to get on with each other. Something must be right here, because each year millions of people ask if they can join in.