Nobody should be surprised. Nobody. We all know that if you keep picking at a scab it will eventually turn septic. You can only torment even the most good-natured of dogs before it turns on you and takes a chunk out of your leg.
Despite the ridicule and loathing that has been directed at them (much of it justified I hasten to add), the British National Party has scored another election success in the North of England, this time taking a local authority ward in Blackburn, the parliamentary constituency of the current Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw who has responded by issuing a desperate-sounding public plea for ‘more tolerance’ in our society.
He’s worried. He is right to be worried. And I’m worried too because, despite strenous efforts to market themselves as decent and patriotic, the BNP remains a viscerally nationalist organisation who pose as big a threat to liberty as their counterparts on the left.
However, panic is not yet due; this was merely a council by-election and the BNP are not about to take their seat at the top table of power. But, taken together with their other recent successes at local level, it has to be admitted that they are enjoying a growing popularity as well as building a plausible grassroots movement.
This may not make comfortable reading but it is my view that all the ingredients are in place for their continued success. It is noteworthy that all the current BNP success is coming in the industrial North and Midlands in blue-collar working class areas that used to be Labour Party bedrocks. But ‘New’ Labour abandoned its struggle for the urban proletariat and has now become the Party of the middle-class kleptocracy and the professional race-baiters; constituencies that regard the white working classes with, at best, contempt.
The Conservatives might have plugged that gap in the way that Thatcher once did. But since her departure they have rendered themselves irrelevant by their consistently spineless surrender to those same vested interests that owe their allegiance to Tony Blair.
Say what you will about the BNP but they do have a vision, an unshakeable confidence in the rightness of their cause and they are the only political party in this country who are bold enough to publicly challenge the prescriptive, anti-British ‘multi-culti’ absurdities of our political rulers. That it should have come to this is disgraceful but it has to come to this.
I have no intention of engaging in the familiar denunciations of nationalist politics, partly because I can add nothing to what has been said many times before but mostly because that tactic is simply not going to work anymore. Neither am I prepared to dismiss those who have voted for the BNP as drooling Nazi cretins because it almost certainly is not true. My guess is that a lot of their support is coming from ‘salt-of-the-earth’ working and lower-middle class people who have been left without a political voice and are too often are abandoned to the untender mercies of a state bureaucracy that has been instructed to treat them as loathesome, reactionary barbarians. If you’ve been unfairly branded as a racist, then you might as well just become a racist because you’ve got nothing left to lose by doing so.
No, these are not evil Nazis. They are angry, disgruntled people with nowhere else to go and with nobody except the BNP who is prepared to listen to their complaints and stand up for them.
At the risk of being alarmist, I see no ready way of reversing this process. By every measurable standard, participation and interest in traditional, mainstream politics is in inexorable downward spiral, leaving the kind of vacuum that marginal organisations with sufficient verve and gumption can claim and call their own.
The BNP seem to think that time is on their side. I sincerely hope they are wrong, but I cannot think of a single convincing reason why.
It will take parliamentary seats before I am convinced that the BNP are a force to be reckoned with.
David’s arguments are spot on and describe the current vacuum in English politics.
However, any votes in local councils tend to be protests at the direction of public spending rather than the undermining of English liberties.
Despite their far-right origins, the BNP are similar to the SNP, UUP, DUP, Sinn Fein, SDLP, SNP and Plaid Cymru in lobbying for funds from the Treasury to feed their constituencies.
It’s a vote to suck at the teat of the state, coloured by their culture.
In my understanding of what England stands for, the BNP count for nothing.
Philip,
You’re understanding and mine are likely at idem but that does not mean that our understanding is universal or even true any more.
Wow, very interesting post.
Like it.
Sems to me current political debate wilfully confuses understanding with acceptance. I understand the views of the anti-hunting lobby, but I do not accept them. I understand (most) of the world’s diverse cultures, but that doesn’t mean I would wish to accept living amongst the people who practice them. Is it too simplistic to note that if we have to provide for separate sections of a stadium for white Christian Arsenal supporters and white Christian Chelsea supporters, what is the realistic (as opposed to optimistic) prospect for enforced state sponsored multiculturalism (i.e. innner city council estates)?
Is it too absurd to see a link between the absurd poster campaign in London, the arrests of BNP supporters, and votes like this? I still think argument will combat racism better than censorship and imprisonment and that freedom of speech harms the democratic just as much as the BNP, as they get their arguments unanswered by mainstream politicians when they are almost banned from making them.
One thing I am surprised about is the scepticism of multi-culturalism from libertarians here. Wouldn’t lifting all immigration controls destroy any notion of a national culture, anyway?
I’d also agree with the distinction made in the post between the BNP themselves – who are certainly a dangerous threat to democracy – and their supporters, whom I do not believe are Nazis or even very political at all.
The policies of the BNP are both racist and frightening to people who truly love there freedom. If people vote for a party that says they support the policies. I call it guilt by association; this is a party that wants to deport non whites… I mean get real, the people who vote for them are one of two things, uninformed or racist more than likely both as the two seem to go hand in hand. The BNP are about white power, they are the KKK without white sheets on.
Events such as these happen when proletarians fully discover that their interests are not represented by the party in power. I would neither vote Labour nor Conservation (and not BNP that is for sure). However, where are the majority of voters’ interests represented by mainstream parties?
I think it was Kennedy (John, not Teddy) that said that those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent change inevitable.
When large portions of the population have legitimate concerns with the direction of government and its effect on the society in which they live, yet are told by that government and its minions that to express these concerns – even politely and in good faith – is illegitimate, a viscious cycle is set up. People will eventually ally themselves with those who say they will address their concerns, even though they are attached to a vile ideology. The perfect ideal of society again becomes the enemy of a good, even very good, society.
Peter Cuthbertson: One thing I am surprised about is the scepticism of multi-culturalism from libertarians here. Wouldn’t lifting all immigration controls destroy any notion of a national culture, anyway?
You utterly misunderstand what ‘multiculturalism’ is and fall into the same statist trap as the socialists by thinking only the state can define a culture. Multiculturalism is not the presence in a country of people from many different cultures… if it was then I suppose the United State in 1920 was the very pinnacle of ‘Multiculturalism’, which is of course daft. No, Multiculturalism entirely a product of the state and its force backed laws: it is the requirement to treat the cultures of others as equally valid, no matter how ridiculous. Immigration without the distortion of law forcing multiculturalism on the host society, and without the distortion of theft based ‘welfare’ (a charter for parasites), immigration leads to absorption of new arrivals and enrichment of the host culture, not its destruction. Mass immigration did not destroy the USA, it created it.
Mass immigation to the US worked because it got shut down for over 40 years starting around 1924 giving the previous waves time to assimilate. Plus, people were expected to assimilate. Plus, the immigrants to America of previous eras wanted to assimiliate.
But what to do about people who want to immigrate to a society but who hold beliefs that lead them to not want to assimilate? There are people who hold beliefs that conflict with the values of the society to which they have immigrated. There are people who have moved to free societies for financial reasons who reject the core values that make a free society possible. What about them?
Can everyone at least admit that some cultures are, generally speaking, worse than others? If people are really and truly coming from worse cultures (worse for the kind of politics that they produce especially) then doesn’t it make sense that there is a limit to the rate at which a receiving society can assimilate these people? If the immigrants really are not coming in with the sorts of beliefs that make a liberal (and by liberal I’m thinking the classical 19th century sense of the term) democracy and free society able to exist?
The libertarians who think that total free immigration can work are ignoring the political problem. A society can only be as free as its overwhelming majority are willing to allow it to be. So, to take one topical example, if there is a substantial minority or even majority that are willing to commit acts of violence in response to a beauty pageant then the society in question is not going to have beauty pageants.
I think it is very understandable that people who feel their culture is threatened by immigrants should react by voting for a party that opposes immigration. There are many belief systems that are not compatible with each other. People who hold such belief systems can not live peacefully side by side unless one side is forcing the other side to live according to their beliefs.
I think this book review sums up the malaise that the BNP is addressing, quite well. Oldham today, where next?
The issue will spiral not because it isnt, but because it IS politically correct and corrupt.
https://neptune.padlock.net/civsoc/cs23.htm
He argues that the immigration policy must be in the interests of the British people, should be robust enough to withstand honest debate, and should be able to command widespread public support. Unfortunately the system we have fails on all three counts: it is based primarily on the interests of immigrants, cannot withstand open debate, and is strongly opposed by most British people.
I’m not English but the BNP sounds exactly like what we need in the United States.