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08/07/09

UAF analysis document: Tackling the rise of the BNP after the European elections

Download this analysis in PDF format

The fascist British National Party gained its first seats in the European parliament at the 4 June election this year. BNP leader Nick Griffin narrowly took the final seat in the North West of England region with 8.0 percent of the vote. Andrew Brons, a former National Front chairman and lifelong Nazi, took the final seat in Yorkshire & the Humber with 9.8 percent of the vote.

The BNP took 6.2 percent of the vote nationally, as com­pared to 4.9 percent in 2004. It is worth noting that the polls were putting the BNP on around 7 percent a week or so be­fore the election, but its rating dropped in the final few days of the campaign. If it had not been for the efforts of anti-fas­cists, the BNP may well have taken three or even four seats.

It is also important to note that the BNP vote actually fell in both the regions where they took seats. The electoral gains were not because of large numbers of people switch­ing to the BNP, rather they were the result of a significant drop in turnout. All the mainstream parties suffered from this, but Labour was particularly badly hit. The Labour vote in Yorkshire & the Humber, for instance, was only 56 per­cent of the figure it polled in 2004.

In the local elections held the same day the BNP gained its first three county councillors, in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Hertfordshire. The BNP polled strongly across Lanca­shire and Leicestershire, as well as pulling in worryingly large votes in other parts of the country such as Essex.

Elsewhere in the country saw a modest but steady rise in the BNP vote compared to 2004, though the party dropped back slightly in London compared to last year, when it took a London Assembly seat. The party’s strong­est regions outside Yorkshire and the North West were the North East (8.9 percent), East Midlands (8.7 percent) and West Midlands (8.6 percent).

The campaign against the BNP

The overall shape of the results vindicates Unite Against Fas­cism’s strategy for the election campaign. We argued early on that the European elections would be marked by a low turnout, and that therefore our focus should be on mobilis­ing the anti-fascist majority by warning people of the threat posed by the BNP and urging them to get out and vote.

Throughout the campaign we put out 2.5 million leaflets and newspapers pushing a consistent message – that the BNP was a fascist party, that there was a serious danger of them winning seats, and that they could be stopped if enough people turned out to vote against them.

We did not attempt to “talk down” the BNP vote by pretending the fascists were not benefiting from the West­minster expenses scandal. Nor did we indulge in premature displays of triumphalism. Instead we argued that there was no room for complacency when it came to stopping the BNP, and that attempts to play down the extent of the threat would only serve to demobilise the anti-racist vote.

Unite Against Fascism worked closely with its sister campaign Love Music Hate Racism to put on an anti-racist festival at the Britannia Stadium in Stoke-on-Trent, together with Stoke City Football Club and Stoke-on-Trent City Council. The event, headlined by Kelly Rowland and Peter Doherty, was a great success and attracted a crowd of 20,000, most of whom were local young people.

The BNP had previously boasted that Stoke was the “jewel in the crown” of the party. It has nine councillors there. But the LMHR festival demonstrated that the majority of people in Stoke rejected the BNP’s racism and that the city was multi­racial and proud of it. The success of the festival delivered a bodyblow to the fascists in the city and helped contribute to the failure of BNP deputy leader Simon Darby to take a seat in the West Midlands region.

Throughout the campaign UAF worked closely with the trade union movement. We helped out with the PCS’s Make Your Vote count campaign. Teaching unions such as the NUT and NASUWT provided sponsorship for anti-BNP adverts in the local press and a UAF ad van that toured the country. We also worked with LGBT organisations and with the Muslim Council of Britain to produce anti-BNP leaflets aimed at the Muslim community.

On the night of the count UAF organised an anti-BNP demon­stration at the count in Manchester, which for a short time prevented Griffin from entering the building. We also held a series of demonstrations in Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Sheffield, Leeds and York in the week after the results were announced.

Our activists successfully disrupted Griffin’s attempts to hold a victory press conference outside the Houses of Parlia­ment on 9 June. He was also chased around Manchester the next day, being eventually forced to hold his press conference in a pub owned by a BNP supporter.

Throughout the campaign and afterwards we made extensive use of the internet, sending out regular email bulletins to members and supporters, updating the website frequently (tripling the number of visitors), as well as using new technologies such as Twitter to mobilise people at short notice (for instance, during the action against Griffin’s London press conference).

Who voted for the BNP?

There is some debate in the media about the nature of the BNP vote. One common explanation is that BNP voters are disaffected former Labour voters who have switched to the fascists because they believe Labour has abandoned the “white working class”. The implication is either that the BNP vote is a “protest vote” directed against Labour that has little to do with racism, or that working class white people are ir­redeemably racist and little that can be done to alter this.

However, an extensive survey of over 32,000 voters con­ducted by the YouGov polling firm in the run-up to the Eu­ropean elections (www.bit.ly/megapoll) gives a detailed pic­ture of the BNP vote that goes against this received wisdom. To begin with, the majority of BNP voters define themselves as politically right of centre and prefer the Conservatives to Labour. The bulk of the BNP’s support comes not from disaf­fected Labour voters but from “working class Tories”.

The YouGov poll also explodes the notion that BNP vot­ers are not racist. It shows that BNP voters are significantly more likely to agree with racist statements than the general population. For instance, 49 percent of BNP voters believe employers should “favour white applicants over non-white applicants”, as compared to 15 percent of the general popu­lation. Only 35 percent of BNP voters agree that non-white British citizens who were born in this country are just as “British” as their white counterparts, as opposed to 71 per­cent in the general population.

But the same poll makes it clear that the BNP is drawing on a much wider pool of racist attitudes that have spread deeply into society, especially on the right. This is expressed most strongly in terms of negative attitudes to immigrants and Muslims. Some 94 percent of BNP voters think all fur­ther immigration into the UK should be halted – but the figure for the population at large is 68 percent. Some 79 percent of BNP voters think that Islam is a “serious danger to Western civilisation” even in its milder forms – but so does 44 percent of the general population.

The poll also suggests that a significant minority of the BNP vote signs up to hardcore Nazi ideology. Some 9 per­cent of BNP voters think it is “completely true” that there is “a major international conspiracy led by Jews and Com­munists to undermine traditional Christian values in Britain and other Western countries”, while 20 percent say Hitler’s Holocaust was either exaggerated or didn’t happen at all.

When it comes to economic issues the data presents a more mixed picture. BNP voters are more tightly clustered around the middle income bracket – a gross annual household in­come of between £20,000 and £30,000 – than the population in general. They tend to be manual workers in the private sector aged 35 to 54 who read the Sun or the Daily Star.

Compared to voters for other parties, BNP voters are the least likely to say they have “enough money to live comfort­ably”, the least likely to say they “feel safe going out in your area” and the least confident that “my family will have op­portunities to prosper in the years ahead”. But they are also the least likely to choose economic issues such as the cost of living, unemployment or pensions when asked to pick the “most important issues facing you and your family”.

The wider political picture

So the evidence suggests that while BNP voters are not particularly worse off economically than the population in general, they are significantly more dissatisfied and resent­ful – and far more likely to buy into racist discourse about immigrants, Muslims and ethnic minorities. It is this com­bination of racism and resentment that drives them into the arms of the BNP, rather than notions of a multicultural elite betraying the “white working class”.

That is not to say that traditional Labour voters are not angry with the government and the party. Many are – but their typical reaction is to stay at home rather than to switch overnight to the fascists. And contrary to the media hype about a “white working class” riddled with racism, Labour voters (who are predominantly white and working class) are consistently less likely to agree with racist attitudes than the population at large.

There were other factors that worked in favour of the BNP at the election. The row over expenses for MPs in Westmin­ster that erupted in the weeks leading up to the election led to voters deserting the mainstream parties and either turning to smaller alternatives or deciding not to vote.

The BNP certainly attempted to position itself as an “anti-establishment” alternative to Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. But it is not clear that the fascists managed to successfully convince many voters of this. Rath­er, the dynamic in places such as the North West was that the drop in support for mainstream parties allowed the BNP to gain a seat even though its actual vote did not increase.

One factor that probably helped keep the BNP out was the persistence of the vote for the UK Independence Party in the face of widespread predictions that it support would collapse. Last year’s London election saw the UKIP vote drop signifi­cantly, with most UKIP voters returning to the Tories, but some radicalising further into the arms of the fascist BNP. But this dynamic did not repeat itself this time round. The fo­cus on the European Union’s role that inevitably arises during a European election together with the widespread campaign against the BNP helped to shore up the UKIP vote.

Nevertheless, there is no room for complacency here. While UKIP is not a fascist party it campaigned on a hard anti-immigrant ticket and its voters share many of the rac­ist and bigoted attitudes found among BNP voters. So per­suading potential BNP voters to go with UKIP instead is not a long term solution to defeating the BNP. The UKIP vote remains a “halfway house” between the mainstream right and the fascist right. If wider questions of racism in society are not tackled, the threat that UKIP voters might move into the BNP’s arms will not go away.

Finally, it should be stressed that the election campaign took place in a wider context of economic crisis, recession, rising unemployment and looming cuts in public spending. The BNP played on fears of immigration and migrant la­bour, calling for “commonsense economic nationalism” that put “British” people first. Its key slogan during the election campaign was “British jobs for British workers” – a slogan revived by Gordon Brown shortly after he became Labour leader and deployed by sections of the trade union move­ment during the recent construction workers dispute.

The BNP’s strategy aims at stoking up divisions inside the workforce and setting people against each other to com­pete for jobs and resources. It is a recipe for fomenting rac­ism. But it is a strategy that takes its cue from mainstream policy proposals that also seek to prioritise “British” or “lo­cal” people above others.

The government’s announcement shortly after the Euro­pean elections that “local” people would be prioritised for social housing is a case in point here. Attempts to ration out public services on the basis of some groups being privi­leged over others can only feed the BNP’s rhetoric of re­sentment that pits “indigenous” British people against those they term “foreigners” and “colonists”.

What next for anti-fascists?

Fascist parties such as the BNP stand in elections in order to gain a “respectable” cover for their street activity. So there are serious concerns that the election of two BNP Euro MPs will usher in a period where the party’s thugs are set loose to intimidate ethnic minorities and whip up race hatred.

There is already anecdotal evidence that the far right is on the move again. Hundreds of right wing hooligans ran ram­page through Luton on 24 May as part of an allegedly “pa­triotic” march, intimidating local people and attacking Asian residents. This followed the firebombing of the Luton Islamic Centre on 5 May. The Greenwich Islamic Centre was attacked with petrol bombs twice in one week in June.

Meanwhile racist attacks continue. There were just under 40,000 racist and religiously motivated offences in 2007 to 2008, almost double the rate ten years ago. But this nationwide average hides significant regional fluctuations. Hate crimes in London almost halved over the decade, but in areas such as Yorkshire and Essex have seen a near tenfold increase.

There has also been a spate of ugly racist attacks in the North West since Griffin’s election. A 17 year old Asian teenager was badly injured in Rochdale when she was at­tacked by a gang of white thugs. She told a local newspaper that she had taken her younger sisters to play on the swings when “a guy started saying stuff about the BNP – he told me he was more British than I was and that I didn’t belong here”. Moments later she was punched in the face and al­most blinded.

Incidents such as these highlight the fact that the BNP can­not be fought on a purely ideological level but must be vigor­ously confronted and excluded from our democratic culture. One vital aspect of this involves the media. The fact that there are now two BNP Euro MPs will lead to specific pressures on journalists and media workers to treat the party as if it were a legitimate political voice. This could mean interviews with leading BNP figures, invitations onto “Question Time” style panel debates, or even misguided attempts at “exposing” the BNP that end up merely sensationalising them.

The danger is that the BNP will be allowed to worm its way into the media establishment. It will use any platforms it is granted to consolidate its presence in the political mainstream, normalise its racist arguments, pull the political spectrum to the right and build its organisations on the ground. And as the fascists grow, so do the pressures on people to capitulate to them. The danger today is that the BNP breaks through the “cordon sanitaire” to become a regular fixture in our media.

Schools, colleges and universities will be another battle­ground. In recent years the BNP has had trouble attract­ing a younger cadre. Young people tend to be less racist and less likely to vote BNP than the population in general. Campaigns such as Love Music Hate Racism have helped highlight the threat of the BNP to young people and present a positive image of multiracial Britain. But this situation could swiftly change with rapidly rising youth unemploy­ment. One Harris poll taken shortly after the election showed an alarming rise in BNP support among the under 35s.

All of this means that anti-fascists have to go on the of­fensive against the BNP. The counsel of despair that sug­gests anti-BNP action is “ineffective” or a “distraction” must be rejected. It is simply the flipside of the compla­cency and denial about the BNP’s rise that we saw from so many quarters before the election took place.

The urgent task is to build a broad anti-fascist movement with deep roots in working class areas, ethnic minority com­munities, LGBT organisations and the trade union movement. And it means building an active mass movement, one that is capable of mobilising for both elections and demonstrations against the BNP. Fascist parties are not simply electoral or­ganisations, so anti-fascists cannot be either. Fascist parties are not simply racist propagandists, so anti-fascists cannot re­strict themselves to anti-racist propaganda.

It is with this in mind that Unite Against Fascism has called a special national conference in Manchester on Saturday 18 July to discuss the future of the anti-fascist movement, and a national mobilisation against the BNP’s “Red White & Blue” fascist rally in Codnor, Derbyshire on Saturday 15 August.

We know that the majority of ordinary people do not want to see racism used to divide our society, and that the vast majority of people are totally opposed to the fascist politics of the BNP. We need to bring these people together and draw them into active anti-fascism in ever greater num­bers. And we need to root anti-BNP activity in communities across the country with a view to building a campaign base in advance of next year’s elections. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to stand up to fascism and race hatred. United we can stop the fascist BNP.

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