Beware: the voters Blair neglected
are angry — and looking elsewhere Next month’s local elections will be a grave test of the Prime Minister’s authority. Peter Oborne goes on the stump with BNP campaigners who believe they are heading for great gains — and Labour politicians who fear they are right Phil is wearing an England football shirt. He lives in a quiet crescent in central Dagenham. He’s shaven-headed and has two small children. He regrets voting for Margaret Thatcher: ‘She lost me my business, she did.’ In 1997 Mark moved to Tony Blair. Next month he will switch again, with immense enthusiasm, to the British National Party.
‘I want to make a statement about what’s going on,’ he states. ‘Half the world is getting dumped round here. I’m a retailer. I work 50 to 60 hours a week. I’m working my guts out. And I see people from nowhere getting a Mercedes cheap. I live here and I don’t want this. My daughter was ill and it took us ten days to get to see my GP. People come in from Eastern Europe and get seen straight up.’ I went canvassing with the British National Party last Friday night, and I’d say half the doors we knocked on, all chosen by me, at random, revealed actual or potential BNP voters. Several cars — always carrying the England flag — hooted or waved their approval as we went about our business.
‘Dagenham isn’t what it used to be,’ said a travel-broker who works in Romford. ‘I’d certainly consider voting BNP. We’re working class. We’ve got two little kids. They go to the school next door. There’s been a big influx. Big time.’ He’s a dark-haired family man standing in front of his nice comfortable home. It’s a decent area, very little graffiti. You’d feel safe walking the streets at night in Dagenham, and the locals are what used to be called salt of the earth. Surveys show that the typical BNP member is respectable working class or lower-middle class, some distance from the bottom of the heap.
‘I don’t know how I will vote. I haven’t really considered. My personal opinion,’ he continues, ‘is that family tax credits are no use to us whatsoever. I’d certainly consider giving you my vote.’ Across the road there’s a man clipping a hedge. We stride across. The man from the BNP stretches out a hand.
‘Labour wouldn’t know a socialist view if it bit them on the backside,’ says the man, putting down his clippers, ‘and I believe in the working class.’ The BNP canvasser notes that there are a lot of foreigners coming into the area. ‘Not just here. All over the country,’ replies his new friend.
Today, there are no BNP councillors in the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham. That will change. The BNP says that it expects to win 12 seats almost one quarter of the total — on 4 May. This may be too optimistic, but even the local Labour MP Jon Cruddas says that the party could pick up six seats. That would be enough to make the BNP the second largest party on the council. The Tories and the Lib Dems are nowhere. It’s a straight BNP–Labour fight.
Labour voters are switching to the BNP in large numbers because they believe that only the BNP articulates what they are thinking. This is a story being repeated up and down Britain in local elections Leeds, Burnley, Keighley, Dewsbury. Racist politics is on the march. Today’s BNP possesses the local campaigning skills and ability to make a personal connection with the voter that mainstream parties have forgotten. In a recent council election in Amber Valley, Derbyshire, literature was produced street by street. The BNP promised to remove the graffiti outside No. 23, shift the problem neighbours in No. 56, etc. The Barking and Dagenham Patriot, distributed by BNP workers, also plays brutally on local fears. ‘We refuse to be bound by political correctness and we will always speak up for the silent local majority who have been criminally neglected by the council,’ it promises. The BNP pledges to clear up graffiti, confront yob culture and stop ‘new residents in council property’ turning their front gardens into refuse tips.
‘Whilst there are always plenty of new homes available for asylum-seekers and immigrants,’ thunders the Patriot, ‘when it comes to local families who are desperate for housing, the council always pushes them to the back of the queue.’ The Patriot’s pièce de résistance is the sensational claim, unfounded but nevertheless widely believed, that the council is running a secret ‘Africans for Essex’ scheme, giving ‘African families up to £50,000 to buy their own homes in Barking and Dagenham’.
This propaganda comes at a time of profound demographic change. According to the 2001 Census, some 18 per cent of the population was black. Today, say local politicians, the figure is probably closer to 30 per cent. This rise does not show up in official statistics. But it does in other ways. Shops selling African food are starting to appear alongside the pie-and-mash shops and newsagents on the high street. The churches are full to overflowing. The Bethel Full Gospel Church is applying for planning permission for a new building capable of accommodating an incredible 2,500 worshippers. The proportion of black children attending local schools rose by 4.5 per cent between 2003 and 2004, suggesting that 8,500 more Africans came to live in the borough (population officially 164,000) in the course of that one year alone. ‘For sale’ signs are going up throughout the borough, showing that whites are moving out. The proportion of white people in the borough is dropping by perhaps 3 to 4 per cent annually.
For decades Dagenham and Barking have been heartland Labour. But the voters have been taken for granted. Jon Cruddas, who worked in a senior position inside Downing Street before winning Dagenham in 2001, observes that the voters of Dagenham have been disfranchised by New Labour. Last year, in a report for the Joseph Rowntree Trust on the rise of the far Right in London, Cruddas wrote the following: ‘The originality of New Labour lies in the method by which policy is not deductively produced from a series of core economic or philosophical assumptions or even a body of ideas, but rather is scientifically constructed out of the preferences and prejudices of the swing voter in the swing seat.
‘It is a brilliant political movement whose primary objective is to reproduce itself — to achieve this it must dominate the politics of middle England. The government is not a coalition of traditions and interests who initiate policy and debate; rather it is a power elite whose modus operandi is the retention of power. In short, the political priorities and concerns of a specific minority of swing voters in a highly select part of the country will become ever more dominant.
‘As a politician for what is regarded as a safe working-class seat, the implications of this political calibration are immense. The system acts at the expense of communities like these — arguably those most in need.’ Cruddas says that the policy apparatus of New Labour in government lags tragically behind the realities of Dagenham. While the borough’s population is soaring exponentially, and its needs grow daily more complex, resources have not followed. ‘For example,’ states Cruddas, ‘social housing is not a priority for swing voters in middle England but is the burning issue locally; we resist the imposition of an academy so we are removed from the school capital programme.’ To sum up: New Labour’s narrow focus of middle-class voters in swing constituencies is driving the white Dagenham working and lower-middle classes straight into the arms of the BNP.
The BNP understands all this implicitly. Its press officer introduces himself as Dr Phil Edwards. He sounds a cheerful fellow down the phone when I introduce myself as working for The Spectator. ‘I’ve got no problem with your Rod Liddle,’ he announces. ‘But that bloody [Peter] Hitchens — I can’t be bothered with the man. He can say everything he likes that agrees with us. And then he calls us scum. There’s a lot of snobbery in that. We’re not allowed. You’ve got your political establishment which has decided there can be a Conservative party. But we’re not allowed.’ Dr Phil puts me in touch with Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s campaign organiser for London, who met me outside Becontree station last Friday evening. Barnbrook was wearing a light-brown moleskin suit. He has fair hair, pale blue eyes and the plausible air of a semi-educated man. He is 45 years old, and was born in Catford, south London. We went to the local tea shop for a chat.
He tells me that his father was a corporal in the Life Guards who went into the chauffeuring business when he retired. Richard’s birth was protracted, so his mother was asked to leave the hospital before he was born. Barnbrook says she was told, ‘We need the bed for people drafted off the boats.’ In due course Barnbrook went to the Royal College of Arts and became a lecturer in art history. His website lists him as ‘visionary artist, sculptor, teacher and nationalist’. It shows a picture of him staring mistily into the distance, very Aryan. He says that he worked with the late film director Derek Jarman on his obscure though revered study of national decline in the 1980s, The Last of England — though his name does not show up on the credits. ‘Derek gave me my first movie camera,’ he says. ‘I met Simon Heffer at a dinner two months ago,’ he adds. ‘He shouted at me.’ Possibly to dispel rumours that he is gay, possibly out of boastfulness, Barnbrook volunteers a list of ex-girlfriends, including the actress Tilda Swinton. Swinton collaborated closely with Jarman, and played a leading role in The Last of England. Most recently she played the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I rang Swinton’s agent. ‘She did know a person named Richard Barnbrook 20 years ago,’ he calmly reports back. ‘He certainly was not a member of the BNP at the time. She has not seen him since.’ In fact Barnbrook seems to have been active with Labour in the late 1980s before leaving in despair at Neil Kinnock’s policies on immigration. He joined the BNP in 1999. I ask him if he is a racist. ‘What does that word mean?’ he asks. He ponders for a while. ‘I’d say I was naturally concerned about the longevity and also the displacement and the stability of my people.’ He adds that Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for neighbouring Barking, ‘couldn’t give a damn about the white working class. Dagenham was built on Ford. And yet when the MG car plant closed she told the workers to get a job in Tesco. These are professional fitters and designers, and she’s telling them to go and stack shelves.’ It is interesting to compare the fortunes of Margaret Hodge in Barking and Jon Cruddas in next-door Dagenham. The BNP scored 16 per cent against New Labour Hodge in Barking, just 9 per cent against Cruddas in Dagenham. Jon Cruddas is an unusual politician. As a former Downing Street employee entering Parliament five years ago, he had brilliant prospects within government. If he had kept his nose clean, he might easily be in the Cabinet by now. Instead he’s out pounding the streets, fighting the BNP, disillusioned with Tony Blair.
Cruddas is running what in effect amounts to a parallel campaign to the official New Labour concentration on swing voters in middle England. He uses the same electoral technology, involving phone banks and dedicated mailings, to target black and ethnic minorities and swing BNP voters. ‘Arguably, the need for the latter is the effect of the former,’ says Cruddas. The BNP, he adds, ‘are on the verge of a major political breakthrough’. In Barking and Dagenham it can only be fought by abandoning New Labour and almost everything it stands for.
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