You are not going to stamp out lump en racism by discriminating against the BNP
ROD LIDDLE
How should we deal with the British National Party? Nobody with any social standing, or in possession of a decent education or good breeding, thinks the BNP anything other than utterly ghastly. But they seem to have become the latest beloved affectation of our white Untermenschen, like tattoos on the buttocks, deep-fried high-fat convenience
food and — odd though this may seem clothing from Aquascutum.
The white Untermenschen of Barking went for the BNP in a big way just recently. In a council by-election in the Goresbrook ward they elected the BNP candidate Daniel Kelley with almost 52 per cent of the vote. He gained nearly twice as many votes as the second-placed candidate, who represented the Labour party. The LibDems and the Tories managed a couple of hundred votes between them — about one fifth of Mr Kelley's total. There were rumours and even newspaper reports of a deal between the three major parties: the LibDems and the Tories would not bother campaigning in order to give the Labour candidate a free run at the terrifying Nazi fascist-type person, despite the fact that the BNP held no seats on Barking council and register less than 1 per cent of the vote nationally. There was even the suggestion that a Ukip candidate had been persuaded to stand in order to split the far-Right vote. Both the LibDems and the Tories deny that there was any sort of deal; the LibDem candidate, Frederick Tindling, told me he had campaigned long and hard, So his 80odd votes must have come as a bit of a disappointment. 'It was just a protest vote,' he said. 'And they don't like the ethnics.'
So we don't know if there was a deal or not. But there's another by-election coming up in the Village ward of Dagenham on 8 October. The BNP will be going for it, according to their gleeful Brummie spokesman Phil Edwards. The LibDems, according to the defeated Mr Tindling, who fancies his chances again, will not even be putting forward a candidate.
Here's a sort of GCSE psychology question for you. Imagine that you are a member of the Goresbrook lumpenprole and possessed of a disaffection with the government and, perhaps, your local council, not least on account of all the money they give yer ethnics (even if they don't). You also suspect that there isn't much to choose between the three major parties, and when asked who you'll vote for you say: Dunno. They're all the same, aren't they? Don't trust any of them.'
Now, the question is this: will you be more or less likely to vote for the outsider party, the BNP, if the other three parties spend their campaigning hours begging you not to do so? Will you be more or less likely to suspect establishment collusion? And if the representatives of the three major parties simply bellow 'Racist?' at you when you voice your perhaps misplaced concerns (about yer ethnics), against which party title will you scrawl your cross on polling day?
Not so long ago the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, floated the idea that civil servants should be banned from joining the BNP. This is, of course, a profoundly undemocratic and indeed repulsive notion. Whatever, it was at least in keeping with the way the political establishment here and in Brussels treats the BNP and the far Right generally. And it is an approach which I suspect helps the BNP rather than hinders it. In Burnley, where the BNP won eight council seats, local representatives from the three major parties wrung their hands and screeched in anguish and announced, with great petulance, that they wouldn't work with the BNP's elected councillors. They would instead pretend that they hadn't been elected at all. Senior figures from the major parties subjected local people to condescending harangues about their regrettable polling-booth behaviour.
Back to that GCSE psychology question. Do you think all that would make the longsuffering residents of Burnley more or less likely to vote BNP next time around?
When the Austrians voted for the extreme rightwing populist, Jorg Haider, how did the established parties in Brussels — Christian Democrat, Social Democrat, Socialist, Liberal — react? They suggested that Austria might be booted out of the EU as a result. If you were an Austrian voter would such a reaction make you more or less inclined to vote for mad Jorg next time around?
The establishment answer to the BNP is to vilify, denounce, abuse and, if possible, ban its activities. They will even threaten to remove the right of BNP members to gainful employment, a la Blunkett, every now and again.
Here's a neat little irony: our senior politicians — Labour, LibDem and Tory — are worried that the number of people who vote in each election, who are, in other words, engaged with the political process, has fallen of late. And has fallen quite rapidly. It must be the way politics is presented by the cynical metropolitan media, they insist.
The turnout in Burnley and Oldham, where the BNP fielded lots of candidates and gained considerable success last time around, didn't fall, however; it rose substantially. The turnout in Barking last week was nearly 29 per cent — way, way above what you might normally expect for a council by-election in a workingclass ward at the tail end of a dismal summer. Fred Tindling told me he had expected the turnout to be in the region of 18 per cent.
People made that inconvenient trek to the polling booth — away from EastEnders or Changing Rooms or whatever other unspeakable filth they were being sprayed with — to vote either for the BNP or against them: i.e., they felt, at last, that there was something worth voting for, or against. They were, suddenly and perhaps only temporarily, engaged with the political process.
It is vile and irrational to judge a person by the colour of his or her skin. No matter how often the personable and even likable BNP leader Nick Griffin might protest otherwise, the propensity to make such a profoundly stupid judgment lies at the heart of the BNP's appeal and, indeed, forms the basis of a good deal of its election literature. But it is not racist to be averse to Islam and its challenge to our way of life. Nor is it racist to question the priorities of your local council. either. A worry that your council is giving homes and/or loans to immigrants while financially neglecting its indigenous population seems to me entirely legitimate, if small-minded. What you do is counter the arguments and assumptions of the BNP, but allow the party's representatives to make their fatuous case without hysteria and without petulance and without the sort of threats David Blunkett seems minded to hand down. And then you let the people decide. The whole edifice of democracy is built upon the notion that we cannot know that we are always right and that therefore other points of view should be heard. Even when they come from the lumpenprole.
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