The BNP Won't Go Away if We Ignore It

Martin Ivens, The Times October 18, 2009

How should an open society like ours respond to those who try to whip up hatred between races or classes? For many, the BBC’s invitation to the racialist British National party leader, Nick Griffin, to join the panel on Question Time this week stretches tolerance too far. It’s a hard call. Peter Hain, the secretary of state for Wales, last week condemned the BBC for giving the BNP “the legitimacy it craves”, and The Guardian argued that the BNP “rightfully belongs under a stone”.

Whether or not you agree with the left’s rallying cry of “no platform for fascists”, you can see the dangers. In a BBC radio report earlier this month, two leading BNP members were stupidly introduced as ordinary “Mark and Joey” and were allowed to question the Britishness of a member of the English football team, Ashley Cole, the child of a white mother and a black father. The two racists were in fact Mark Collett, the BNP’s publicity director, and Joseph Barber, head of Great White Records, whose output we can presume runs to more inflammatory material than Mel Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler. Hardly responsible journalism.

Those with longer memories recall the nadir of the corporation’s current affairs operation when it co-operated with an IRA operation to “liberate” a town in Northern Ireland. Back then, however, the liberal left were all for free speech when Sinn Fein was banned from the airwaves. No platform for fascists, but yes to Republican terrorists.

Newspapers, the maligned tabloids included, usually come down hard on political extremists. The Sun and Daily Mirror do their damnedest to put their readers off the BNP — though I note that a clutch of Guardian columnists recently allowed their names to be used in publicity material for a conference organised by the Trotskyite Socialist Workers party. But let’s give the BBC the benefit of the doubt. Griffin was elected by northwest voters to the European parliament in June and his party polled not far short of 1m votes. The corporation can’t pretend this result didn’t happen, though some politicians would rather indulge in ritual abuse of the BNP or, equally uselessly, pretend it isn’t there. And, despite the exquisitely bad timing of the MPs’ expenses scandal with the economic downturn, Britain is not Weimar Germany. If the BNP ever constituted a threat to public order the state has the legal right, the means and the will to suppress it.

The sky won’t fall on Thursday. Griffin may be a better speaker than his bombastic predecessor, John Tyndall, but he lacks the charisma of his European counterparts. The Austrian neo-Nazi Jörg Haider really did look the part of the handsome Hollywood Nazi, radiating a dangerous dynamism. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French National Front could draw on his service as a former paratrooper to bolster his patriotic credentials. The anti-southern, anti-immigrant Northern League in Italy has support among university academics as well as the middle classes. That can hardly be said of the BNP. Exposure to the full glare of publicity shows the shallowness of the party’s talent and its bizarre policies.

The BNP truly is an unlovely outfit. Some of its leaders have criminal convictions, and its constitution states that it is open only to white people. Last week the sleepy Equality and Human Rights Commission belatedly got a legal ruling to oblige the party to change its admission rules — why had it not acted years ago? Griffin will now try to persuade his old guard to swallow the necessary amendment. If he succeeds, he will be able to present the BNP as a nationalist party, not a racialist one — though extreme nationalism itself is one of the bad jokes of history. Blacks and Asians are hardly likely to queue around the block to join, but the white working class is giving it a hearing.

The paradox of the rising vote for the BNP is that Britain has demonstrably become a more tolerant society over the past three decades. Polling evidence shows that the classic racially divisive question of “would you allow your daughter to marry a black man”, gets an affirmative response. We eat chicken tikka masala; we have gay friends.

Globalisation has made this country a prosperous place despite recent squalls. Yet a fluctuating 10% to 20% of the white population feels alienated and left behind. As an authority on extremism, Professor Roger Eatwell of Bath University, puts it, “the chief characteristic of this group is pessimism about our political system and the economy”. They are most likely in polls to say they can’t see their personal circumstances improving. Nearly two-thirds (61%) of BNP voters are C2DE males, the lowest paid and least skilled category of worker. Migrants compete for their jobs and, they believe, asylum seekers take “their” council housing. They feel their values are despised: more than 70% of teachers believe it is their duty to warn their pupils about the dangers of patriotism, equating it with xenophobia.

Conventional politicians have been slow to find a language to address these people. David Cameron, who needs to woo the political centre for victory, eschews appeals to the Alf Garnett vote. UKIP is the threat that concerns him. Griffin targets the collapsing Labour vote, presenting the BNP to working-class neighbourhoods as “the Labour party your grandad voted for”. Westminster’s softly-softly approach to Islamist extremism has done nobody any good.

New Labour and Tony Blair’s pitch was largely to the middle class. A few isolated politicians understood the threat. Jon Cruddas, the parliamentary leader of the centre-left group, Compass, and the brave maverick Frank Field desperately tried to alert the party leadership to the interaction of high levels of immigration with a shortage of social housing. Working-class areas and a few over-burdened councils had too bear too great a burden.

At the Home Office, Liam Byrne, now chief secretary to the treasury, tried belatedly to address concerns about immigration if not Europe.Alan Milburn, the former secretary of state for health, has proposed a long-term remedy in an agenda of empowering clients of the welfare state. On its deathbed, the government has finally got the message.

What now? Searchlight, the magazine which has long monitored the activities of far-right activists, believes that violently confronting the BNP on the streets allows Griffin to play the martyr. Door-knocking by trade unions, churches and others did cut his vote in the Euro election, but the collapse of Labour support let him in.

The centre right too are beginning to wake up. They have set up their own campaign, “There is nothing British about the BNP”, led by James Bethell, a liberal Tory, and Tim Montgomerie, who runs the ConservativeHome website. Their aim is to deny the BNP “ownership” of the army, the church, the Union Jack, the St George’s Cross and other symbols of Britishness. The BNP’s “battle for Britain” campaign in the European elections drew heavily upon wartime imagery and icons such as the Spitfire, forgetting the brave Polish airmen that flew them. Bethell and Montgomerie are organising a campaign by prominent military figures, including the SAS hero Andy McNab, to attack the false patriotism of the nationalists. This is fruitful territory.

On Question Time and elsewhere I hope essential British decency will also triumph. Our amused contempt for humourless ideologues is a national tradition — witness the fictional Private Eye revolutionary Dave Spart, the commie shop steward Fred Kite as played by Peter Sellers in the film I’m All Right Jack, and PG Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode, the leader of the Black Shorts. (According to Gussie Fink-Nottle in The Code of the Woosters, “by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left”.) Humour only goes so far, however. The philosophy of the far right and left, barely concealed by evasive language, is the worse the better: they thrive on society’s ills. That must be exposed.

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