Hype, Hope and Hysteria: UKIP And The BNP Roil Britain’s Euro Election

But, significantly, immigration reform carried in the teeth of some ferocious opposition from within the party. Roger Knapman said recently on this subject: “There’s a climate laid down by a Hampstead liberal establishment which has been accepted as the norm, and any view other than this is somehow a bit quirky or rightwing or extremist” (Nicholas Watt, Guardian, 2 June 2004). This view is still extant within his own party, even at senior levels. 

Another possibility: the media is talking up UKIP’s chances because it is so anxious to avoid even thinking about the possibility of a breakthrough by much less respectable British National Party.  (One Leftist writer, Gaby Hinsloff, wittily describes UKIP as “the BNP in blazers.”  (Observer, May 30, 2004)

Ever since May 2003, when the BNP got 17 local councilors elected in England, the keepers of the public conscience have been obsessed by the possibility that it might win seats the European Parliament. The party is fielding 75 candidates for European seats, its biggest-ever push and has also started to show up in national opinion polls.

The BNP thinks that the UKIP momentum is all a conspiracy. According to the party’s website:

“This scam was agreed by the three main parties at their secret meeting in Halifax earlier this year, convened by the shadowy Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, at which they plotted various arranged schemes to prevent a BNP breakthrough at June 10th elections. Hyping up the UKIP as a viable ‘anti-establishment’ political party serving to create a safety valve for voters who are genuinely unhappy with the three old gang parties’ stance on Europe, asylum and the Iraq crisis, was one of the main tactics discussed at that meeting and unanimously agreed” (UKIP Poll Plot Unravels, British National Party, June  2, 2004).

The BNP approached the UKIP last year, with a proposal for an electoral pact under which they would not compete for the anti-EU vote in their respective strongholds. Either these proposals were rejected out of hand (according to the UKIP) or they were carried on to a fairly advanced stage (according to the BNP); in any case, official relations between the parties are now exceedingly poor. The UKIP says that the BNP is a racist party. The BNP says, in a poorly-punctuated message, “Only cowards and fools vote for UKIP, it’s time the British people saw through their facile charade of a party”. There is no doubt that the BNP is seriously worried about the emergence of UKIP as a serious rival for disaffected Tory votes.

And there is no love lost between the Tory and BNP hierarchies (although there are often friendly links between BNP and Conservative activists). In February, Tory leader Michael Howard visited Burnley, where the BNP has seven councilors, and made a vitriolic speech describing the BNP as “a bunch of thugs dressed up as a political party” and “a stain on our democratic way of life.” (Tom Happold, Guardian, 20 February 2004)

The BNP has devised one clever pitch: it makes great play of the fact that the electoral presence of the BNP in an area does deter some of the more foolish schemes of central government.

“No asylum seeker distribution centres are built in towns where BNP councilors are elected. Just the presence of ONE BNP councilor ensures no more bus loads of asylum seekers are dumped in local hotels. Inward investment from government floods in to the areas. Inward investment and regeneration money floods into the towns. Local housing stock is allocated on the basis of need once again rather than being allocated only to immigrants and asylum seekers. The local police start to listen once more to the voice of the people and tackle local crime” (Vote BNP - Save your home town. British National Party, 29 May 2004)

But despite leader Nick Griffin’s recent attempt to rebrand the BNP, and the resultant increase and improved quality of members, it has no support whatever from the press, and rarely even gets objective coverage. The anti-BNP cause has united Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, Labour yahoos in Glasgow and genteel Tory ladies in the Home Counties, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, Terry Eagleton and Peter Hitchens, trade union leaders and the church hierarchies, Muslim fundamentalists and militant homosexuals, in a spasm of righteous indignation. Ironically, the BNP is one of the very few things in today’s Britain that can unite ‘everyone’!

The extreme Left magazine Searchlight, an SPLC-type self-appointed political correctness enforcer, set up its own website (http://www.stopthebnp.com/), and distributed newsletters drawing attention, in the most hysterical terms, to reprehensible things in the pasts of some BNP candidates.

But these efforts were overshadowed by those of Unite Against Fascism, which swiftly drew attention to itself by getting a lot of Labour and Liberal Democrat (and a few na�ve Tory) MPs to sign its declaration, and with a series of meetings in the House of Commons, after one of which the singer Billy Bragg told a Guardian reporter that he was in favor of “beating up BNP officials, members and supporters in the street”, for which he was reported to the police [Billy Bragg gets his collar felt!, British National Party, 8 March 2004].

In some northern towns, there have indeed been physical confrontations with the Left. Two BNP local election candidates have just been charged with assault. And Unite Against Fascism supporters were responsible for the disgraceful incident in April, when Nick Griffin and Jean-Marie Le Pen were set upon by a mob of fanatics ready to use fascist tactics to bring about the end of fascism.

The Commission for Racial Equality, a government-sponsored political correctness enforcer (no U.S. equivalent, lucky you), even posted “a guide to election law for local councils” on its website telling local councils that they were under no legal obligation to provide the BNP with meetings halls or other public places. Actually, under the 1983 Representation of the People Act, all parties standing for election have the right to facilities. The BNP quite rightly complained to the Electoral Commission, and the posting was hastily taken down. BNP election material has also been the target of a boycott by unionized mail workers.

Most serious of all, TV stations have made it as difficult as possible for the BNP to show its election broadcasts, although legally obliged to accept them. Channel 5 at first rejected the BNP broadcast footage on the grounds that it might provoke racial ill-feeling. Ironically, this broadcast had borrowed heavily from an unshown Channel 4 documentary, called Edge of the City, about a series of horrifying allegations from Bradford that gangs of Asian men were raping young white girls. Channel 4 had pulled the program after police advice that it might provoke racial discord, but says it will show the program at a later date. Eventually, the BNP broadcast was shown, with segments blanked out.  

Unite Against Fascism agreed with this censorship. Joint secretary Wayne Bennett said that “I think that anything that negatively portrays the black and Asian communities would not help the process of creating a multicultural and multiracial society in the run-up to this election” (Secrets and Lies, British National Party, May 20 2004).

My emphasis. Truth, in short, is not a defense.

The reality is that that the BNP, and also UKIP, exist because the major parties have failed to address the genuine concerns of many thousands of people up and down the country—about immigration and also about the abolition of their political expression, the British nation-state.

No doubt the Establishment full-court press will prevail—this time. But whatever happens, in deferential Britain it’s striking that these insurgent parties have got so far.

Derek Turner [email him] is the editor of the independent magazine  Right Now, which Labour Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook said should be shut down.