[repr0bate]

BNP tries scare tactics to win target voters

In Yorkshire and London the far right is putting the frighteners on the white working-class

Hugh Muir
Wednesday April 27, 2005
The Guardian

The far-right British National party is claiming that Africans are being paid up to £50,000 to move into its number one target seat to protect the majority of a government minister.

The party has poured activists from the south of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland into Barking, the east London seat that the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, holds with a 9,500 majority.

Voters are being canvassed by 50- to 60-strong teams of BNP activists and targeted with a series of inflammatory leaflets.

One contains the spurious claim about African voters, while another suggests they are being promised new homes in the Thames Gateway. Yet another raises a scare about the rate of TB infection.
The BNP has little chance of winning the parliamentary seat but is attempting to ratchet up its support base in the hope of capturing up to 10 seats in next year's Barking and Dagenham council elections, all of which need only a 5% swing.

Regional officials of the BNP are being told to study the Barking campaign as an example of how sophisticated the party's techniques are getting.

The BNP won a council seat in the Goresbrook ward of Barking and Dagenham last year - its first London victory in over a decade - by exploiting the fears of a predominantly white, working-class electorate about the local effects of migration and concerns about failures of the local authority.

Nick Lowles, of the anti-fascist organisation Search light, said: "Barking is now on the frontline of the battle to stop the BNP. They will not win here this time but they will get a big vote.

"The danger is that Labour is still not seen as campaigning in this area and that the BNP is able to tell people that Labour doesn't care about them.

"When Tories switch to the BNP, that is a soft protest vote. When former Labour supporters turn to the BNP that can be a hard vote because they are people who feel let down."

In Goresbrook, where BNP member Dan Kelley won the byelection last September, it is difficult to tell that there is an election under way at all. Only a few homes display party leaflets. Even fewer residents display any enthusiasm.

One middle-aged blonde woman drags a hoe across her front lawn and chats amiably until asked about the appeal of the BNP. "Isn't it obvious?" she says sternly.

Michael O'Neil, a 59-year-old contract cleaner out walking his dog, says he will not vote for them but understands the motivations of those who do. "Labour is not doing anything," he said.

"You go to see these people and you might say something about a Kosovan who lives near you and that's the end of the conversation. They say you are racist and from then on they don't want to know."

He added: "I will live next to anyone, so long as we live together - but no one will tell us why there are so many Africans living in the area. The other day one African woman pointed my dog out to her little boy and said 'Chien, Chien!' I said to her 'No, it's a dog. We are in England'."

Campaigners against the BNP say that by linking the BNP and the Nazis, they can dampen support with many older residents.

The BNP's push has not been helped by its victorious councillor, known locally as Clueless Kelley since admitting his deficiencies to the local paper.

"There's meetings that go right over my head and there's little point me being there," he told the Barking and Dagenham Advertiser. "I'm wasting my time."

However, Richard Barnbrook, the parliamentary candidate and BNP London organiser, appears smarter and less gaffe-prone.

Sharp-suited - although critics say he only seems to have one - Mr Barnbrook sees himself on the same intellectual wing of the party as its leader, Nick Griffin.

His pamphlets, the Barking Patriot, have concentrated on increasing resentment among the white population against asylum seekers.

In one, an elderly white woman is pictured in the half-light of a cluttered room below the headline: "If only I could claim asylum."

They are, however, less forthcoming about his experience with an environmental charity, the Jubilee Woods Trust. The charity distanced itself from him when his association with the BNP came to light.

BNP pledges:

· Complete halt to all immigration and "voluntary resettlement" of ethnic minority Britons to their "lands of ethnic origin"

· Redeployment of British troops from Iraq to secure Channel tunnel and Kent ports against illegal immigration

· Reintroduction of compulsory military service

· All adults who have completed military service required to keep a military assault rifle in their home

· Corporal punishment for petty criminals and the death penalty for paedophiles, terrorists, murderers and drug dealers or importers

[MO75]

Jesus Christ, if those fuckers got in I'd be one of the first to leave the country.

[Tim]

I've been telling you all this on pofoUK - they have a real chance there.

They swept the Goresbrook by election, with enthusiastic people joining up, waiting for rosettes and a geniune feel that they have a foothold there.

Add to that a defunct Conservative campaign, Lib Dems, Greens, Workers Revolutionary and you have the BNP as the main opposition to labour in barking.

[Ombrageux]

They got 800k votes in the European elections. Given our FPTP they aren't going to get anywhere. Maybe a few token MPs in the more racist areas of Britain.

[Tim]

DT, write them off at your peril.

It's the ignoring them, arguing for their irrelevance that makes people vote for them so as to politically thump the liberal elite in the face.

[Ombrageux]

Oh I'm not ignoring them. It's the Conservatives job to have some mildly racist/anti-immigration views so that they can attract the Radical Right vote. But lets compare with France. France has FPTP and between 15% and 20% of French voters vote Front National. And yet, they have 1 miserable seat in parliament because of the electoral system. Britain's BNP voters are far far less than 15-20% and as such I really don't expect them to get any seats or anything significant.

[Rifleman]

Tim,
I'd agree with the "ignore them at your peril" sentiment. They are certainly a danger to British society and our way of life.

However, I do not believe that they pose any serious threat in electoral terms, not now or in the medium term. Even assuming that they proved capable, and they were way off the mark during this election, of becoming the second largest grouping in some council election they would have little power to do anything other than disrupt the machinery. Even if they gained power in a local authority they would not, as councillors, have the power to imnplement any of the policies they espouse.

No, the danger they represent is that in time the core support will become frustrated with Griffins insistence that they must be "respectable" and will want to return to the white supremacist fold. As objectionable as they are under Griffin, they will be more so when this happens.

[| I, CWAS |]

Tim

thump the liberal elite in the face.

This is exactly why if I lived in Britain, and had a protest vote, I would go with them. They have a decent platform, that appeals to nationalists, and add in the fustration factor, and you have a rising party. Light immigration policy will only breed resentment. One of the reasons why I like Le Pen, and the western european right in general, is the anti-immigration attitutde.

DumbTeen

Oh I'm not ignoring them. It's the Conservatives job to have some mildly racist/anti-immigration views so that they

I wish they had more anti immigration views, and I don't see what you consider racist.

[Tim]

The BNP have been using this general election to set up a strong council election campaign next year.

And from their percentages of the vote in some areas, they could do better than before.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

CWAS, examples of the BNP's racism are that they will only allow party members who are of 'British or allied European ancestry', and the leader regards a mixed-race marriage as 'miscegenation', and morally wrong. They won't allow non-white people to come to their meetings either.