Maybe you’re right. After all, the BNP have a long history of uninterrupted electoral success… oh right, they don’t. Maybe it was a protest vote, after all.

I find quite ironic that the left think they can do exactly what they castigate the right for. Hypocritical? I think so!

Is that enough evidence for you?

Personally I blame the people who voted for him.

Abso-bloody-lutely.

I lived in York for 4 years (’87-’91, ahh, the fond memories of the old NF skinheads trying to stage their ‘wreath laying’ ceremonies at Clifford’s Tower), and I’d personally like to give all the f@cking “stay-at-home” ‘traditional Labour’ voters a damned good slap. Except I haven’t got the time, but still…

Of course, I doubt anyone was taking the time on the doorstep to explain that if people stayed at home, it would be easier for the BNP to get in, so even if you wanted to see the government humiliated, *please* could you at least vote for someone else…

Of course, up here in Scotland, the BNP only got 2.5% of the vote (up 0.8% mind), and UKIP only just over double that (but down 1.5%)…yet another argument for independence, methinks )

(oh, just in case anyone tries to resurrect the old “SNP=Tartan BNP” smear – even for ‘wind up the Jock’ value – you’re being very silly, there are plenty of voting stats to disprove that tired nonsense, and nyaah! boo! sucks! so there…)

F@cking lazy Labour sheep.

(just felt it was worth saying again)

Of course Immigration having been out of control for years might have a teeny part to play in it ..

I think immigration of British citizens to foreign countries is out of control – the BBC says that there are 5.5 million of these immigrants around the world.

761,000 of these live in Spain. They refuse to learn the language. They refuse to assimilate into the culture. And they make enclaves for themselves, making large parts of the south coast of Spain feel like a foreign country to Spaniards and spreading fear throughout law-abiding Spaniards with their strange fondness for drinking excessive alcohol and fighting. Many of these read the Daily Mail and whinge about how immigrants are turning the UK into a foreign land without the slightest bit of self-consciousness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/brits_abroad/html/default.stm

Or is this a one-way problem, because British culture is superior, or British immigrants are ‘good immigrants’ or some other bizarre argument?

Though it is amusing to watch him being reduced to the state of some giberring HYS lunatic wibbling on about how his oh so edgy and inflammatory views are being censored and of course the ruthless censors are nice enough to let us read all about it.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – PUBLISH THIS IF YOU DARE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111.

do you mean: (a) More immigrants than I would have liked came into the country, (b) not enough immigrants for my liking came into the country.

At the moment, evidence suggests that a disproportionate number of BNP votes came from traditional Labour voting areas/wards, and is indicative that their campaign to portray themselves as “what Labour used to be” has been vaguely successful.

I have no doubt that they’ve picked up voters from all other parties, and from the “won’t vote/none of the above” party as well, but my suspicion based around doorstep experience is that a disproportionate number is traditional white aspirational working class Labour voters. I suspect many of them might’ve previously voted Tory, especially in Yorkshire, back before Thatcher made the Conservatives a pariah party during the miner’s strike (and that visceral hatred runs deep in some areas around here, very scary).

But between the 80s and now, they’ve been Labour voters, and I suspect once Labour is out of office, many will go back, but that’s all suspicion.

It might need to be a crowdsourced research project, I’ll start looking into it and post when I’ve got my head around it.

I definitely blame Blair’s forcing this voting system on us though, STV would’ve seen them off easily.

I hope you do look at those results. I’m not a detail guy – I’m more visceral, I go in for heart-felt anger and disillusionment (backed up by admittedly anecdotal evidence) – but I’m pretty sure the stats will confirm my piece (when analysed in detail).

I’m no Lib Dem’r. I’m just a pissed off former Labour member/campaigner/voter.

Some of the people voting BNP are old Labour, yes. Some of them are New Labour. Some of them are Tory. Some of them are Lib Dem. The notion that the BNP attract a disproprtionate number of switches from Labour rests purely on the notion that the Labour Party and the working class are effectively synonymous, and that because an area has traditionally elected Labour representatives, everyone in that area must be Labour.

I attended the Calderdale count, and spent most of my time watching the boxcount for my district (a Tory/Lib Dem marginal). BNP vote was negligible, UKIP vote was high, I thought we were going to take 2nd place. But then I wandered the hall, and saw the box counts for the areas where Labour are strongest.

The BNP vote there was massive. The results are available by local authority, and I will be digging into it to do a full analysis over the next few weeks, but from what we saw as results came in, the BNP vote grew the most in Labour’s rotten boroughs.

When the other parties abandon an areas because it’s “safe Labour” and they can’t afford the resources to campaign there, the BNP move in. They doubled their vote %age and the numbers went up in Barnsley, for example. In the areas of the SE and London where you’re right to observe the total votes cast did go up, they did so in areas where Labour has traditionally been fairly strong, especially east end boroughs like Barking and Dagenham.

The answer, of course, is to ensure that another party moves back in to areas abandoned, as the Lib Dems have done in Burnley, by giving voters a valid alternative they took 5 out of the 6 wards. The BNP still got one of them, but without the massive effort put in, it would likely have been all 6.

It’s a mixture of different reasons, naturally, it’s not just “Labour voters switching” nor is it “Labour voters staying at home”. Some of those voting BNP are simple racists who’ve always voted for a different party before but in a list PR system go back to their natural home. Some are old Labour supporters, etc.

For those above that doubt the “66% used to think Labour represented them”, that’s not 66% were old Labour, that’s people thinking that the 1997 “big tent” included them as part of it. I definitely did. I got disillusioned in 1998 when Blair used the Parlt Act to force through closed list PR, but still voted Labour in 2001.

Now I’m branch chair in a Lib Dem target ward that, in 1997, was held by Labour, they’re now a distant 3rd. Labour used to speak for me, it used to speak for a broad church. In office, it’s abandoned both its core and the liberal left. The latter have come to the Lib Dems, the former are either staying at home or voting elsewhere. Unfortunately, some of them are for the BNP.

Unity:

I think the pivotal moment was Blair’s decision to take the populist Daily Mail line on immigration after the 2005 election – that’s where we dropped the ball and began to create an environment which helped to lend the BNP an undeserved veneer of credibility and respectability

You’re partially rigth, but in the two regions where they won seats, they did so on a decreased number of votes from 2004. So they didn’t pick up any new voters this time around, so it can’t be explained by events that happened since then.

Remember, the BNP won not because they had a huge increase in support but because Labour’s support evaporated. Obviously those people who stayed at home, their fat asses perched on their credit-purchased couches whilst watching live footage of Big Brother and endlessly replaying clips from Britain’s Got Talent on YouTube, would never have come out and vote for Labour because no one in their right mind could vote for Labour after all the betrayals and the corruption they’ve let run amok during their time in power. But they could’ve got out and voted.

The rise of crappy reality TV, Heat magazine, public outpourings of grief and all the other bollocks is roughly analogous to the history of this Labour government.

The UN’s “Human Development Index 2008″ ranks Canada 3rd (the UK comes 21st).
In the Economist’s “Most Livable Cities 2008″, Vancouver came first and Toronto fifth (no UK entries in Top 10).
In Mercer’s “Quality of Living Survey 2009″, Vancouver came fourth (no UK entries in Top 10).
The “Economist Intelligence Unit’s quality-of-life index, 2005″ ranks Canada as the 14th best place to live in the world (the UK slides in at 29th).
Compared to the UK, Canada has higher life expectancy, a higher literacy rate and better income equality.

Remind me why “becoming like Canada” would be a bad thing?

That, Chris, is a completely valid point. But I adopted Labour as a centre-left/ordoliberal party. Clearly I have no place in the modern party or the historical one, but was merely seduced by Blair and his Clintonesque rhetoric. Damn him!

http://armchairnews.co.uk/2009/05/23/whos-afraid-of-the-bnp/

The BNP are not the problem, odious as they are. It’s Labour, who have promoted racist policies the hard right can only dream about. The centre left need to wake up to this brave new world. This is democracy, and the people (of the North) have spoken…

I don’t care a damn for the progressive cause. I care about the socialist cause and I don’t think the collapse of the Labour Party would do that any good at all. The Lib Dems would probably fill the gap and we’d become like Canada, with the left as the third party.

I don’t doubt they know what the BNP stands for. That’s why it’s such a shocking(!) protest vote.

He’s doing it purely to try and change perceptions. If the polls can say the Lib Dems are closeish to overtaking then he can try to put an end to the “wasted vote” rhetoric. You’re probably right, assuming nothing else bad happens to Labour, but it’s sensible to try and capitalise politically.

“No-one votes BNP without knowing what the party stands for. Even if BNP voters are not all racists, they are remarkably relaxed about giving their support to people who quite clearly are.”

Precisely. Politicians are now falling over themselves to say that BNP voters aren’t racist…they want the votes back so that’s sensible, but the reality is people are voting for a party that they know is acting at worst in a racist manner with racist intentions or at best in a racist manner with spiteful, childish, “you get to do it so why can’t I?” intentions. Ignorance is most certainly not a defence, not while there are no shortage of other non-racist parties that still wish to restrict immigration.