The BNP are taking white working class Old Labour votes. That makes them your problem, not ours.

Good luck with that.

What is it with this white working class myth and BNP voters? It is just not true, I think it comes down to old class stereotypes, the BNP has a large scale middle-class fan base, not working class.

And they are the right’s problem because with the racheting up of tough on immigration banter, exacerbated by Labour’s anti-humanist stance on the issue it is feeding into the spirit of hate.

1.6% of the UK population voted BNP in the EU elections, they do not voice the concerns of the many or some kind of suffering silent majority, they are the party of bigots and racists with ridiculous policies that make for fine comedy material.

And so as not to pinch his words, Flying Rodent has a good beginner’s guide to de-constructing the BNP mythology right here.

[deleted]

A sensible discussion on immigration would involve pointing out that EU immigration is responsible for the biggest shifts in our population, and that stopping the darkies from coming here wouldn’t have any impact.

No impact? None whatsoever? If ‘engaging’ with BNP policies is bad, what you’re doing is just as bad – you’re effectively saying that because the BNP is immoral, anything they say must be a lie.

The concern about ‘darkies’, as you put it, is a concern about culture and not about skin colour. Skin colour just makes it easier to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’ and that’s why racists latch on to it. The BNP play upon the fear that foreigners who a very unlike ‘us’ will come to Britain and cause a permanent change in culture that the BNP would find displeasing. They believe that they speak for the ’silent majority’ in this regard, and they might not be totally wrong about that. The job for us – not so much as ‘lefties’ but as people committed to truth, honesty and common sense – is to explain why this is wrong, why the arrival of a pretty small number of immigrants from Somalia, Pakistan or other troubled places isn’t going to lead to Sharia law, violence on the streets, the rise of militant religion or social division. We’re hampered a bit by the fact that these things have actually happened to a certain extent, but rather than just say “well, I guess Enoch was right after all”, we have to articulate a more positive way forward. To be fair, the idea of a more inclusive national British identity that you put forward is the right way to do this.

We’re not going to get anywhere by pretending that the BNP are just making the whole thing up, or by somehow invoking EU migration as the ‘real’ problem – that’s swallowing a spider to catch a fly.

They should then respond by strengthening rights for workers in the lowest paid jobs so they’re not easily fired and replaced by cheaper Eastern EU workers.

That’s a bit incoherent. Surely giving British workers more rights will make them less attractive to employers than footloose EU migrants? For what it’s worth, I’d take the stigma away from being ‘on benefits’ by instituting a basic income system. I’d rather let companies employ who they like and redistribute the profits to those who lose out. Trying to lock EU migrants out of our labour market sits pretty oddly alongside an avowed ant-racist/anti-nationalist argument, in my opinion.

So A8 has nothing to do with it and Poles aren’t the second largest group of none-UK born immigrants in the UK?

Hmm. I’m unconvinced that you’d spike the BNP’s guns by saying that immigration is all the fault of the EU. They’d probably agree, and say that’s why we need to leave it.

As for where the BNP is drawing most of its support, it’s instructive that it’s predominantly in old Labour heartland seats, and that (as we’ve gone round and round on) most of its support is from people who don’t usually vote, and that of the rest, twice as many were Labour voters than for any other party.

For my money, the best solution to the ‘threat’ of the BNP would be to stop fucking talking about them all the fucking time. They’re an irrelevance. A democratic non-event. It’s as if the collected minds of the cabinet and the media were obsessing about the threat of Capt. Bill Boaks sweeping the country at the next election.

Comment 6 was in response to Frank Fisher and not Rob but with regards to Rob, the idea that the BNP are spokespeople for a broad church of British thought or fears for want of a better word is not something I believe.

Tonga Tim:

As I’m sure you’ve seen from the data, BNP voters mostly come from areas with very, very low levels of non-white population, fitting the old adage that ignorance is the precursor to bigotry because exposure to other humans from different backgrounds defies racist stereotyping.

And you are better than falling into the trap of assigning BNP voters to Labour, as if the Tories aren’t even a little bit racist and you disprove your own point by saying it is people who mostly never vote so it is not as if ex-Labour voters are racist, which is what your comment intimates a wee bit.

But I do agree that too much time and effort can be wasted on them.

As I’m sure you’ve seen from the data, BNP voters mostly come from areas with very, very low levels of non-white population, fitting the old adage that ignorance is the precursor to bigotry because exposure to other humans from different backgrounds defies racist stereotyping.

I’d be interested to know what counts as ‘very, very low levels’ of non-white population. Some figures to get us started:

Greater London’s population is estimated as 69.4% white out of a population of 7.5 million people. So about 5.2 million white people and 2.2 million non-white, give or take a few hundred thousand, with a ratio of approximately 2.4 white people to every non-white.

North-West England (where I live and where Nick Griffin is *spit* our MEP), the population is 92% white, and there’s 6.8 million people in the North West (so pretty comparable in size to Gtr. London). From this I can infer that we have about 6.2 million white people and maybe 600,000 non-white, a ratio of 10 white people to every non-white.

However, I’m not sure these figures tell us much about individuals on the ground. I’m from Liverpool originally, and whilst Liverpool is also around 92% white, the population is fairly mixed. Aside from some recent immigrant communities (Somalis, mostly), ethnic minority groups are fairly evenly distributed throughout the general population (though North Liverpool is certainly much whiter than South). In Manchester and other places without a port city heritage, things are a bit more balkanised. There are definitely ‘Asian areas’. Despite there being not many of these, it creates an appearance of ethnic minorities ‘taking over’, and I suspect that’s the idea that the BNP use to stoke up fear. Unfortunately (and I suspect this is a result of some deep-seated psychology), the stark differences in population that one sees in these areas creates a sense of ‘us and them’, and the BNP can paint a picture of immigrants taking over and pushing white people out, rather than simply co-creating a new local culture in partnership with white residents.

I’ve always assumed that, given a few decades, these presently separate communities will inter-mingle. At any given time in the past, it would have been easy to identify differences between people (say, Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish) which are now mostly forgotten. The challenge in the interim is to de-escalate ethnic tensions and pursue a policy of creating more united communities, mostly just by letting local people get on with it. The government should stop talking up immigration as a problem and just let people get on with their lives. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of power and prestige to be had in talking up the problems, and the responsibility for this is pretty widely dispersed. The BNP are just the worst example.

I’m just citing polling and voting data, and I’m not accusing Labour of anything. The best analysis we have is what I quoted – most BNP voters have never voted for another party. Of those that have, twice as many voted Labour as any other party. That’s not commentary, they’re just the figures. Back from the European elections:

0155 Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University says: The Labour Party were clearly the principal losers where the BNP’s vote went up most. In areas where the BNP vote went up by more than three points their vote was down by eight points, whereas where the BNP’s vote fell Labour’s vote fell by only five points. This three-point difference is much bigger than the equivalent statistics for the Conservatives and Lib Dems. In contrast, above-average UKIP increases in their share of the vote seemed to have hurt all of the Westminster parties. Thus, it seems possible that UKIP may have picked up some of the anti-Labour protest vote as well as pinching votes from the Conservatives.

Quoting yourself is always a bad idea but:

In other words, a large, perhaps the largest, element in the rise of the BNP is the death of the Labour Party. Their sheer unpopularity has deprived a large section of the electorate of a party to vote for. They won’t vote Tory, the Lib Dems are too middle class – who else is there? In Scotland, of course, there’s the SNP – how did they do? In Wales there’s Plaid. The BNP vote is almost exclusively an anti-Labour protest.

This should be at least partially self-correcting. Once back in opposition, Labour will be able to articulate the grievances of the poor far more stridently in the knowledge they don’t have to do anything about it. That, coupled with the Tories inevitable loss in popularity, ought to see these ghastly, god-awful racists safely back under the Labour banner. Problem solved.

It’s happened before, of course. People usually attribute the collapse of the NF to the fact that Thatcher pandered to them. Looking at where their support base was, it’s more likely that the (racist, stupid etc) anti-Government vote of the NF cheerfully returned to Labour, after leaving it during the 1970s.

On reflection I’d change ‘anti-Labour’ to ‘anti-Government’ – and note that my references to racist, stupid, ghastly people going back to Labour was a reflection of the anger that commentors were expressing at the BNP voters, and not an attack on Labout for being stupid, ghastly etc. Otherwise, I think that still stands as analysis.

Rob:

Here is a nice bit of data pr0n from the Guardian.

Tonga Tim:

I’m sure you are not but your words did come across as if you’re going: ‘the BNP is a Labour problem’ but clearly that is not what you are saying.

Whoops, I was going to do a few more sums on the statistics:

The UK as a whole is 92.1% white as of 2001, with 54 million white people at that point. This leaves us with 4.6 million non-white people in the whole of the UK. Slightly fewer than half of these live in London. I realise that my figures are going to be slightly out because I’m comparing 2007 to 2001, but a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation suggests that the UK excluding London has around 48 million white people and about 2.4 million none-white people, a ratio of about 20:1. The figures are being considerably skewed here by the inclusion of Scotland and Wales, which are overwhelmingly white. This raises the further question: if BNP presence correlates with being overwhelmingly white, why aren’t the BNP doing better in Scotland and Wales? Is it because the SNP and Plaid Cymru cater to the nationalist audience, leaving the BNP with only the hardcore nutters in these places? Or is it because they have healthier democratic credentials, having the devolved government that England-outside-London lacks?

Martin Coxall wrote:

The BNP are taking white working class Old Labour votes. That makes them your problem, not ours.

Unless you think that the abandonment of the white working class by the Conservatives is part of the problem, that is.

Rob @ 6

Excellent, you have articulated my view precisely.

The problem is that the word racist is used so loosely and indiscriminately that it has lost its value.

For example, which of the following is a racist?

a) Someone who believes that his own race is superior to another race.

f) Someone who Dave Osler disagrees with politically.

Thus, whilst the BNP leadership could be fairly described as racists, many of their supporters are so for reasons related to d) and e). So describing all BNP supporters as racists muddies the waters and devalues the negative power the term should have.

Rob @ 6

Excellent, you have articulated my view precisely.

The problem is that the word racist is used so loosely and indiscriminately that it has lost its value.

For example, which of the following is a racist?

a) Someone who believes that his own race is superior to another race.

f) Someone who Dave Osler disagrees with politically.

I have seen the term used on this site to describe all of the above, but would argue that it is only appropriate to be used in relation to a) and b).

Thus, whilst the BNP leadership could be fairly described as racists, many of their supporters are so for reasons related to d) and e). So describing all BNP supporters as racists muddies the waters and devalues the negative power the term should have.

Hi Rob, well, I would suspect that the BNP’s joy in Britishness doesn’t sit well with the Welsh and Scots, that and the Scots seem to have a fine tradition of mis-trust of fascists, there is some great footage of the BNP candidate trying to garner support in Glasgow East and getting horribly heckled.

I’m sure you are not but your words did come across as if you’re going: ‘the BNP is a Labour problem’ but clearly that is not what you are saying.

Well, it is a bit of a problem for Labour, in that it is losing votes to the BNP (per John Curtice above). It would also appear to be more of a problem for Labour than for the other parties. It’s not exclusively a Labour problem though.

pagar:

On your tick list of racist I would also have to give a tick to d) and e) as well, depending upon context of course.

Hang on Tim, now you are confusing me, you say Labour is losing votes to the BNP but before you said that the BNP voter never usually voted for anyone else? So once again we see these thin wispy strands connecting Labour voters with BNP voters, as if to pass the right wing buck onto Labour.

It could also be argued that as the Tories are a little bit racist anyway many possible BNP voters feel sated within the ranks of the Conservatives.

@ 19

And probably f) too.

20 – Daniel, the polling data says that most BNP voters are previously non-voters. Clearly no party has ‘lost’ their votes. However, of the 40% remaining, half used to vote Labour, and now don’t, with a quarter being former Tory voters, and an eighth former Lib Dems. Clearly on these figures, all parties are losing votes to the BNP, but Labour are unarguably losing relatively more than the others. Does this make Labour a racist party? Obviously not, and that’s not what I’m saying.

The John Curtice point is that in the Euro elections where the BNP vote was highest, it hit Labour’s vote disproportionately hard.

I’m not arguing any real political points here – just looking at what the data tells us.

pagar:

I don’t really know who Dave Ostler is that well.

Tim:

I understand the data but it is finite, not that many people vote BNP and it may not always break down in the way that particular bit of data describes. And I don’t rally think there is a political point to make here because of that.

@ Sunny,

Abso-blinkin’-lutely! Nail hit square on head.

I’m tired of pointing out to xenophobes that the “rise” of the BNP is only partially due to the government and is more influenced by exaggerated and downright spiteful press reporting on the issue.

And the comparison with the attention – sorry hysteria – given to the anti-immigration agenda of the BNP over the more widely accepted Green agenda of the Greens is a killer blow for the xenophobic headless chicken brigade.

In my opinion, this post and the comments to go along with it are a disaster.
I very much disagree with much written in the post, and then the childish-ness and blaming each other of the first two comments is depressing.

Firstly, the BNP is probably a racist party.
So are all the people who support them racist?
I think the author (Sunny) does a terrible job of attempting to tackle the BNP problem by just damning everyone as a racist. We live in a democracy, the BNP have such a profile because they have support from many people. The author is typical of those who stick their heads in the sand and refuse to listen to the concerns of voters.
I’m from south Essex originally, where there is a great deal of support for the BNP from people of middle and lower classes. Sticking your head in the sand and slating people as racists rather than listening to what they have to say is bad for everyone, except the BNP.
The BNP thrives on the idea that Britian is being taken over by foreign-loving liberals who don’t listen to/care about the “British” people. This post, to me, reinforces that view

DHG @2 is spot-on.
The stuff about the BNP being “working class” is one of the laziest myths as propagated by the press at large.

Surely there are working class BNP voters, but in my life, every single BNP voter I’ve met was of the petty-burgeoise type. Small entrepreneurs, a shopkeeper, a sound engineer and a low to mid-rank civil servant are the first four that spring to mind.
At school the only self-professed BNP/NF type (it was the early 90s) was the most loaded guy in my year…the first one to get a mobile phone, back in the days when 99.9% of people couldn’t afford them.

Coincidence? May be so.

But more than class, the common thread amongst the above mentioned BNP supporters was the fact that they were extremely gloomy, paranoid and with anger management issues.

One aspect whiuch is not discussed is that the Labour Party is now dominated by a white collar arts educated middle class. The blue collar and especially the craftsmen have very little influence in the Labour Party. Consequently identity politics has moved up the agenda while support for industry has been demoted . The Labour Party has not undertaken sufficient measures to ensure the UK has a large enough skilled workforce combined with an effective industrial policy so we can compete in the global economy. How can a blue collar family from Lancashire emotionally connect with Yvette Cooper or David Miliband? If the Labour Party still had MPs such as Don Concannon, Roy Mason, Gwyneth Dunwoody or Ernie Bevin, then I am sure the BNP vote would shrink.

Bearded Socialist re: Comment 25,

You are to be congratulated again. So far it’s been well below par.

My view is that it’s not so much an issue of the BNP’s traditional core supporters but rather the potential large support they might be drawing upon at the next election. So, there’s no point in talking about the BNP on this board if people are just going to dismiss their potential voters as racist thickos.

In the past year the financial meltdown has caused people to question the assumptions upon which the banking / credit / valuation systems were based. All well and good the orthodoxy was challenged at last.

With regard to UK politics I suspect we might be entering a new phase of political voting partly as a consequence of the financial turmoil / personal indebtedness / changing population / expenses. This phase will not be understood by considering the drift away from the left and shouting “racist!” at every possible opportunity – it just misses the point.

For all I know Nick Griffin may do well at the next election – I certainly hope he doesn’t and hope that he can’t hide behind the cover of a ‘Liberal Conspiracy’ who will ony challenge him on a single issue. Although the people of Daganham and Barking are well used to the ‘Essex Girls’ insults lets spare them the racist stereotype as well.
.

Rob @10, if you look at ward-level data (albeit from the horribly out-of-date 2001 census) it is the case that most wards which have elected BNP councillors have negligible non-white populations. However, they also tend to be areas which are close to other areas with a larger non-white presence. For example, the Barking/Dagenham wards where the BNP did well are (or were) still very white, but Barking town centre itself is visibly multi-ethnic.

When the non-white population becomes bigger it gets harder for the BNP to win, because there is a larger pool of voters who won’t vote for them, while their ceiling of support among white voters is pretty low. This is why, when they do get elected, they tend to scrape in on split votes with shares of around 35% or lower.

@Bearded Socialist

The author is typical of those who stick their heads in the sand and refuse to listen to the concerns of voters.
I’m from south Essex originally, where there is a great deal of support for the BNP from people of middle and lower classes. Sticking your head in the sand and slating people as racists rather than listening to what they have to say is bad for everyone, except the BNP.

No one can miss what numpties who vote BNP say. Their voices are shrill and over reprsented in the press. It is the detatchment from reality of those numpties that is the problem. The gap is created by the press who shockingly inhuman coverage of the issue of immigration creates the divisions and by the government who pandered to all the bull written up in the press.

I cannot understand this kind of pandering by professed liberals to the stupidity of a few people in BNP voting areas (whether working class or middle class).

What is the government supposed to do? Pull up the drawbridge and damage not just internal social cohesion – leaving the field open for racists to make hay and others’ lives a misery, but also irreperably damaging the reputation of this great country in the eyes of all other major – civilised – nations?

That must never happen.

Britain is not alone in dealing with modern migration flows. All other advanced nations are experiencing the same kind of phenomena as travel becomes easier and cheaper and education expands the horizons of those in the developing world.

No wall has ever been built high enough to keep other human beings out. Humanity is too intelligent and too resourceful. The xenophobes are just going to have to be told to get real.

And that starts with government pushing back the hysterical anti-immigration tide.

Ben M.
I really don’t like your take on “numpties who vote BNP”.

For what (little) it’s worth, my ideas on challenging the BNP are:
1) make the case for immigration
2) attack the myth that being British is a crime and that we’re under attack from foreigners, liberals etc.
3) make the case for others. The BNP don’t do well when other parties do well. They have a number of supporters that seems unlikely to rise above a certain point. If other parties do well they will have their share of the vote squeezed.
4) don’t insult everyone who votes for them.
5) try to ensure that politicans don’t so stupid things the public will hate e.g. duck houses

For what (little) it’s worth, my ideas on challenging the BNP are:
1) make the case for immigration
2) attack the myth that being British is a crime and that we’re under attack from foreigners, liberals etc.
3) make the case for others. The BNP don’t do well when other parties do well. They have a number of supporters that seems unlikely to rise above a certain point. If other parties do well they will have their share of the vote squeezed.
4) don’t insult everyone who votes for them.
5) try to ensure that politicans don’t so stupid things the public will hate e.g. duck houses

Which is what I pointed out above, and you say I’m damning all BNP sympathisers and the post is sticking my head in the sand etc etc.

First, BNP voters are NOT ex-Labour voters.

Secondly, most BNP voters do not come from areas with a big percentage of racial mixing – but come from areas with the lowest percentage of ethnic minorities in the area. So it’s time to recognise that a LOT of them do vote for the BNP on the basis of fear about ethnic minorities.

Trying to white-wash BNP voters by saying all of them are not racist isn’t good enough – a significant proportion are.

Thirdly, I’m all for making the case for immigration, and all for the govt recognising that immigration has made life difficult for people who need access to public services etc.

Fourth – I already addressed the point about non-whites coming here with their culture and religion etc. I’m happy to prmote a stronger sense of national identity and more strongly dismissing any sign of sharia law (in criminal law) or other things that destroy cohesion.

I’m already on the record as opposing religious discrimination in faith schools and going further in ensuring everyone speaks English and knows the rights and responsibilities as a British citizen. But I’ve said parts of it above.

Rob: That’s a bit incoherent. Surely giving British workers more rights will make them less attractive to employers than footloose EU migrants?

No, it would make it harder for employers to fire British workers just to replace them enmasse with Polish workers for example.

Thanks for response Sunny.

My own views on this come (in part) from a conversation I had in a pub in south Essex with some mate’s mates who were BNP supporters. At the time I was pretty unpleasant to them, in a down the pub in Essex sort of a way.

I think it was good to talk like that, and we were each pretty clear where we all stood. It’s an area where the BNP came 1st, 2nd or 3rd in each council election that set of elections.

Some of their supporters are racist, but some feel abandoned by politics and politicians. One said that Labour used to be the party of the working man but now no-one was. So to some extent their is a link with Labour supporters. But Labour don’t have a monopoly on the working class, and the BNP is a problem for all.

But the BNP is a legal political party so we have to accept that and engage with their supporters’ concerns or they will feel that “the liberal elite” is not listening to them, reinforcing why they support the BNP in the first place

Yes but the 1.6% of the UK population that vote BNP seem to do so on only a single issue, as surely they must understand that the majority of the BNP’s policies are either unworkable (indigenous cuts, foreign trade only with Australia, New Zealand and Canada) or just plain weird, like all the weights and measures nonsense and the idea that Britain has indigenous people, seemingly failing to acknowledge the complex make-up of any Britain.

And because they are a minority, it feels disappointing to engage frankly backward and idiotic ideas, doesn’t engaging with an idea sometimes mean a tacit acceptance of the premise and validating the concept?

And thanks Sunny for getting rid of the impostor.

Some of their supporters are racist, but some feel abandoned by politics and politicians. One said that Labour used to be the party of the working man but now no-one was. So to some extent their is a link with Labour supporters. But Labour don’t have a monopoly on the working class, and the BNP is a problem for all.

But I’m not denying any of this. The only way the Labour Party can deal with this is through community organising, better engagement on a local level, and focusing on helping deprived communities.
People feel let down by mainstream politicians, but that goes across the board. And that is not something ethnic minorities helped bring about. Some people are voting BNP because they are the anti-establishment… but to then tie that explicitly with immigration is not always the right link.

LAstly, why aren’t people talking about the growing Green vote?

Sunny, agree on the Green’s who of course beat the BNP in the EU elections but got hardly any press for doing so.

this is a BNP topic, if we want to do something on minority parties’ votes that’s cool.

I think the link between alienation and the BNP, to me, comes from the Mail, Express, Telegraph and Murdochs grubby paws.
BNP and non-BNP people that i’ve talked to believe that the British are strangers in our own land, that we’re down trodden and at the back of every queue due to political correctness, liberal elite etc. etc. you know the lines.
They see the BNP as cutting through this, and so are drawn to them. The BNP do have other policies, which tend to be populist and non-liberal. Some say they are far left, some say far right so it’s probably fair to say that they’re somewhere at that end of the doughnut.
Lots of people sympathetic to the BNP were carping about how Griffin wasn’t allowed to talk about their wider policies on Question Time.

35. Sunny H. Some areas returning Labour MPs have all the similarities of rotten boroughs pre Reform Act. Much of politics is about perception and connecting emotionally to the electorate . The problem is that many middle class Labour MPs have never done, what many working class people, call a proper job and therefore are unable to connect emotionally to the working class. Often to connect with another person requires shared experience. A guardsman who has come from a run down council estate shares an emotional bond with an Eton educated aristocratic officer because they have faced danger together in Iraq and Afghanistan. How can David Miliband, Harriet Harman or Yvette Cooper emotionally connect to working class families, living in a run down crime ridden council estate, in an area where industry has long gone?

DHG wrote:

Yes but the 1.6% of the UK population that vote BNP seem to do so on only a single issue, as surely they must understand that the majority of the BNP’s policies are either unworkable (indigenous cuts, foreign trade only with Australia, New Zealand and Canada) or just plain weird, like all the weights and measures nonsense and the idea that Britain has indigenous people, seemingly failing to acknowledge the complex make-up of any Britain.

Yes, but being unworkable isn’t always a barrier to policy being enacted – the current government has enacted some daft policies and so did the Tories before them. The weights and measures nonsense seems odd to anyone educated after a certain date, but probably not at all daft to anyone educated before that date. People do still talk in terms of pounds and ounces for many things, after all. I think there’s a deeper point here, that whilst metric measurements are more ‘rational’, this only applies if you’re regular called upon to do sums using measurements. Most people aren’t, and if they find ‘5 ounces’ easier to understand than ‘12 grams’ then the advantage of metric measurements is nil or negative.

As for the ‘indigenous’ argument, part of the problem is that there certainly are cultures around the world which do promote the idea of ‘indigenous’ people. Our own history education in schools spends a fair amount of time talking about the indigenous people of various places (certainly I studied the native Americans when I was at school, around 1994 or so). It might be obvious to you or I that Britain has no definitive indigenous population and it wouldn’t even matter if it did, but there are plenty of people who insist that greater respect be shown to various indigenous groups around the world merely by virtue of their status as indigenous people. The idea exists and the BNP want to apply it here. It’s wrong, and it may be nonsensical, but it’s a mainstream idea in many places.

And because they are a minority, it feels disappointing to engage frankly backward and idiotic ideas, doesn’t engaging with an idea sometimes mean a tacit acceptance of the premise and validating the concept?

The only premise that needs acceptance is that the BNP feel their own views to be valid. The premise can still be undermined and countered with suitable evidence, surely?

There seems to be a division here between those of us who want to try to understand the BNP and those who don’t. There’s no point in giving the BNP’s views a totally uncharitable reading because you will immediately conclude that they are nonsensical, weird and idiotic, and there’s not really anywhere you can go from there. The only conclusion that can flow from this is that anyone who votes BNP must be a nutter. I’m trying to view the BNP’s views in a slightly more charitable light, with a bit more empathy. I guess I am accepting some of their basic premises in order to understand where they lead. Bearded Socialist is doing the same thing. If you find this unpleasant or uncomfortable then you’re under no obligation to do it yourself, but I don’t think you’re achieving anything by refusing.

As part of my job, I’ve been on a few courses about sales, and one of the key messages that gets drummed into you is that you must “live in the customer’s world” and “understand their problems from their perspective” in order to persuade them to buy your product. I suspect that the same holds true for political parties, and that in order to figure out how to persuade a BNP voter to vote for someone else, you first need to figure out how a BNP voter might think.

Bearded Socialist:

Please ignore the idiot who was on the Internet at 1.11 this morning.

Rob:

I do agree that unworkable is not a complete barrier but I do feel that unworkable is too kind a word for the quite frankly, mental policies of the BNP, I really do not feel that a BNP voter examines the entire manifesto (Capital and corporate punishment and chain gangs used to strengthen the UK’s coastal defences?) but goes for the hot button issue of immigration, where also, their ideas are unworkable nonsense; just on the issue of racial interbreeding alone, never mind repatriation and all that guff.

Also, defending a return to imperial measures is a wee bit of an odd thing to do, you seem to be justifying silly policy in order to fit reality to your own opinion.

I struggle with the idea indigenous of people also because the British Isles doesn’t have any and the race that the BNP mark out as indigenous is in itself an interbred race with a complex gene pool and was not indigenous at all in the early history of the British Isles.

I mean, when you have to stretch a point that much, it inherently becomes really silly.

To be honest Rob, your approach makes me very, very uncomfortable, it is appeasement and empathy with racists, fascists and bigots; if you replace the word BNP with, for example, the Nazi Party of Germany or the far right political groups in Europe at the moment it would read far worse.

And crucially, you seem to be under the impression that the BNP has a large scale grip on the UK population, when it does not.

So you’ll have to forgive me for not giving the BNP a sympathetic ear.

What a wonderfully articulate post from DGH – he is clearly a product of left wing education and expresses himself like a true socialist.

@ 40 “I struggle with the idea indigenous of people also because the British Isles doesn’t have any and the race that the BNP mark out as indigenous is in itself an interbred race with a complex gene pool and was not indigenous at all in the early history of the British Isles”.

You can argue that NO countries have an “inginous” race (although I think most countries correctly use the word people rather than race), or that all countries do. What you cannot credibly argue is that some countries do and some don’t, as if there is some arbitrary test of “indiginousness”.
As others have said, even under nu labour, a comprehensive education will teach that aboriginees, native Americans, eskimos etc are indiginous, usually just before saying how terrible it was when the Imperial West invaded “their” countries and took “their” land – and yet by your logic they had no more right to it than anyone else and should have just shut up and celebrated the diversity of their complex and ever changing society ?

Well the one involved genocide and the other involved, um…. better food?

“Some areas returning Labour MPs have all the similarities of rotten boroughs pre Reform Act”

Apart from the fact that they have nothing in common. As you would know had you done even five seconds of research.

Indeed you could Matt but in your effort to prove the falsehood that the UK has an indigenous population you seem to have skipped over a point well by Left Outside and I’m not sure why you are contorting yourself into this position in the first place in order to justify BNP policy?

Bearded Socialist

“I think the author (Sunny) does a terrible job of attempting to tackle the BNP problem by just damning everyone as a racist. We live in a democracy, the BNP have such a profile because they have support from many people. The author is typical of those who stick their heads in the sand and refuse to listen to the concerns of voters….”

Well said.

Firstly the fascists are the UAF who support Iran, hamas and hezbollah who want to wipe Israel and Israeli Jews off the map. Unlike them the BNP accepts Israel’s right to exist. Secondly, Nick Griffin is in the process of reforming his party, ditching all the old clause 4 style baggage of the past, and bringing together a party of black and white loyal British people, who will challenge the One-Party-State corrupt liberal elites, end multicultural balkanisation, Islamisation and mass immigration and bring Britain’s sovereignty back from Europe.

Thoughtly, you wear your racism like a badge a pride, you also bandy about the term fascist with no real knowledge of what it means and if you think some window dressing by Griffin hides the fact that the BNP is racist, you’ve another thing coming.