Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

In the English local authority elections of May 2006 the BNP scored a phenomenal success in Barking & Dagenham, a much-enriched district on the eastern edge of London.

The local Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, picked up a good deal of the blame for the BNP’s performance.  Instead of refuting its line on preferential housing allocation for migrants, she had managed to make it almost respectable for English residents to vote for the local BNP candidates.  There were calls - unheeded, naturally - for her to resign from her government post in the Department of Trade and Industry. 

Now, hard on the heels of Gordon Brown’s little eco-stratagem - the planned building of thousands of new council houses - Ms Hodge has outraged Labour supporters in the same way again.  Writing in the Observer she declares:-

A message to my fellow immigrants

In our open, tolerant country, there are, thankfully, few issues that remain taboo.  But, motivated by the fear of both legitimising racism and encouraging the extreme right, migration is one.  Yet for many voters, it continues to be a top issue.

My constituency of Barking in east London has experienced rapid change, moving from predominantly white neighbourhoods to many multiracial neighbourhoods.  At the same time, my constituents are facing other challenges.  Young families on low wages cannot afford to buy a home and the council house stock has shrunk with tenants exercising their right to buy.  These young families enjoy few choices.

... For some, it is easy to blame the new families for the frustrations they feel.  As people living in Barking see new faces and hear new languages, they often link the problems in their community with the migratory changes.  Unless we listen, we shall be unable to convince people that we are on their side as they learn to live with new neighbours in the tolerant and strong multiracial society we on the liberal left desire.  This stifled debate means we have missed the opportunity to articulate more clearly the huge benefits to our economy, our culture and the evolving nature of our Britishness that migration brings.

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There have been two posts on the BNP website covering last week’s election results.  One of these is a very brief region-by-region round-up.  The other is a Nick Griffin essay dealing with causal factors and forward-strategies.  Griffin is good value and worth a read, particularly this:-

So here’s the bottom line: Several years ago our improvements in our own electoral machine caught our opponents off guard and gave us the string of victories that made us the story of successive elections.  But the shock and humiliation of losing to the BNP forced the other parties to up their game.  So from shock firsts we’ve been forced down to good but shell-shocked seconds.  And that is where, by and large, we will stay unless we learn the lessons of May 2007 and take our game up a level as well.

Labour and the LibDems have learnt to concentrate on mobilising their own core vote (the elderly, ethnic minorities and the local functionaries of Brown’s welfarist empire), while their leftist allies combine expensive smear sheets and phone calls targeted at especially at postal voters to depress our vote.  This is why, from key seats up and down the country we got reports of sitting Labour councillors trudging round the streets putting out their election addresses by themselves.  Their activists weren’t sitting on their hands, they were manning telephone banks to identify pro- and anti-BNP voters and work on them accordingly.

As one would would expect, Griffin was not alone in giving his opinions to fellow nationalists.  Various nationalist websites have been offering interesting interpretations of the results.  There is some optimism, some stubborn pride.  But the overall tenor is undeniable disappointment.  After all, the omens had been so good.  The candidates in their canvassing and the leafletters on their rounds were providing plenty of positive feedback.  The customary barriers to the Party - a blackened reputation and the power of the main parties on the ground - seemed less formidable.  Nationally, the Labour Party was weaker than at any time since the Foot era.

But it all went ever so slightly sour.  An uneasy feeling stalks the nationalist right that something systemic, something not ameliorable is at work in all this.  Sure, practical explanations like Griffin’s - all those Labour activists “manning telephone banks” - are comforting.  They offer a way forward in an “anything you can do ...” sense.  But they reduce everything to the level of engine room politics.  Are electoral mechanics really where success for the Party resides?  Is that, as a world-weary Peggy Lee once sung, all there is?

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This evening the BBC News website is running an article headed Violent immigrants fuelling crime:-

Young immigrants from violent and war-torn countries are fuelling mayhem and murder on London’s streets, according to a new report.

Research from Scotland Yard says increasing numbers of youths with significant post-traumatic stress are having a negative impact in the city.

There are currently 171 street gangs operating in London says the report.

... Some 43% of gangs are estimated to have more than 20 members, while 18% have more than 50 members.

Although 90% of gang participants are male, there are believed to be three female gangs operating in London, and women are often used “to mind weapons” for brothers and partners.

The document states that half of gangs identified by police intelligence are based in the African-Caribbean community.

Now, I checked the Met’s website to see if there was a press release about this rather interesting new research.  There wasn’t.  But there were seven “news headlines” listed to the right of the front page, on each of which I clicked.  The first link was to an all too typical “triple success story”.  That was followed by two links to the jailing of the Crevice terrorists, then one to another six charged with terror offences, one to a top-brass speech on counter-terrorism, one to the jailing of four bank-robbers and, finally, one to a typically surreal PeeCee campaign the Met is running under the name of Communities Together.

Elsewhere on the front page, and in true soviet style, the Met talks up its role in making London one of the safest cities in the world with, apparently, falling crime and rising detection rates.

Meanwhile, the BBC website’s leading front page news story concerns growing pressure for a public enquiry into MI5’s handling of 7/7 intelligence.  The lead story on the “England news page” ventures outside the capital to vibrant and unhideous Gorton in Manchester, where a “youth” managed to kill his 12 year old sister by shooting her in the head.

Alone against this relentless torrent of diverse horrors, the BNP is putting up 880 candidates across the 10,500 council seats to be contested this Thursday in 312 English local authorities.  That is immeasurably more realistic than the 1,000+ claimed by UKIP and the 1,419 of the Greens, and, of course, only a fraction of the effort being mounted by the three diversity-celebrating, mainstream parties.  But it still represents a great step forward from the 363 who stood a year ago in that tranch of Britain’s 21,892 council seats where elections were then due.

Media-wise, there has been some speculation that BNP councillors in Sandwell could increase from four to ten, and maybe snatch control of the council in the process.  But by and large the concentration of the press and TV has been elsewhere, and little has been said about Nick Griffin’s boys and girls.  The party itself, though, is brim-full of confidence from the warm public response it is receiving - even to the extent of running an article on its website advising giddy activists to keep their feet on the ground.

So how high can they do?

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Just forty-eight hours of campaigning remain for the candidates in Super Thursday’s three elections in Britain.  So this is as good a time as any to hazard a guess as to the outcomes.

Or possibly not.  There aren’t many experienced pundits prepared to do so because of complications inherent in all three elections.  The council elections in England are horribly complicated because parties stand in some areas but not in others.  Labour has candidates in only about half the seats on offer.  No party is standing across the board.

But the list systems employed for the Scottish and Welsh Assembly elections don’t make prediction easy, either.  They were plainly designed to maintain the liberal-left pro-Westminster status quo, and to prevent nationalism (that’s the constitutional variety, of course) from ever placing a hand on the tiller.

In Scotland, 73 of the 129 MSPs are elected to single-member constituencies and 56 are chosen for one of eight regions using proportional representation.  The cost of this system to its architect, the late Donald Dewar, was the Genscherisation of Scottish politics.  Labour, as the eternal largest party in Scotland, may never be able to govern alone.  A permanent place at the governing table was, therefore, the Scottish LibDems for the asking.

When I last ventured into Scottish political punditry, on January 13th I presumed that the SNP would be forced to make common cause with the Scottish Conservatives.  At the time Labour and the SNP were pretty much neck and neck in the polls, but headed in opposite directions.  So I predicted that the real poll would give the SNP 35% and Labour 30%, and these figures are now reported by the major polling organisations.

But I also predicted that sufficient shy Conservatives would support David Cameron and his Scottish leader, Annabel Goldie, in the voting booth to make an SNP/Con coalition viable.  In fact, the opinion polls have not been kind to the Conservatives, and it seems unlikely that they will gain on their 18 MSPs from the last Parliament.  Meanwhile Labour is eyeing a “traffic light” coalition with the Scottish LibDems and Greens.

The LibDems, however, are not to be trusted.  They will want more from Alex Salmond than the Environment portfolio that would go to the Greens in the Labour’s three-party arrangement, and they will get it.

One thing is certain.  Whichever way the LibDem’s eventually go they will try to present the decision as one of high principle.  Re-enter an administration with Labour and they are acting on their first duty is to preserve the Union.  Go with Salmond and Co and they are acting on their first duty to the Scottish electorate, who made the SNP the largest party in the new Parliament.

So, am I going to predict what evil little thoughts are spinning round and round inside LibDem brains?  Surprisingly, yes.  It is always possible to seek “assurances” and “guarantees” on a referendum three years in the future.  But how, if such are forthcoming and are demonstrably reasonable, can the LibDems reject them and face the electorate again without bringing the entire system into disrepute, and risking grave and lasting damage to themselves?

No, they will follow their ultimate self-interest.  It will be Salmond who leads the next administration at Holyrood.  And everything else I wrote about on January 13th, including the forthcoming death of the Labour Party (to the lasting benefit of the BNP), will come to pass in the fullness of time.

Today the Times ran a lengthy and entertaining interview of Nick Griffin.  It was conducted on the hoof by Martin Fletcher, and gives a generally fair flavour of the man, his views and his supporters.

Griffin has earned his £1,800-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls “enriched” areas such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.

Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic acquittal in last year’s race-hate trials.

... He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster. He opposes miscegenation “because most people want their grandchildren to look basically like them”. If the liberal elite had its way, the world would become “a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured citizens by the million”.

...  In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are “lovely English towns and we believe they should stay that way. They can’t if there are high levels of immigration,” he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters. It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.

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My thanks to a seriously untangled guy named Smith for this hard-to-find story from The (Glasgow) Herald:-

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission of Equality and Human Rights, said there was a clear choice facing communities who are witnessing an influx of migrants.

Speaking at the STUC annual congress in Glasgow he said the choice was between welcoming people or fearing newcomers.

He urged people to turn their backs on racists in communities and at the ballot box and showed his contempt for the British National Party by saying they should be treated as “less than human”.

He said: “We will see communities standing up for asylum seekers who want to live as part of that community. We will see the Scottish government welcoming them as part of the fresh talent initiative.

“But we will also see the ugly face. We will see those who will assault a woman and baby simply because they are foreigners.

“We as a society have a choice. In England we have the BNP. The path is to keep them out.  We need to change in an inclusive way.”

I haven’t heard about any dramatic breakthrough yet in the search for those who will assault a woman and baby simply because they are foreigners.  But let that pass, because the big news is that Mr E has pulled off another of those smooth political hip wriggles for which he is so famous.  “Less than human” he says, is how BNP members should be treated.  A real headline grabber, one would think.  And surely that was what Trevor was hoping.

But, was he legal?  Can you imagine Nick Griffin and Mark Collett getting away with such a statement about Pakistanis?  If they were worth twice prosecuting for calling Islam “a wicked, vicious faith”, surely they would have been lynched for saying what Phillips just did.

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The lead story in today’s Times may prove the last Labour straw for the middle-class.

Secondary students will be offered cheap school transport under plans to open up popular schools in wealthy areas to pupils from poorer neighbourhoods, as well as to promote eco-friendly travel.

Pupils will be charged a maximum of 50p a journey for travelling on school buses or chartered coaches, or for passes for public buses or trains, the Department for Education will announce today. The subsidised travel will be available from September 2008 to all secondary school pupils in 20 pilot local authorities, regardless of ability to pay. Poor children will not have to pay at all.

The plan is part of a move to end the middle-class stranglehold on popular schools in expensive areas and to encourage sustainable travel for pupils by reducing the number of cars on the school run.

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