VOTE AGINST FASCISM

Stepping stones to power

David Williams discusses why today's BNP presents a far more serious political threat than the 1970s National Front.

The British National Party is determined to contest more seats than any British extreme-right party ever before. With over 160 candidates declared for the general election at the time of writing, the BNP appears well on track to reach its target.

The figure the BNP has to beat is the 303 candidates that the National Front (NF) fielded in the 1979 general election. However, their average vote of 1.5% was the end of the road for the NF, which had overreached itself and imploded. Out of the ruins was born the BNP, founded in 1982.

Unfortunately there are few comparisons between today’s BNP challenge and that of the NF.

The NF had never really been interested in contesting elections for their own sake, preferring a more violent path. It believed it could rise to power if it could “kick our way into the headlines” through demonstrations and marches in an attempt to “control” the streets.

Nevertheless the NF did contest elections and occasionally achieved some notable results. In 1973 Martin Webster, the NF’s national activities organiser, polled 16% in a by-election in West Bromwich. This compares favourably with the 16% that Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, polled in Oldham West and Royton in the 2001 general election and the 17% that Richard Barnbrook won in 2005, the highest percentage achieved by the BNP at a general election to date.

Nick griffin leading a National Front march

However the NF was not geared organisationally towards contesting elections in the same sustained manner in which the BNP has focussed on cultivating wards and constituencies in recent years.

The NF believed that its support, which was concentrated in the West Midlands and Greater London, would simply filter outwards but did little to facilitate such growth. NF support experienced two distinct spikes related to the influx of Asian immigrants in 1972 and 1976. BNP support in contrast, although similarly concentrated in pockets of the country, shows some sign that it is transcending the regionalisation of its core support base.

Since emerging as an electoral threat in 2001-02, the BNP has fielded increasing numbers of candidates at local and general elections. It currently has 56 council seats, one member in the London Assembly and two MEPs.

BNP support appears less volatile than that of the NF, which has given the BNP a measure of electoral stability that the NF never managed to achieve.

There is another crucial factor, which invalidates any comparison with the 1979 general election. The BNP’s fortunes are still rising; the NF in 1979 was already in decline, which its appalling showing in the general election that year only helped accelerate. The party was in poor shape after being wracked by splits in the middle of the decade, which the temporary boost given to the NF by the arrival of the Malawi Asians in 1976 served to mask. The party polled strongly in the 1976 local election and in the following year fielded more than 400 council election candidates across the country, achieving 235,000 votes.

In the 1977 Greater London Council election the NF stood in all but one of the 92 seats and took 119,000 votes, over 5% of the total. In Hackney South the NF polled 19%. This was the peak of the NF’s electoral achievement.

The BNP is simply not in the same position. Griffin is more realistic about his prospects and is standing for Parliament in Barking largely to boost his party’s attempt to win the main prize, namely control of Barking and Dagenham council.

The BNP has implemented a “ladder strategy” – securing one tier of government before contesting the next – something that was beyond the resources and strategic imagination of the NF. However, it offers the BNP its most realistic chance of putting down enduring roots in Barking and Dagenham.

In addition, the BNP is operating in a different political context. In the 1970s Margaret Thatcher led a resurgent right-wing Conservative Party that won support on the back of campaigning against immigration. There was also a strong left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, which acted as a pole of attraction for working-class militants.

These factors are not present today. David Cameron is desperate to divest the Conservative Party of its right-wing image but is widely disliked by the type of working-class Tories who flocked to Thatcher in 1979. The left is considerably weaker than in the past and less involved in the lives of working-class communities. The vacuum, on the left and the right, is now being occupied by the BNP.

It has taken the BNP a long time to reach this position. After founding the BNP in 1982, John Tyndall perhaps unsurprisingly remained committed to the same failed strategy as he had followed while leader of the NF.

The BNP would have to wait more than a decade for its first whiff of electoral success, with the election of a councillor in Tower Hamlets in a by-election. The party lost the seat in the council elections seven months later and it would be another decade before it began to focus on elections and grassroots campaigning. Unlike Tyndall, however, Griffin has belatedly learned many of the lessons of the past, making the BNP and the threat it poses in the forthcoming general election a very different proposition.

Some argue that the BNP is overstretching itself by fielding so many candidates in the general election. However, the position of the BNP today cannot be compared with that of the NF in 1979. Contesting a large number of seats will give the BNP legitimacy, a free mail shot to millions of voters and television airtime. With many of its candidates likely to save their deposits, the BNP will see the money paid out as a good political investment.

MY COMMENT :

BNP can believe what they will. Personally I find their views repulsive. What I also care about is the adoption and then corruption of folk music - the tradtion, the heritage, the musicians and the heriatge they uphold that is being used for scurrilous political propoganda. I have been a folkie all my life - some 50 years and while music comments and satirises - it does now represent racist political parties - not for me. The Nazi party used Wagner - BNP want to use Kate Rusby - its obscene.

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