Ian Austin
For decades, I’ve marched and demonstrated against the far right.
We were right to mount those campaigns, but almost a million votes for the BNP last year, councillors across the country and the shameful election of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons show we need to change our approach.
The old tactics of bans, pickets and protests no longer work. Legal action over membership rules is counterproductive too.
In the coming election, candidates from mainstream parties will have to take the BNP on at public meetings, win the argument and persuade voters the BNP are wrong.
Their appeal is based on exploiting resentment or alienation from politics, claiming people have been let down by the mainstream parties who they say neither listen nor care about their concerns on immigration, crime, housing or jobs.
So banning the BNP or refusing to debate won’t work because it risks reinforcing the impression already alienated and disenchanted voters have that mainstream politicians believe their views don’t matter.
And trying to relegate them to the margins means they can say what they like about themselves, their opponents and the country but avoid the scrutiny all other parties receive.
The BNP’s appeal is strongest in areas that have undergone great economic change, like my home town in Dudley where manufacturing industries have declined, or Stoke where the pits and the potteries have been hit hard.
And where there have been moribund mainstream parties, not listening to people because they’ve either given up or are taking their support for granted, there’s a vacuum for the racists’ easy answers.
It was this toxic brew of resentment and alienation, insecurity and fear, combined with complacency from the major parties that led to the BNP winning a council seat in Dudley in 2003.
Their victory gave the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider community such a shock that they worked harder than ever before to beat them.
And when I became the Labour candidate in 2005 we made beating the fascists our number one priority.
I moved my office into the ward they targeted, and we won the campaign door by door, street by street, listening to local people and acting on their concerns.
The BNP’s new respectable image masks a very ugly truth but if they won’t tell the truth about their views, we decided we had to do it for them, exposing the hatred beneath their campaigns and trusting the basic decency of the British people to reject them.
So when I meet people who are considering voting for the BNP, I point out that the party does not believe what normal decent people believe.
They are appalled to discover the BNP believe Black or Asian people can never be British, that they oppose any racial integration and even mixed marriages. They are shocked to find out the BNP believe ethnic minorities should be second class under the law so people should be given preference in the jobs and housing market and choice of schools on the basis of the colour of their skin.
We worked with Searchlight and its Hope not Hate campaign to build a broader community campaign and ensure we kept them out. Searchlight’s strategy of mass campaigning, the long hard slog of grassroots politics and community engagement and the use of new social media to mobilise thousands has seen similar successes elsewhere.
But the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s legal action against the BNP’s constitution is counter-productive.
It lets the BNP pose as the underdog and compounds the belief of the voters the BNP are targeting that their worries are being ignored.
And allowing them to claim they have changed their rules weakens one of our strongest arguments against them – that they are a racist party who judge people on the colour of their skin.
Bans and protests or court cases and legal arguments won’t beat the BNP. Instead, we should have faith in the decency of the British people and trust them to reject the racists.
If we tell the truth about what they believe, mobilise the wider community and work harder to listen to people and represent them than ever before we can not just beat the BNP at the ballot box but undermine the platform on which their support is based and win the battle against the racists for good.
Ian Austin is the Labour MP for Dudley North. This article originally appeared in the Observer.
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