First the fear, then a sigh of relief, now the return to reality.
In the first major piece of new polling insight since BNP-QT, The Sunday Times’s David Leppard (a former-colleague of mine) has first sight of a Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) poll that says that BNP support in their core-vote communities like Stoke and Blackburn is set to rise by about 50% to 18%.
Some points:
1) The anger and frustration is still bubbling away.
After Griffin’s stumbling performance there was a temptation to hope for the best. That’s it. The worst is over.
In fact, BNP leader’s poor delivery on the night does not somehow miraculously defuse the sort of anger and frustration that readily feeds off the BNP’s brand of family-friendly racism and extremism.
Five drivers of this anger and frustration are particularly important.
a) In the heartland of Britain economic pessimism is still growing, despite the feel-good factor returning elsewhere in the economy. For instance, the manufacturing sector is still shedding jobs and public sector restraint is beginning to be felt at the front-line.
b) The Home Offices immigration regime is widely felt to be unfair, a sensation that is now being felt not only at the work-place and but also at the Job Centre. Mainstream parties refuse to address the issue, even in the run-up to the election, to the immense frustration of those who are losing out.
c) The EDL’s fortnightly marches, though often a damp squib, keep Islamism and “Islamification” in the headspace of these communities. Politicians are not trusted to solve this problem.
d) The war in Afghanistan – an important struggle of historic proportions – is increasingly confusing to voters and public support is falling. The BNP are taking a counter-intuitive, populist anti-war position.
e) Westminster’s reluctant efforts to clean up its act are a national embarrassment that re-inforces the sense of disenfranchisement felt by Britain’s dispossessed.
Despite his evidently poor debating skills and distasteful world vision, Griffin is far from a busted flush.
2) BNP support has spread beyond the pockets studied by the EHRC
A feature of the current “post-globalisation” burst of fascism – Britain’s fifth such burst in 100 years – is the use of the internet by the BNP to reach beyond the pockets of core-support in the Thames corridor, northern ex-mill towns and the West Midlands.
New BNP offices are being set up in unexpected places like Scotland and events are held in places like Salisbury, Thetford and Cheltenham. New communities are being targeted, such as veterans, agricultural workers and Christians.
The EHRC are wrong to focus their pollsters on a few areas because the politics of fear and resentment are seeping into dispossessed communities throughout the country – the results will be seen in the 2010 local elections when we’ll see red-white-and-blue victories spread like German Measles across the map in places around the country which have never seen the BNP before.
3) Westminster elections are not safe
It is an easy assumption that our first-past-the-post system is some kind of guarantee that prevents yucky extremists like the BNP from ever plonking their fat bottoms and cheap suits on the green leather at Westminster. This is probably still the case – they are unlikely to win a seat next year barring a disaster like the implosion of the Barking Labour party (this is a possibility). However, the hold the mainstream parties have on the country’s votes is diminishing – they had less than two-thirds of the overall vote in June ‘09 – as special interest parties (UKIP and the Greens) and regional-representative parties (eg SNP and Plaid Cymru) chisel away. The BNP are a mixture of both. In some three/four-way seats a candidate might win with less than 10,000 votes or less than 20% of the votes cast. The BNP are on 18% in three constituencies, according to the EHRC.
If the mainstream parties remain so highly focused on relatively few swing seats in Middle England, they could easily let extremists slip in the cracks where no one is paying attention.
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