Britain: Fascist elections gains a result of Labour betrayals
3 May 2003

"This is just the beginning. Now that we have a foothold and people know that we are capable of winning they will come out and vote for us and the whole thing will just snowball." - Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP)

The local elections on proved the BNP to be a growing threat. Standing a record 212 candidates it trebled its number of councillors in England from five to fifteen. It gained some seats in the Midlands, two in the borough of Sandwell, one in Dudley, one in Stoke-on-Trent. They also gained one each in Calderdale, and the Hertfordshire district of Broxbourne.

But its real breakthrough came in Burnley, Lancashire where it won eight seats - up five, making it the second largest group on the council and giving them real influence over local policies. Victorious Burnley candidates gave Nazi salutes as they left the count.
Two questions need to be answered: Why such successes now and how can we stop them?

The BNP have obviously benefited from the mainstream media's anti-asylum seeker racism. As the BNP candidate in Dudley West Midlands observed in an interview with the Guardian: "Well we've had quite a bit of luck in that newspapers have become obsessed with the asylum issue. I have not been able to believe the Daily Express. Issue after issue, day after day, asylum this, asylum that. So we now have the luxury of banging on people's doors with the mainstream issue of the day. It has legitimised us. We are mainstream now."

Far more important is that a crucial shift is taking place in the allegiance of working class voters. The historic party of the working class in Britain is in crisis and its supporters are deserting it in droves. Even before the election Labour had been abandoned by so many of its core activists that it could find candidates to contest only 70 per cent of the wards. The party's roots in the working class are withering. Blair's destruction of internal party democracy, his weakening the accountability of councils to local people, his introduction of highly paid chief executives and "professional councillors" are all deepening this process not arresting it.

Labour was widely tipped to lose 500 seats on 1 May - instead it lost far more, around 800. Wards, once solidly Labour, have been sliding deeper and deeper below the poverty line under two successive Blair governments. Record hikes in council tax (12 per cent on average) were announced just two weeks before the elections. They come alongside declining services, appalling neglect of council estates and cuts in leisure facilities for young people.

People in previously solid Labour areas now believe Blair and New Labour couldn't care less about them. They are right. Increasingly they hate the party for neglecting them and their basic needs. That is why the BNP is targeting the most deprived white working class wards in Britain, using racism as their bait, but posing as fiercely anti-establishment and taking up legitimate grievances, such as the 43 per cent pay rise that local councillors awarded themselves shortly before Christmas.

The racist tabloids have been peddling lies and myths about "soft touch Britain" offering refugees free mobile phones, luxury housing while locals can't even get on the housing list. A BBC poll in 2002 found that British people thought a quarter of the world's refugees ended up in Britain. The figure rises to a third among young people. In reality Britain takes a minuscule amount, less than 1 per cent.

The BNP plays on these propaganda myths with its claims that white British people are second class citizens in their own country, and that instead "we should be at the front of the queue, not the back" as one Sunderland organiser put it. Poor people, looking around at their neighbourhoods and what Labour has done to them, can easily believe that they come last, even after the refugees.

Despite Labour ministers expressing horror at the BNP's policies, they always respond by mimicking the racists "concerns". After the BNP's gains in Burnley last year, Labour started building detention centres (prisons) for asylum seekers. David Blunkett hailed the disproportionately severe sentences for rioting handed down to Asian youth in Bradford and Oldham, and "outlawed" beggars. In Oldham Labour MP and government whip Phil Woolas claimed that that Labour had to be "even handed" and fight racist attacks on white people- thus legitimising the BNP's campaign against claimed "racial attacks" on whites.

Labour can't tear up the roots of racism - they are too busy feeding them, both by social deprivation and by trying to compete with the BNP by playing the racist card.

The BNP is a fascist party. It is right to stigmatise them as Nazis. Right but not enough. Under the leadership of the Nick Griffin the BNP made a turn. After witnessing the success of the Le Pen's right-wing racist populism in France, Gianfranco Fini's rebranding of the old Mussolini party, the MSI, and bringing it into government in Italy and Jörg Haider's feat in getting the Freedom Party into power in Austria, Griffin persuaded the BNP to drop its tactics of violent street marches and focus on electioneering and respectability. The BNP swapped its skinhead boots for three-piece suits. Griffin is trying to construct a fascist front party, one that is based on racist populism rather than overt fascist race-war politics.

The BNP dropped the call for the compulsory repatriation and limited itself to halting immigration and encouraging voluntary repatriation. 'Respectability" and "normalness" are Griffin's constant advice to party members: "when on official party business, smart dress is a must! ... the overall impression should be one of professionalism, normalness and smartness." Griffin goes so far as to call the rival fascist group, the National Front "thugs".

Low profile tactics such as door to door sales and chats in front rooms and pubs replaced the street sales and skinhead demonstrations. Young fresh faced candidates were found to replace the old lags who could hardly stand as credible anti-crime candidates when they had criminal records as long as their arms! Though the latter still work as election agents, canvassers and bodyguards.

However the facade of respectability is paper-thin. On a Panorama documentary shown in December 2002, Mark Collett, the Young BNP's organiser let the cat out of the bag when he explained he would prefer to live in Hitler's Germany than in mixed-race Oldham and Burnley, and how happy people were under the Third Reich. The BNP was forced to remove Collett as head of Young BNP - but within five days he was back speaking alongside Griffin at meetings, and was selected to stand in Leeds as a BNP candidate in the May elections.

Despite the respectability ploy there is no doubt that he growth of the BNP will mean rising attacks on black and Asian people, as well as left paper sellers and anti-fascist campaigners.

Peiman Bahmani, an Iranian asylum seeker was killed in Sunderland last August. His partner connects his murder to the deepening racism and fear that is enveloping Sunderland as a result of the BNP's campaigning. And in Leeds when Anti-Nazi League campaigners were out leafleting last week a BNP supporter attacked them. He broke the finger of one and, waving his mobile, threatened to phone round and get a gang together to take care of the rest.

In the last year BNP supporters have attacked two left paper stalls in Leeds, and the car of a prominent anti-fascist campaigner firebombed.
We need to organise to meet this threat - self-defence to keep our movement safe, and community self-defence to keep out fascists and to break up their meetings and canvassing. We need united campaigns in the communities to isolate the fascists and combat the spread of racism. And we need a sustained struggle to win the unions to driving the fascists out of their ranks, to implementing a policy of total non-co-operation with fascist councillors and to launching propaganda campaigns to win their memberships support for a workers united front to smash the fascist threat once and for all by denying the fascists a platform.

Above all we need to build a new workers party, based on revolutionary politics, that can offer hope to thousands of the poorest white workers, that can organise the forces against capitalism's poverty, exploitation and racism, and get rid of it for good. That is the only lasting solution to fascism, which will always breed under capitalism.

Now read: Le Pen's visit to Britain to boost BNP ends in flight before anti-fascists, April 2004