Having To Invent Them

The white working class feels abandoned, Hazel Blears? Never! This realisation has only taken three and a half years since turnout in some of their areas was as low as one in three.

Someone is paying for the BNP, and I doubt that the BNP has the faintest idea who. Someone wants to get them into Strasbourg in June, so that association with them can be used to keep all sorts of things off the agenda. Mention those things, and you will "sound like the BNP". This has already started.

Anything addressing loss of sovereignty, whether to the European Union, to the United States, or to global capital. Anything adddressing the practical consequences of that loss, from the Common Fisheries Policy, to the Iraq War, to the imported credit crunch. Anything addressing the importation of a new working class whose members understand no English except commands, know little or nothing about workers’ rights here, can be moved around this country at will, and can be deported if they step out of line.

Anything addressing deference to Islam. Anything addressing the erosion of the traditional family and its values, not least on the airwaves in general and (because better is rightly expected of it) the BBC in particular. Anything addressing the proliferation of lap-dancing clubs. Anything addressing the de facto legalisation of cannabis. Anything addressing the deregulation of drinking and gambling. Anything addressing how the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have effectively lowered the age of consent to 13.

Anything addressing the Police not patrolling the streets. Anything addressing soft sentencing, the kind that gives rise to horrific calls for the restoration of the death penalty. Anything addressing the fact that the white working class has been left behind. Anything addressing the fact that no one ever mentions manufacturing, which still accounts for more than twice the GDP of the entire financial services sector, never mind the bailout-begging City alone.

Anything addressing the fact that the powers that be apparently cannot distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless, so that council and housing association tenants are therefore to lose security of tenure in order for Shameless characters to be moved in next door to them, or even in place of them. Anything addressing the indiscipline in many schools serving the working class, the kind that gives rise to horrific calls for the restoration of the cane.

Anything addressing the concern that Scottish devolution has never been supported by the majority of eligible voters in Scotland, yet is presented by all parties there, both as “the settled will of the Scottish people”, and as “a process rather than an event”, a “process” which can have no logical end except one massively unwanted “event”.

Anything addressing the fact that a mere twenty-six per cent of the electorate ever supported devolution in Wales, where it is being used to entrench the rule of those who live in English-speaking areas but who speak Welsh as a cordon sanitaire.

Anything addressing the fact that the government of Northern Ireland has been carved up between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a fully armed, highly active terrorist organisation.

And anything addressing the treatment of England, where there is now the kind of resentment that gives rise to crazy calls for an English Parliament, a potential BNP platform.

These valid and well-founded concerns are very widely, deeply and strongly shared within the visible ethnic minority communities. Yet the main parties are not addressing them. So the vacuum is being filled. By the BNP.

And when the BNP, heavily hyped by the client media, marches into Strasbourg, then these concerns will be off the mainstream political agenda once and for all. That is the plan.

So make your own instead.