Who Votes BNP?

If the BNP is really the left-wing party claimed by some, then funny how it endorsed Boris Johnson. Would he have won without that? Funny how Nick Griffin’s father is a former Tory councillor who gave his phone number as the Welsh contact number for Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership campaign (not that I blame IDS - I rather like his views on Europe, social justice, and the expendability of the Tories) and then answered it with the words “British National Party”. Funny how, of the main parties, only Tories have ever been found to be BNP members on the side. Funny how a lot of things.

Even at the last European Elections, the BNP vote was not very large absolutely or as a percentage of the eligible vote. In the latter case, it was about as many people of that mind as there are in any comparable country, and should have come as no surprise to anyone. It was only much larger than before as a percentage of the votes cast. This is the error at the heart of the smug assumption that the BNP could never win a Westminster seat: being the first past the post does not mean taking more than fifty per cent of the eligible vote, but only having the single largest share of the votes cast.

The old Monday Club and Alf Garnett constituencies now matter simply because they still vote whereas all sorts of other people, having no one to vote for, do not. They can therefore maintain a fairly major party of their own, rather than just having to vote Tory if there were no National Front candidate or when, especially in Westminster elections, they felt it pointless to vote NF, in either event rendering them invisible within the larger Tory bloc. But this only applies while several vastly larger constituencies are disenfranchised. So let’s re-enfranchise them.