The End of The BNP

Panorama will tonight catalogue its financial woes and irregularities.

That the BNP vote comes from traditional Labour supporters is lazy drivel, and based on the assumption that Labour could ordinarily expect every vote cast in, say, the North West, or the East End of London. Without exception, ward by ward and box by box, BNP support is in the relatively more upmarket end of the given town or locality, however little that may be saying in any objective terms. At Glasgow North East, the Labour vote held up sufficiently that Labour kept the seat, while the Conservative vote went down so far and the BNP vote went up so far that they were almost even at the end.

If the BNP has a consciously working-class following, then it is the only Fascist party in the world ever to have had one. It does not. It is like all the others, including the British Union of Fascists and the National Front in their respective days: a vehicle for those who see themselves as a cut above their “chav” neighbours; for, in British terms, “Tories” in Labour areas. Interviewed as Leader of the Opposition on 27th January 1978, Margaret Thatcher was asked if she was trying to bring the National Front’s supporters back to the Conservative Party. “Oh, very much back, certainly,” she replied. The full text of that interview now appears on the website of her Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

Far from being the voice of the self-identifying white working class, the BNP could not manage an MEP in the North East in 2009, and I am not sure that it has any councillor above Parish or Town level here. It certainly has no one on the newly unitary Durham County Council, nor had it on any of the preceding District Councils. Are the North East in general and County Durham in particular not white enough for them, or not working-class enough from them, or both? In any case, the BNP is now going the way of the NF before it and of the BUF before that. They, too, made a lot of noise, but nothing much more than that, for a few years, and then went away. It will be 30 or 40 years before the same thing happens again.