Hazel And The Nutters?

Hazel Blears is of course quite right. Jean-Marie Le Pen once got himself as far as the second round of a Presidential Election by playing on the undeniable abandonment of the French white working class to poverty, dereliction, crime, drugs and disorder.

Maps published on the Internet in the last week show a concentration of BNP members here in County Durham, with fully one per cent visible ethnic minorities and with no asylum seekers at all, and particularly in the east of the county, where Easington was the only district in the United Kingdom to be one hundred per cent White British at the last census. Have you ever been to County Durham in general and to East Durham in particular? No, it is not multicoloured. What much of it is, is poor. Grindingly, hopelessly poor. After eleven years of “Labour” government.

There are not twelve thousand eugenicists or Holocaust-deniers in Britain today. Of course there aren’t. So now that this membership list is available, perhaps someone in academia will undertake a proper piece of research, surveying all those listed, in absolute confidence, about their political views. Just what is it that only the BNP is addressing?

We may mercifully conclude that no major party is going to adopt a policy in favour of capital punishment. It is also just as well that none is going to adopt a policy in favour of an English Parliament.

But the three great political traditions in this country have at least potential answers to the questions of loss of sovereignty (to all three of the EU, the US, and global capital), of the consequences of that loss (from the Common Fisheries Policy to the Iraq War), of the importation of a new and compliant working class that largely cannot speak English, of the abandonment of Police foot patrols, of light sentencing, of the legalisation of drugs in all but name, of the erosion of the traditional family and its values, of the way in which the traditional white working class has come to be completely ignored, of institutional deference to Islam, of the admission of a fully armed and highly active terrorist organisation to government in Northern Ireland, of devolution without majority support in Scotland and with only twenty-six per cent support in Wales, of the oppression of Wales’s English-speaking majority, and of so much else besides.

Those concerns are shared far beyond those who do, or who would ever, support the BNP. Not least, they are very widely, deeply and strongly shared within the ethnic minority communities.

Of course, if any of our existing parties were anything to do with any of the three great political traditions in this country, then (like the underlying situations giving rise to the calls for hanging or for English devolution) these problems would never, and could never, have arisen in the first place.