The Bourgeois National Party

In the words of Rod Liddle:

"But this approach to explaining the BNP — the geographical anomaly/thick northerners paradigm — is running out of fuel. Five years ago it seemed to work when the media could point to racial tension in Burnley (with its no-go areas for whites) and Oldham and Bradford; a reactive vote, spurred by dumb, inchoate anger. But not now, surely. Because it isn’t just Barnsley. It’s Coalville and Shepshed in Leicestershire, where there are comparatively few immigrants; Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, where there are close to none, and Doncaster, where the BNP scored 12 per cent."

At this point, it is worth mentioning the BNP Assembly Member in London, whom the media completely ignore, because he gets in the way of their "thick Northerners" thesis about who the BNP are. When I arrive at King's Cross and get off a train from Durham, can you guess the first thing that I notice about London? And yet...

"There’s the lesson: if you media monkeys want to find out why the BNP did so well, then forget Barnsley, Stoke and Rotherham and start probing the attitudes in Islington, Notting Hill and Westminster. It is those opinions which are anomalous, even if the three main parties cheerfully subscribe to them."

"Most of those million people who voted for the BNP on Thursday are not fanatics at all; instead they are drawn from that section of the electorate which is least likely to struggle down to the polling booth, namely the largely unskilled, low-paid working class."

"But still they will not address the problems. Labour — and Tory — politicians insisted, as one, that the BNP votes should not simply be dismissed by the mainstream parties, but ‘taken seriously’. But they will do nothing about it, because the ideology to which the BNP voters (and millions of others) object is an almost ineradicable constant not just in the Labour and Tory parties, but within local councils, social services departments, the police, education departments, the courts, the media and every EU institution. They could not simply stop immigration, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. They cannot change the way council housing lists are drawn up, or do anything material to improve the lives of those who feel they have had their communities taken away from them and replaced with something ‘alien’. There is nothing the major parties can do about schools where 50 per cent of the kids don’t speak English and burkas are part of the uniform. Alistair Darling was right when he blamed Labour for the rise of the BNP (much as the ideological retreat of the Conservative party has allowed Ukip to survive) — but this realisation will not change anything."

Still, there is more to it than this. Mosley-esque toffs (as Nick Griffin sort of is) are one thing. But Andrew Brons is a retired lecturer living in Harrogate. The BNP is all-white, as its own constitution requires. But it is quite wrong to suggest that, apart from at the very top or quietly paying the bills, it is all working-class.