We, The Rabble

A New Labour functionary of my acquaintance has just emailed me to say that my “revival” of the old mining “antipathy” towards Churchill was “the worst case of rabble-rousing that I have seen in a very long time”. That person is several years younger than I. Ho, hum.

The BNP electorate is unreachable by anyone else, being the race-obsessed rump that used to vote NF if it could and Tory if it couldn’t, which was most of the time, so that it was mostly invisible. The BNP vote is not large absolutely, merely as a percentage of votes cast in these days of mass abstention. The key is to bring those other people back to the polls.

One way of doing so is to recognise that the BNP’s greatest success-by-default has been in the North (although the BNP’s failure to make any sort of progress in the North East rather gives the lie to idea that it is a working-class movement), just when the psephological impossibility of a Tory overall majority puts us on the cusp of a Tory minority government merrrily dependent on the party that the Tories at Westminster already call “the Cameron Highlanders”, part of the family, the SNP. The SNP, in turn, has given up on independence and become a pressure group for ever-greater central government spending in Scotland. That would be Salmond’s price. And Cameron would gladly pay it.

I don’t like the regions, so let’s say the seven pre-Heath counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. People here would take a lot of convincing that some of those places were in the North, but even so. A much larger population than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. A need for a voice, even more urgently than ever, and offered nothing by a rising “England” lobby which, as its economic policies make clear, knows nothing about anywhere outside the South East and those parts of East Anglia nearest to London. No voice means no votes, which means the BNP by default. I’m doing my bit. What are you doing?