Barking isn't Barking.

Since 2001 the BNP have made steady inroads into British politics, gradually building up a significant base in local councils, and expanding slowly but surely into other arenas – winning a seat on the Greater London Assembly and their highpoint last year, winning 2 seats in the European Parliament. It’s almost been a grudging acceptance by some people on the Left that the BNP’s growth could at best only be slowed in the short term, due to their high profile and the constant anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment in the British press. So it’s not surprising a lot of folk looked with dread to what was going to happen in Barking and Dagenham, the BNP’s stronghold.

It’s where the BNP’s leader Nick Griffin was standing against New Labour hack Margaret Hodge – who gave the BNP ammunition with her comments on housing – and it’s also where the BNP were the official opposition on the council. They had a real chance of both taking Hodge’s seat and taking control of the council – the BNP were throwing the kitchen sink at Barking, and telling their members and supporters they were on the verge of a breakthrough.

Instead they were annihilated – to the surprise of BNP supporters and antifascists alike. They lost all their council seats in Barking and Dagenham – Labour now hold all 51 council seats. Griffin’s vote was also down from 2005. He came nowhere close to challenging Hodge, and finished third behind the Tories. In his speech conceding defeat, Griffin said that they had lost the battle for Barking, and that the area was “colonised”

The BNP’s misfortunes weren’t limited to Barking and Dagenham – they lost councillors all across the country, and are down from 45 councillors to 19 (though English council elections don’t happen all at once, they have other councillors who weren’t up for election).

This result might seem surprising given the BNP got their best result, in terms of votes a couple of nights ago – over half a million. But we don’t know how much of this increase is due to the BNP’s ability to field many more candidates than they were able to in 2005. For example the BNP vote in Scotland in 2005 was only 1,590 but jumped up to almost 9000. On the face of it this looks like a fantastic boost for them, but in reality it is largely due to being able to increase the number of seats they can stand in. They only stood in 2 in 2005 (Glasgow Central and Glasgow North East), in 2010 they stood in 13.

The only direct comparison we can make then, is the vote in Glasgow Central and Glasgow North East – and in both seats, the BNP vote was down from 2005. It’s particularly surprising in the North East, where there’s a lot of concern about immigration and asylum seekers and the BNP nearly held on to their deposit in the by-election last year.

These results couldn’t come at a worse time for Griffin, who has already had to deal with internal difficulties in the BNP – like Mark Collet allegedly trying to kill him, mutiny in the Scottish BNP, their website owner walking off, as well as other discontent around Jim Dowson’s practical ownership of the party. The BNP’s electoral meltdown will inflame the anti-Griffin opposition in the BNP, who may now feel that Griffin’s holocaust denying past is baggage that the BNP can no longer carry, and a new leader more in line with the image of the “new” BNP must be found.

The smarter BNP activists will be asking why their vote collapsed. The reality is that across the UK people who were willing to vote BNP as a protest vote in elections were Labour were certain to win will no longer do so under threat of a Tory Government. From Glasgow North East, to Stoke, to Barking, traditional Labour areas are prepared to hold their nose and vote for Labour to defy the Tories.

Setbacks for the BNP of course aren’t solely attributable to the threat of a Tory Government – it’s likely that thousands of voters would have gone to the polls to vote in fear of what a BNP council would look like, and would have probably chosen Labour as the far lesser evil.

The setbacks for the BNP shouldn’t make us complacent though – the BNP’s ideas still have an an echo among hundreds of thousands of people, and relying on a Tory Government to scare people into voting Labour to keep the BNP out is no long term strategy. If people won’t cast protest votes for the BNP out of fear of the Tories, they won’t cast protest votes for the Left or the Greens. If Labour don’t stand up to the Tories the BNP could posture themselves as the real party against cuts, for British Jobs for British Workers etc.

This shouldn’t mean we don’t celebrate though – it’s squeaky bum time for Griffin and co, whose seats in the European Parliament now look a lot more fragile than before. If the Tories do take power, they may do to the BNP what Thatcher did to the NF – steal their rhetoric on immigration, and steal their votes. And in Scotland they will have a very interesting time upholding “British” identity if the union foists upon us a Tory Government we didn’t vote for.

4 Comments

  1. Their vote got squeezed most would have returned to the Tories and the high turnout meant that Labour benefitted from a lot more of its core voting in the locals. They wont be disappearing and will grow in comparison to the left which lost the champagne socialist Galloway and didnt get the Yaqoob result. The micro sects and the rest of the left would be better spending their deposits on community work rather than wasting it on electoralism.

  2. Jack says:

    I’m not one of these people that pays attention to the internal politics of the BNP, but I thought (quite possibly wrongly) that most of the opposition to Griffin was from people who didn’t like the electoral “pretend we’re not Nazis” turn, and who wanted to a more hardcore far right organisation. But am I wrong, and people want the BNP to be more like Geert Wilders etc, and therefore make more of an electoral breakthrough without the baggage?

  3. Liam T says:

    yeah Jack I thought that too – Griffin is the leader who HAS totally ‘modernised’ the party and is now letting in Jewish candidates and Sikh members and whatever else. eg. the NF have been trying to capitalise on the anti-Griffin dissent by presenting an openly Nazi alternative.
    as an aside, the NF almost saved their deposit in Rochdale, 4.9% and 2236 votes. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Front_election_results#General_election.2C_6_May_2010

  4. Sarah says:

    That’s certainly what I’ve taken from the Mark Collett and website scenarios but I just wasn’t sure what the deal with Charlie Baillie was…