The British National party’s recent local election successes in Burnley and Oldham were the best of the 66 council wards it contested. The BNP also polled well in a further sixteen wards – including Sandwell, Sunderland, Kirklees and Wigan – some of which have no history of an organised extreme right presence in local politics, thus vindicating the party’s strategy of concentrating resources into exploiting the racial tensions and deprivation in northern inner cities.
Overall, this represented the best result for any far right party since the NF’s 1970s heyday. But in places such as Bexley and Tower Hamlets, in London, the party’s performance was a mere shadow of its former strength, and overall the party only polled an average of twelve percent in the seats they contested. However, this was much better than the UK Independence Party’s 5.8 percent average in 160 seats, or the paltry 6.5 percent cast for the Socialist Alliance in 200 seats. Equally, the 9,984 BNP votes cast in Burnley was more than double the number who had voted for them in the 2001 general election. In Oldham, in five wards, the party took an average of 28 percent share of the vote. Meanwhile in Wigan, in the Abram ward, which they had never fought before, the BNP took 23 percent of the vote.
There is no doubt that the isolated pockets of success for the party correlates closely with areas with large ethnic minority populations and/or high unemployment. The BNP’s 2002 strategy was to concentrate on economically depressed, ethnically segregated northern towns and try to win council seats where turnout is low and voters more willing to cast a protest vote, or where a number of independent candidates split the vote of the established parties.
The election of three BNP councillors in Burnley saw the party successfully exploiting split voting in wards in which three candidates were elected on the same ballot and, in one case, where the Conservatives failed to put up a candidate. The party therefore maximised its political and media impact, despite only polling twelve percent of the votes cast in the town. Even in Gannow, their most successful ward in Burnley, the BNP won only fifteen percent of the vote.
However, in the party’s former core areas of racist support their showing was mixed. They achieved their best result in Sandwell, West Midlands, where they took 24 percent of the vote in one ward. In nearby Tipton, a former stronghold, they only polled seven percent, or 334 votes. In London’s Bexley Northend ward, former site of the party head-quarters, they polled only seven percent, down from 27 percent in 2001. In Tower Hamlets the BNP candidate only managed a paltry 3.7 percent of the vote. This poor showing in London was the price paid for switching attention to the north of England, and this has led to criticism of Nick Griffin’s tactics from the party’s London activists.
The root of the BNP’s support lies in growing resentment against New Labour’s abandonment of the Old Labour electorate in poverty trap white ghetto areas of northern England, characterised by high levels of unemployment, low educational attainment, and high dependency on state welfare handouts. Local competition for council housing, amenities and community support are commonly understood to be ‘unfairly’ distributed towards the adjacent ethnic communities who are ‘favoured’ by ‘do-gooder’ liberal politicians. The white community also perceives itself as ‘threatened’ by periodic waves of immigrants and bogus asylum seekers
and blames endemic high unemployment, rising crime and drug abuse levels, and poor housing chiefly on scapegoat ethnic communities close by (when in fact they are usually even more deprived than the white neighbourhoods who resent them so much).
It is in this fertile political space, or opportunity structure, that the BNP thrives, offering quick fix authoritarian solutions to law and order, dolling out accusations of pro-immigrant favouritism, attacking the EU and ‘globalisation’ for exporting British jobs, and offering to end immigration and reverse the flow. Sadly, many of the BNP’s new electors
are former Labour voters. The majority remain male (although this is changing) and are either under 24 or over 50 and are generally unskilled. It is too early to decide what the implications are of the BNP winning in the relatively middle-class ward of Clivager, but local conditions are crucially important in
all BNP voting and this will be no exception.