The British National party has become the most successful far right party in British electoral history. Its ability to capture local seats, from former mill towns in the north-west to ‘white flight’ areas in outer London, underline the BNP’s ability to generate success hitherto unknown on Britain’s far right.

The 2007 local elections represent another chance for the party to score significant gains. The previous year saw the BNP’s strongest performance in local elections to date, with the party fielding over 360 candidates. In one locality – Barking and Dagenham – the party saw 11 of its candidates elected, taking the total number of BNP councillors to almost 50. In terms of how the party will do in the upcoming elections, the general consensus among academics and anti-fascist campaigners appears to be one centered upon further gains. For instance, in the Sunday Times recently one researcher from the Elections Centre at Plymouth University predicted significant BNP gains.

Meanwhile, the anti-fascist Searchlight organisation has warned that the BNP constitutes a serious threat in over 90 local wards. Particular areas ‘at risk’ include Sandwell, Stoke, and Dudley. The elections will also see the BNP standing candidates in both the Welsh and Scottish elections.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this debate is not necessarily the BNP gains, but rather the apparent inability of anti-BNP campaigners to establish a coherent and effective response. This point is best underlined by considering recent approaches to the BNP advocated by various organisations and figures.

For Searchlight, the answer lies in intense activity spread across an ‘anti-fascist fortnight’, involving days of action, the distribution of targeted localised material and high-profile support from mainstream politicians and media outlets. Between Searchlight and Unite Against Fascism, however, there exist ‘substantial political differences’. For the chairman of the latter, Ken Livingstone, the answer lies in openly criticising the absence of a general ‘outcry’ against the BNP in the national media. Campaigns should openly confront the party’s racism and intolerance.

Arguably, however, this point is fundamentally misguided. As noted in one study of the National Front, support for the far right in Britain has often arrived despite public awareness of neo-Nazi propensities among its leadership. Merely screaming and kicking about anti-semitism and the personal political histories of individual BNP activists, while mainstream parties become embroiled in party-funding debates, is simply not going to work.

Thus others, such as Catherine Fieschi, the director of the thinktank Demos, have warned against alarmist reactions. Rather, the success of the BNP has been seriously overstated, both by the mainstream media and campaigners. Compare, for instance, the handful of far right councillors in Britain to the participation of the Austrian Freedom party and Italian National Alliance in national governing coalitions. Or consider the very real powers held by French Front National mayors in cities such as Orange, Toulon and Vitrolles in the 1990s.

In these areas, the FN introduced censorship against left-wing publications in local libraries, sought to expand the local police force dramatically and introduce financial incentives to families having ‘French’ babies. Compare this to the marginalisation of BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham when they sought to introduce a ban on halal meat and Islamic headdress from public buildings. At the same time, others have produced evidence suggesting that as many as 18 to 25 per cent of the British electorate would consider voting BNP.

Interpretations aside, what is certainly unquestionable is that the political opportunities now confronting the far right are more favourable than perhaps at any other time in recent history. It seems likely therefore that the party will make modest gains in the local elections. Disillusionment with continuing mainstream party convergence, inflamed debates over Islamophobia and what is to replace the seemingly doomed multicultural model, and the way in which the far right itself has sought to generate an increased sense of political legitimacy all combine to provide fertile soil for campaigns rooted upon crude populist rhetoric and exclusionism