Margaret Hodge tells Robert Philpot about the lessons of the ‘bloody difficult’ campaign to drive the BNP out of Barking
‘It is’, says Margaret Hodge, ‘the most important thing I have ever done.’ On a night which offered little cheer for Labour supporters, Nick Griffin’s humiliation at Hodge’s hands in Barking was one of the few bright spots of the 2010 election.
But the former minister did not just defeat the leader of the British National party, she trounced him: doubling her majority and causing a ripple effect which saw the far-right lose all 12 seats it had gained on the local authority four years previously.
While her victory over Griffin was the high point of Hodge’s political career, the 2006 local elections must count as one of the most difficult. Less than a month before polling day, the then employment minister publicly warned that eight out of 10 white families in her constituency were ‘tempted’ to vote for the BNP. She laid the blame squarely at the door of a ‘political class’ that was ‘frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race and … the BNP then exploits that’.
After the BNP went on to gain nearly a quarter of the seats on Barking and Dagenham council, Hodge was accused, in the words of Ken Livingstone, of ‘magnifying the propaganda of the BNP’. It is a charge that the Barking MP dismisses: ‘It is pathetic to think that. There is a myth that if you gave the extreme right a voice that increased support for them. I think that completely misunderstood what was really happening in the community.’ Instead, she believes that attempting to play down the BNP’s potential support, and the reasons for it, simply had the effect of adding to the alienation of those who believed that politicians do not listen to their grievances or understand their concerns.
Openly confronting the far-right and attempting to ‘reconnect’ with the largely white working-class voters tempted to support it became the hallmark of Hodge’s efforts to rid Barking and Dagenham of the BNP. Unsurprisingly, she was one of the few Labour voices to support the BBC’s decision to allow Griffin to appear on Question Time in October 2009. ‘If you really want to destroy the extreme right, you have to do it through democracy. You cannot do it by gagging them,’ she argues. ‘All my experience of beating the extreme right and particularly beating Nick Griffin in Barking demonstrates that to be the case.’ In 2010, the BNP leader refused repeated requests by Hodge to debate with her and the other candidates.
Hodge admits that the BNP had been able to secure a foothold in Barking and Dagenham because ‘we had lost connection with our voters’. Her response was one of ‘reconnection’. Eschewing traditional town hall meetings, she sought opportunities to ‘create environments where people feel easy to speak and you can listen’ and began holding coffee mornings throughout the constituency where she could listen to the concerns of both ‘very angry’ white families who had lived in the area for generations and newer migrants who had bought their own homes or were living in privately rented accommodation in the area. Not only did the coffee mornings allow the MP to show that she was listening to voters’ concerns, it also encouraged the participants to listen to one another. ‘You’d start an engagement which ended up breaking down barriers,’ recalls Hodge.
But ‘reconnecting’ meant more than simply talking, says Hodge. She accepts that on the big issues which drove voters towards the BNP – immigration ‘as the scapegoat for why they couldn’t access housing or jobs’ – she was, to a degree, powerless: ‘I never changed anything on immigration [or] housing.’ So she concentrated on what she could directly affect. ‘People’s politics is very local,’ she suggests. ‘If I could change something in their immediate environment – get the streets cleaned, get the prostitutes off the street, get a post box or a bus stop moved – if you could do that, you just start to build trust.’
The tale of Hodge’s fight to defeat Griffin was immortalised in Laura Fairrie’s award-winning documentary, The Battle for Barking. The former minister believes, however, that it missed the key to her re-election. ‘The film suggested that what we did was mobilise the BME vote and that’s how we beat Griffin … Of course we mobilised the BME vote … But, equally, I had to regain the white working-class vote. If I hadn’t done that, I would have lost,’ she says.
Beating Griffin may have been the thing of which she is most proud but, as Fairrie’s documentary captures, it was hardly the easiest. Still coping with the loss of her husband, Hodge describes the campaign as ‘a bloody difficult time’. ‘We were fighting the BNP … I had [Dagenham Labour] trying to deselect me. I had Searchlight saying I was terrible … The GMB were completely against me,’ she says. And, for the first time in her life, Hodge faced discrimination herself: ‘I got quite a lot of antisemitism.’ The former minister recalls the moment when she considered standing down: ‘I’m not young. I thought: “Do I really need this at my age?”.’ In the end, however, she concluded that the fight was ‘so essentially what my politics are about, I had to do it’.
After her victory, Hodge warned that it marked ‘the beginning, not the end’ of the campaign against the far-right. ‘The attitudes that created the frustrations and anger are still there,’ she believes, although she reserves judgement on the threat posed by the new British Freedom party and believes the English Defence League are ‘a different bunch’, more like ‘football hooligans’ bussed in to ‘create a bit of chaos and tension’.
Still, there are, Hodge contends, lessons for Labour from the campaign. ‘The BNP gained ground because Labour failed, in part. We failed because we were complacent, we were inward-looking, we cared about our … own internal fights and we forgot how to talk to people,’ she suggests. Politics remains too dominated by what Hodge dismissively terms ‘the Westminster bubble’. ‘If every MP and every candidate said: “everything I’ve got to do is about reconnection”, I think we’d win our marginal seats, we’d be back in government,’ she argues. But, she warns, reconnection ‘isn’t leaflets slagging off [David] Cameron. It’s doing your politics differently.’ She fears, however, that there are ‘very few MPs’ who recognise this.
Hodge agrees that Labour’s long-time domination of the local authority played a ‘huge part’ in the BNP’s rise in the area and she warns that the party locally must guard against a return to its old ways now that it holds every council seat: ‘I think if our control of the council means that we go back to the old ways of Tammany Hall politics, the inward-looking resolutions in closed rooms being what matters, there is a huge danger.’
Far beyond Barking and Dagenham Labour MPs and candidates in 2010 experienced a swell of anger at the then government’s perceived failure to control immigration. Hodge cautions the party on how it should respond. ‘The mistake Labour would make is going down this road that past governments of all persuasions have gone down – we’ll control the numbers – because they will fail,’ she argues.
Instead, she urges Labour to focus on some of the ‘fairness’ issues which she believes fuel resentment towards immigration. She continues to argue, as she did prior to 2010, that ‘we need a better system for rationing housing and benefits, with priority for those who have lived in an area for longest. This would immediately lance the toxic perception that the allocation systems are unfair.’
Hodge believes that in 2010 her stance – and refusal to ‘start promising that we were going to stop immigration’ – ‘worked with everybody. It worked with the ethnic minority and the migrant community as well as the long-standing white community. That is an interesting lesson for Labour to hear and understand.’
She is, however, dismissive of the ‘blue Labour’ agenda which aims to appeal to the very white working-class voters that turned against the party so sharply at the last election. She says of blue Labour’s mantra of ‘faith, family and flag’: ‘I hate that. I absolutely hate it. I’m an immigrant. How the hell can I reconnect to that sort of an agenda? It’s not what puts me into the Labour party.’
Griffin’s defeat in Barking sent the BNP into a tailspin from which it is yet to recover. In 2011, it lost a further 11 councillors nationwide, while 2012’s London elections saw the party lose its sole seat on the London assembly and its mayoral vote halve. ‘That’s the thing I’m really proud of,’ says Hodge. ‘I always said if we could really smash them in Barking and Dagenham, then we’d destabilise them and they would disintegrate. Fascism comes in waves. We successfully caused the tipping point which enabled them to come down.’ ‘Pack your bags and go,’ Hodge ordered the BNP leader after defeating him. Of that victory she now says simply: ‘How do I want people to remember me? It would be for that.’
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