Labour MPs are glancing nervously at the success of the racist British National Party in the local elections. They are right to do so, but the message is not what it appears. A year ago the BNP took three council seats in Burnley, its first electoral success for a decade. Now it has sixteen seats nationally. It has shown that it can win in the south of England as well as the north. But the BNP is not winning where voters are bigots. It is winning where mainstream politicians have abandoned voters.
In Burnley, the BNP polled around 30 percent of the vote in the town, neck-and-neck with Labour. The reaction of the town’s Labour figures was to blame the Tories and Lib Dems for putting up scarcely any candidates. It is, on the face of it, an odd response. Surely they should be finding fault closer to home? After all, it is Labour that controls the council and holds the parliamentary seat. But they do have a point. After all, this was not a normal council election. The eyes of the country were on Burnley and the BNP. You would have thought the local Lib Dem and Tory faithful could have put up a few paper candidates to help the good fight.
One thing we cannot do is explain away the Burnley result
by putting it down to low turnout, with extremists turning out
to vote while the sensible majority stayed at home. In one ward that the BNP won, turnout was 66 percent – very high for a council election.
The BNP made a breakthrough in the home counties by capturing a seat in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. It came in Rosedale ward, a down-at-heel council estate in the comfortable commuter
town of Cheshunt. One resident I spoke to on the estate was
not surprised that the BNP had won. They had visited three times during the campaign. Leaflets abounded. They were the only party doing a traditional telling operation on the day.
The BNP won in Burnley and Broxbourne using traditional Lib Dem tactics of pavement politics (which, as a side note, the Lib Dems are now ditching because they think they have a decent ideological message to sell). True, an element of white resentment will help to ensure their leaflets are not thrown back in their faces. But it wins where it works hard, and where Labour and the rest fail to act in time. Some of Labour’s inactivity this time around was due to a ‘strike’ by some activists who opposed the war in Iraq. Maybe the message from the BNP’s success is that parties do need their foot-soldiers after all.
Many Labour modernisers used to be very keen on directly elected mayors. Staid councillors and dull committees
were out of fashion. The new-style burghers would
provide strong leadership and serve as figureheads for their towns. The government has cooled since the first batch included Red Ken in London, Robocop in Middlesbrough and a monkey in Hartlepool. Their success was part of the wider impatience with party politics which saw four independents, six Socialists and seven Greens elected to the Scottish parliament in May.
However, the gravest threat to Labour comes from more traditional quarters. Direct mayoral elections provide a chance
for struggling parties to seize the town hall on the strength of
a strong candidate and a wave of dissatisfaction. Once in, they could be in to stay. In Watford two years ago, the Lib Dems
were nowhere. Then their candidate, Dorothy Thornhill, beat
the Labour favourite to become mayor. This May, the Lib Dems crushed Labour to take their first majority on the council.
Now Ms Thornhill is all over the local paper and her smile beams from every page of the council freesheet. If she is selected by her party to run for Westminster, she will be a serious threat to Labour’s Claire Ward.