Jonathan Todd

The BNP is Labour’s challenge. This is because a major new study which “examined a large sample of those who have voted BNP or would consider doing so” concludes:

“The BNP is gaining new support principally from older, less educated, white working-class men – voters from Labour’s historical base who feel they have benefited little from the past decade of Labour government, and whose resentments the BNP has succeeded in articulating”.

It is not traditional Tory voters or traditional Lib Dem votes but traditional Labour voters who are inclined to support the BNP. This is a message from The New Extremism in 21st-Century Britain by Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford which Routledge will publish later this year. These traditional Labour voters, report Goodwin and Ford, “gained little from the Blair boom and will be the first to suffer in the Brown bust. Their growing cynicism, distrust and detachment from politics have not been taken seriously by Labour”.

Nonetheless, the alienation described brings to mind the thought of one of Labour’s great strategists: Michael Young. Ferdinand Mount asked us to “turn back to Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London” and ”ponder the stabilities described there and question how much of that survives in the Bethnal Green of today”. This loss of stability feeds the alienation that was Young’s concern in Small Man, Big World (1949). Here Young wrote that:

“The common purposes of the small group are more easily understood; in the large group the people at the top tend to get out of touch with those at the bottom, and the small man to regard those at the top as ‘they’, the impersonal authorities with mysterious power over himself”.

‘They’ have certainly been exercising their mysterious powers over the kind of communities liable to vote BNP. These communities feel bereft of the common purposes that provided stability to the Bethnal Green of the 1950s. The world, thus, feels that much bigger and the man that much smaller.

Responding to local concerns, which Margaret Hodge argues is the way for Labour to tackle to the BNP, can create a sense of common purpose; making the world smaller and the man bigger. Activity and organisation on the community level, which Sam Tarry advocates, can combat the sense of alienation upon which the BNP feed. Labour should not underestimate the importance of this task, particularly in view of the upcoming European elections. A parallel that is made by Goodwin and Ford highlights this point:

“Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN) sets a worrying precedent in France. Founded in 1972, the FN was dismissed as a fringe movement for a decade. But after gains in local elections around Paris, the FN achieved a shock success in the 1984 European elections, obtaining ten seats and transforming its electoral prospects. In the next legislative elections, the party increased its vote from 44,000 to 2.7 million, nearly 10 per cent of the vote. It has been a significant force in French politics ever since. Those who dismiss Griffin’s BNP would do well to remember that no one in France took Le Pen seriously in the early 1980s. Twenty years later he was competing with Jacques Chirac for the French presidency”.

The alienation that fuels the BNP is real. It is imperative that it does not become seen to be more socially acceptable than it presently is to try to address this alienation via the false solution of voting BNP. The genie cannot be let out of the bottle, as it was in France. ‘They’, the impersonal authorities with mysterious power, cannot be seen to include Labour – otherwise, Labour is considered to be part of the problem by the communities that we seek to serve. Labour must, instead, be seen to be a real part of these communities. In taking on this role, Labour addresses the alienation that gives succour to the BNP.