The former National Socialists of the BNP are attracting a lot of excitement. The courageous anonymous bloggers of Ipswich Spy have openly stated that they will censor any mention of the BNP and their candidate (except that a few posts later they didn’t) and Andrew Coates accuses Ben Gummer, Chris Mole and this website of the crime of understanding.
Both of these strategies are based on encouraging ignorance and that’s probably not going to work.
The first thing is that the people who vote for the BNP are in most cases not members, activists or even core supporters. The voters have to be engaged. Andrew Coates has a strange view of the working class when he reads himself in as a member and he reads out anyone who has ever voted for the BNP.
The BNP voters that I’ve met are largely people who believe that they have been hurt by the increased job competition, increase in house prices and rents and the crowding out of public services that have been bought about by immigration. And in most cases they have. Until recently both parties, for different reasons, largely avoided this area while it shot to the top of people’s concerns. It was this avoidance of the topic that fed the rise of the BNP.
Is Immigration too high? Asking that question is not playing to the BNP. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.
The Rock Against Racism and Blair Peach demonstrations of the 1970s did nothing to combat the National Front who grew throughout the high point of activity and everything to boost the esteem of middle class leftists. It was Maggie Thatcher’s “swamped” comments and some actually reasonably tough immigration policies that broke the back of an emerging fascist electoral force. Chris Mole is right to emulate Maggie.
The BNP can’t be beaten by an appeal to ignorance. The fact that two left leaning blogs think that it can says more about the poverty of their world view than any facts on the ground or light of experience.
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