2010 Assessment

Source: Searchlight Magazine April 2010

The politics of HOPE and hate

In just a few weeks’ time the British National Party could achieve its biggest breakthrough to date by winning control of its first council, with a £200 million a year budget, and even a parliamentary seat or two. It would herald a massive breakthrough for a party that only ten years ago had just a thousand members and was largely irrelevant.

Alternatively, in just a few weeks’ time the BNP could have been defeated in its electoral bid and end up with fewer councillors than it has now.

The outcome of these elections will go a long way to determining the extent of the BNP threat over the next few years.

HOPE not hate co-ordinator Nick Lowles looks at the 2010 election campaign and highlights what needs to be done.

On the streets of Barking and Dagenham you can sense a mood. Few people remain undecided and most have a view. Over the past few weeks I have accompanied a succession of journalists around the Becontree estate and the shops on Dagenham Heathway. Few have left unshocked.

The overt racism, the fear and the anger. Everyone can sense it. As we give out leaflets outside Dagenham Heathway station men, and they are usually men, shout “BNP” from their cars. Some young women refuse to take our leaflets. They complain about a shortage of housing, too many immigrants and jobs being taken by eastern Europeans.

“This isn’t our area any more,” is a regular response. “They” – the word is pronounced in a heavy and derogatory tone – “are being given houses”.

It can be depressing and even demoralising to hear these views. You just hope that the journalist is too busy talking to shoppers to hear the worst of the abuse, knowing full well it will get reported.

But there is another side to Barking and Dagenham, one that is rarely recorded in the media. People are beginning to stand up to the British National Party.

On a cold but bright January morning the HOPE not hate (HnH) campaign kicked off its 2010 campaign with a well attended Day of Action. Over 80 people took part, most from the borough itself. Most encouragingly, about 30 local people were new to the campaign and for some it was their first political activity.

A month later, in a plush room at the Royal Society Arts in central London, Sandra Vincent, a GMB organiser from Barking, gave an impassioned speech on the need to support the HOPE not hate campaign. A working-class mother of two, who has lived in the borough for 20 years, she told the suited and well-heeled audience at a HOPE not hate fundraising event how scared she would be for her children if the BNP took control of the council.

“I need you to help them [HnH] to help me to help my children to help our community,” she concluded.

It brought the threat we are facing into clear perspective. In just a few weeks the BNP might take control of Barking and Dagenham council. If it does then the floodgates for further success for the racist party will be open.

***

There will never be a better opportunity for the BNP to make a political breakthrough. Everything, it would appear, is going in its favour. The political system has been discredited and defiled by the expenses scandals. Many traditional Labour voters feel their party has abandoned them, while many of Margaret Thatcher’s working-class Tories hate the posh and liberal David Cameron. We are not yet out of the worst economic crisis for 60 years and immigration is running at an unprecedented level and is generally concentrated in those areas least equipped to cope.

A real and perceived fear exists among many people that their economic prospects are grim and the main political parties do not represent them any more. With Scotland and Wales developing new identities and gaining confidence in an increasingly powerful European Union, and with financial institutions and multinationals becoming stronger than governments, the little man at the bottom feels abandoned and angry.

It is a perfect storm for the BNP and the party is determined to take advantage of it.

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The BNP is putting forward a record number of candidates in these elections. As Searchlight goes to press we believe that the BNP will field at least 400 candidates in the general election, maybe more, and more than 1,000 in the council elections.

While the vast majority have little chance of winning, the numbers signify the BNP’s determination to be seen as a major national political party. With the free mail shot available to parliamentary candidates and accompanying television airtime the BNP hopes to use these elections to grow even bigger.

The party’s national priority is Barking and Dagenham. It is already the official opposition on the council and would only need to hold its present 12 seats and take a few more off Labour, while hoping the Tories do the same, to become the largest party.

Party leader Nick Griffin is challenging Margaret Hodge in Barking but as he admitted to The Guardian last month the big “prize” would be the council.

Stoke-on-Trent is the BNP’s next priority and despite a quite public falling out within the local party organisation, the BNP could still become the largest party on the council after 6 May. The BNP’s deputy leader, Simon Darby, will also be fighting hard to win the parliamentary seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central.

It is in the local elections that the BNP presents the greatest risk. While the general election should boost turnout at the polls, it is no longer inevitable that people will vote the same in their council election as they do nationally. Indeed there is growing evidence to show that voters are more likely to vote differently locally as a protest against mainstream politicians.

We have identified 102 wards where the BNP poses some form of electoral threat. Of these 30 are wards where the BNP is defending seats. In additional to all its London councillors being up for election, other high profile BNP councillors defending their seats include Chris Beverley (Morley South, Leeds), Paul Cromie (Queensbury, Bradford) and Derek Dawson (Gannow, Burnley).

In a further eight wards the BNP won in the last round of local elections and so is well placed to take another seat this time.

Overall, we are expecting the BNP to contest over 1,000 council seats. Many will be in London, where every seat is being contested. The 102 “risk” wards include 53 where the BNP either came first in the last election it contested or needs a swing of less than 5%.

The BNP threat is concentrated in a handful of local authority areas. The 102 risk wards cover 30 local authorities. However, 51 of these wards are in just ten local authorities. The concentration is even more stark for the “most at risk” wards. All but three of the 25 most at risk wards fall in ten local authorities, as do 38 of the 50 most at risk wards.

We are sure that there are other wards where the BNP could win but has never stood before, making it difficult to measure the risk. This is especially the case in London where all-out elections give the BNP a better chance of winning seats than in elections for a single councillor in a ward, as is usual in the rest of the country. The BNP could several seats in Havering, the neighbouring borough to Barking and Dagenham, and could also do well in Bexley, on the southeast edge of London.

HOPE not hate’s 2010 campaign newspapers await distribution in Barking and Dagenham

While the BNP will continue to present a serious threat in many of its traditional heartlands there are some places where we expect a weaker BNP effort. These include Kirklees and Bradford, two areas where the local BNP organisation has collapsed, Burnley, where it is likely to get squeezed in a hard-fought contest between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and Epping Forest where the party could lose three of its four councillors.

Outside Barking and Dagenham and Stoke-on-Trent, we expect the BNP to poll well in Thurrock, Amber Valley and Barnsley. We are also expecting a strong BNP performance in Sandwell, where two BNP councillors are up for election.

We expect the BNP to emerge strongly in some new areas too. In addition to Havering and Bexley, we anticipate a stronger BNP showing in South Tyneside, Teesside, Wigan and Salford.

The BNP will be looking to build on its growing support in Barnsley and were it not for the general election the party could be looking at several seats here. However, in neighbouring Rotherham, where the BNP took two seats in 2008, there is little indication that it has built on its success.

Sandwell could be interesting. In 2006 the BNP averaged 33% of the vote in the nine wards it contested and won three seats. One of these councillors left the party the following year, but the three seats are now up for election and, while the BNP vote dropped by half by 2008, there are growing fears that it could rise again this year.

Standing opposed to the BNP is the HOPE not hate campaign. Launched in 2005 as a positive antidote to the BNP’s message of hate it has developed into one of Britain’s largest non-party political operations. In last year’s European election we delivered 3.6 million newspapers and leaflets around the country, including 1.4 million in the North West alone.

With 142,000 supporters, we probably have Britain’s largest political email list, with an estimated 20,000 people doing something regularly for us online. More importantly, we have brought thousands of people into more traditional campaigning. A survey of those who got active with us last year found 35% had never done any political campaigning before. And a large proportion of these were women.

This year our campaign is going to be even bigger. We have 20 staff working on the campaign, a mixture of full and part-time staff, young volunteers and retirees. We have organisers in key areas of the country and we have developed a local organiser network through our Organisers’ Academy.

With the help of our online campaigning we have developed a telephone canvassing operation that can be accessed by anyone with a phone and internet connection. This means that HnH activists in areas where there is no BNP threat can play a role in defeating the BNP in a key area.

We are also systematically targeting women in a way we have never done before. Responding to surveys showing that women are far less likely to vote BNP than men, we have produced almost a million copies of a 12-page women’s booklet and, following research we conducted into women’s attitudes to political literature, the tone of our material is more positive and less aggressive.

New technology plays an ever-increasing role in our campaigning but it cannot replace traditional organising. We are producing 27 different tabloid HOPE not hate newspapers, each customised for a key area, and almost a million local leaflets.

It is quite simply the biggest and most targeted anti-BNP campaign ever.

We know our campaigning can be successful. The electoral decline of the BNP in West Yorkshire is in large part down to the work of HOPE not hate Yorkshire. The same is true in Oldham, where we work with Oldham United Against Racism, and Epping Forest, where our partners are Redbridge and Epping Forest Together. In Sandwell, we were instrumental in reducing the BNP vote between 2006 and 2008.

We also know our limitations. We are obviously not a political party and for the BNP to lose somebody else has to win. But we can, by mobilising the anti-BNP vote and suppressing the BNP vote, create the space for a mainstream political party to refill.

One of the advantages of this being a general election year is that all the political parties have increased their activities in recent months. One effect of this has been that the BNP has failed to win any council by-elections and has indeed lost a few seats that it was defending. It was not necessarily that BNP support had dropped, just that with every council by-election being a dry run for the general election every party was fighting much harder than it might otherwise have done. Consequently turnout was higher and the BNP was out-organised.

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These elections are crucial and not just because the BNP could win a council or even a parliamentary seat, though those should be compelling reasons alone. The outcome will set the tone for the next two years, which by every prediction are going to be much harder for us. The perfect storm is going to become a lot rougher.

We are going to see huge public sector cuts and reductions in already depleted frontline local services. Many of those who lose their jobs will be low-paid local government workers, precisely the audience for the BNP. Immigration will continue to grow with employers increasingly keen to find cheaper labour from abroad to reduce costs and that, coupled with rising unemployment and pressures on local services, will present the BNP with new opportunities.

Finally, there is a growing clamour for electoral reform to introduce some form of proportional representation, which as we have seen across Europe could give the BNP the opening it needs. The BNP’s representation on the London Assembly and in the European Parliament, which is being used to bankroll the party, are both the result of elections held under a form of PR.

Whether the BNP can take advantage of the opportunities ahead will partly be determined by its success in 2010. If we can hold the fort and even push the BNP back in key areas then we will start the post-general election cycle in clearly a better position than if the racists make a breakthrough, particularly if they take control of Barking and Dagenham council.

For the voters of Barking and Dagenham there is a clear choice: hope or hate. The politics of the borough are that polarised. Sandra Vincent, and others like her, will be campaigning tirelessly until the polls close to prevent the BNP taking the council. For the sake of her children and her community she has no choice. We need to support her because what happens in Barking and Dagenham this year will have an impact on the rest of us in the coming years.