A reassessment

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Thursday, 18 June 2009, 08:57

I spent yesterday down in Brighton at the Unison conference where I spoke at a fringe meeting which was attended by 70-80 people. It was good to see so many people wearing HOPE not hate T-shirts around the conference hall. Despite the BNP success there was a general determination to continue our campaigning, especially from areas where we haven’t done much work to date.

On the train down I looked over some new polling on the BNP voters. It was fascinating, if not alarming, stuff. The pollsters interviewed 1,000 BNP voters and even I was startled with the results. I’ll be going through the results in detail in the July issue of Searchlight but it is clear, from my reading of the statistics, that the BNP vote is much harder and more loyal than many people had thought. On election night I was furious how politicians of all parties dismissed the BNP vote as a protest. Of course, it was in their interest to say that – to say otherwise would have meant accepting public policy failures.

It is clear that BNP support goes well beyond a protest vote. Racial attitudes are also far more deeply ingrained than even I thought. A third of BNP voters believed that black people are intellectually inferior to whites and almost half agreed with the statement that black or Asian people can never be British.

The research also reveals that many BNP voters share a belief that they are victims of modern society, a theme that is cleverly exploited by the BNP. Linked to that is their belief that outside forces are conspiring to undermine them and their society. A shocking 34% of BNP voters agreed that there was an international Jewish/Communist conspiracy to undermine the Christian values of British society.

Only 2% of BNP supporters believed that the Holocaust did not happen but a further 18% said that while the Holocaust occurred the number of deaths had been exaggerated.

The polling is fascinating and it is certainly making me reassess my own thoughts about the BNP vote.