BNP fails to impress

Nick Lowles | Wednesday, 1 June 2005 Source: Serchlight

For the second year running the British National Party has failed to make any political breakthrough at a country-wide election. Nick Lowles examines the general election results and asks where now for the BNP?

The British National Party was determined not to repeat last year's mistakes. Then, it went into the European elections and all-out council elections in West Midlands and North boasting that it would achieve a huge political breakthrough. Five MEPs and 60 new councillors was the prediction of Nick Griffin, the party leader. The breakthrough didn't come and the BNP's failure to meet its own expectations badly damaged its internal morale.

This time the BNP attempted to play it cool. It admitted that it had no chance of winning a parliamentary seat but believed that a few second places and a handful of votes in the 15-19% range, even one or two in the low twenties, was quite achievable. The party contested 119 seats but chose them carefully, with nearly all meeting the party's requirement of having attracted more than 8% of the vote in the European election.

But nazis being nazis and Griffin being Griffin their expectations rose during the campaign to the point where they believed they were in with a shout in both Barking and Dewsbury.

Even by its own modest (at least in public) predictions, the BNP still failed. The party received 192,746 votes but this represented an average of only 4.2% in the seats it contested, little more than the 3.9% the party polled in the 2001 general election.

The BNP has tried to claim that this share of the vote makes it Britain's fourth political party but of course it only stood in fewer than one fifth of the constituencies and only in the areas where its vote was likely to be highest. Overall, the party attracted only 0.74% of the national vote.

BNP candidates saved their deposits in 34 constituencies but that meant the party lost a total of £42,500 in the rest. More significantly for the future, it failed to gain a single second place, which was politically necessary if it were to claim to be the party of opposition in any locality. Barking, where the BNP polled its highest vote, was the only constituency where it came anywhere near a second spot. In many of its other key target seats it finished a poor fourth.

Regionally, the BNP results are even more interesting. In the North East, East Midlands, South East, South West, London (with the exception of Barking and Dagenham), Wales and Scotland the BNP failed spectacularly, losing its deposit in all 38 constituencies contested.

The North East and East Midlands were particularly poor results, given that the party polled over 6% in both regions in the European elections, with several constituencies seeing votes of over 8.5%. The BNP in the North East had already started to stagnate in its Sunderland and Gateshead base but its failure to get above 3.0% in the southern section of the region does not bode well for its immediate prospects.

The BNP significantly under-performed in London, polling only one third of the votes obtained in many boroughs in last year's London Assembly elections. With just one year to go until all-out council elections in the capital there was little reason for the BNP to cheer.

Even Barking was not the success the BNP now likes to boast. It produced the highest vote for a fascist party in British electoral history, but it was well below the BNP's own expectations.

The BNP continues to decline in the North West, with a lower vote in Burnley and the two Oldham seats compared to 2001. In Oldham the decline was dramatic, its vote being more than halved.

It is only in Yorkshire and the West Midlands that the BNP has anything to cheer about. While its vote in its target constituencies was lower than expected, there was a good overall vote and a few surprises. The BNP polled well in South Yorkshire and achieved a strong showing across Birmingham and the Black Country. But even in these regions there was underachievement. Griffin's vote of 9.2% in Keighley was embarrassingly small for the party's leader, as was the 6.6% obtained in Halifax. As Searchlight has long suspected, this reflects a declining base of support in an area where recently it was polling above 30% in Conservative and Labour council wards.

Earlier this year the BNP had boasted of a possibility of winning the Stoke-on-Trent Mayoral election and as a result made it its national priority. However, its failure to win the East Valley ward by-election in Stoke in early March, despite a national effort, reduced the BNP's prospects and therefore the amount of regional and national resources that the party directed to the campaign. In the event, although the BNP polled a dangerous 19% of first choice votes, its candidate lagged well behind in fourth place.

Steady progress?

"Mission accomplished!" screamed the headline on the BNP's own analysis of the election. "The BNP has emerged from four weeks of hard campaigning and an interesting night at the count as Britain's fourth largest party.

"Despite a national media silence on the presence of the BNP and a few nasty smear campaigns conducted by the institutionally hostile press at a regional level, the people of Britain made up their own minds. Based on what they know to be true with their own eyes, voters from Somerset to Sunderland and Glasgow to Kent gave the thumbs up to the BNP. Our progress is measured and steady, rather than euphoric and erratic, deep rooted and growing."

Quite apart from the nonsense that it is Britain's fourth largest party, the BNP also failed in its central objective of using this election as a base for next year's local elections. At the turn of the year the party set out an ambitious programme of canvassing a handful of entire constituencies and single wards in other places as a means of acquiring the voter information to win substantial council seats in the future.

To all intents and purposes, it failed. Canvassing was limited, where carried out at all, even in its key target seats. Richard Barnbrook, the BNP's Barking candidate, boasted to the press of 48-50% support in four wards but in reality this claim was based on little more than a handful of streets surveyed. In the vast majority of the seats contested, the BNP struggled to get a ward leafleted let alone canvassed.

Last year Searchlight highlighted this failure to identify its core vote as the single most important reason why the BNP did not make substantial council election gains. The BNP will go into next year's local elections in no better position. By contrast, with many of the BNP's key council target areas being marginals, the other parties will have an abundance of new data.

Perhaps the best measure of the BNP's "steady" progress was its performance in the county council elections held on the same day. While these elections did not cover many of its traditional urban heartlands, local elections often give voters a greater chance to switch their vote.

The BNP had a mere 45 candidates. They came last in 34 of the contests, and second from bottom in all but two of the remainder. The BNP's best hopes of getting councillors elected were in Lancashire and Hertfordshire but in both areas it finished poorly. In Burnley its share of the vote was down by as much as 50% on previous elections and in Broxbourne, where the BNP already has one borough councillor, its 9.1% was only a third of previous votes.

Poor campaign

The BNP was always going to be squeezed in this election and quite correctly its leadership chose a targeted strategy which would be beneficial next year. However, with the exception of a handful of places, it is unlikely that this campaign has improved the BNP's chances of winning council seats next year.

Additionally, its vote was once again hampered by poor organisation and leadership. The quality of the bulk of its election material was poor and the party political broadcast was embarrassing, even by the BNP's standards.

Locally, a growth in party membership continues to have little impact on the number of activists on the ground. The BNP ran little or no campaign in the vast majority of the seats contested.

The BNP has boasted that this election allowed it to purchase modern printing equipment but this was at the expense of the campaign. Branches complained about leaflets arriving late and then often the wrong ones arrived.

Some of the blame must lie at the door of Eddy Butler, the party's elections officer and quite easily its most effective political campaigner. Early in the campaign he decided that a county council victory, however small, was better than no victory at all. As a result he devoted his energy to running the Hertfordshire County Council campaign at the expense of the general election effort in Barking. He took with him Lawrence Rustem, the party's candidate for Dagenham, which meant that little was done there.

Butler misjudged the election. The turnout for the county council elections as a result of them being held on the same day as the general election was always likely to result in the Conservatives beating the BNP in Hertfordshire and even if the BNP had won, it would not have received the publicity that a 25% vote in Barking would have done.

Above all, the BNP faced opposition from local anti-BNP groups, trade unions and rival political parties. The BNP is now finding it harder to win. It can motivate a disillusioned section of the electorate to turn out but its very presence energises its opponents.

The only bright spot for the BNP is that this election confirmed that it has now established a hard vote in several areas of the country which will turn out for the party in any election. However, this on its own does not win elections and its failure to do the hard graft in identifying a soft BNP vote, which is done through canvassing, means the BNP remains some way off its political breakthrough.

In many ways, the die was already cast well before the election. Its failure last year triggered a bad six months for the party. Demoralisation, financial chaos and a TV expose that received extensive media coverage meant the BNP was in a weaker organisational position than 12 months earlier.

The task for anti-fascists now is further to demoralise the BNP so that it ends up even weaker 12 months from now.