What Are BNP Supporters Really Like?
This BBC article, "What Are BNP Supporters Really Like?", was a particularly interesting read for me. It starts out as an interview with a Jewish granny who ran as a BNP candidate - contrasting the party's holocaust-denial past with her concerns about immigration - and travels into an article about the far right in general, comparing the UK to Europe.
This offers up two particular discussions poitns I'd like to address.
This offers up two particular discussions poitns I'd like to address.
- The villification of the BNP. The Jewish lady discussed being no longer welcome at certain gatherings; at risks to her job; and anti-BNP protestors turning up outside her door and hurling abuse. This sort of behaviour against someone whose politics you don't agree with would normally be considered bad form. There's absolutely no way that I wouldn't be able to drum up a lawsuit against my employer if I got pressure over running as, I dunno, an SNP or Tory candidate. Why should we accept this for the BNP?
I can't deny there's a difference of some sort - for one, some of the BNP's policies make people who carry them out right now criminals for racist and similar behaviour. (Nick Griffin's refusal to talk about holocaust denial springs to mind - he can't say what he thinks about it because to do so would be a crime, so he just pointedly says nothing.) The far right are considered an antisocial fringe and the villification is pretty universal.
But then, other fringe groups have been villified in the past. The louidest protestors against the BNP are often the far left, the socialist and communist groups, and one doesn't have to stare too far into the past to find a period when they were in pretty much the same boat. Does the far right deserve a McCarthy-esque witch hunt? Are black lists and accusations of Fellow Traveler status acceptable for this group even though we look back on the last accepted villains and find it offensive that we treated people that way? - The Contrast Between The Public's Acceptance Of Far Right Policies & Parties. Immigiration is routinely a top level issue in elections - the Conservative pledge to drop immigration my an order of magnitude (a wholly unfeasible one) wouldn't have been made if it didn't appeal to the electorate. While it's not something Ailsa and I would consider in the ballot box, both of us have coworkers who have ranted about it in the past - including, in Ailsa's case, a citizen of another country who now lives here, but that's beside the point. I think I've spoken about the comments of my coworkers before on this topic and shan't go over the specifics, but suffice to say they include some views which are further right than my own.
All of this should add up to a serious BNP support, right? And yet, not really - in fact, one of the same coworker who ideologically shouldn't struggle to have common ground with the party also explicitly spoke about telling his mum not to vote for the BNP because "they were Nazis". The hardcore BNP supporters almost thrive off being rejected by society - the party messing up the LibLabCon establishment too much - but to the bulk of people they just see a bunch of criminal record-packing hoodlums trying to play at being reasonable but comign across as uncouth. Even if immigration is constantly one of the top three election issues, the public can't be convinced to actually put an X beside the party whose main issue focuses on that.
The article mentions that the far right has a slicker look in the rest of Europe - that they've managed to move away from National Front/BNP-style politics and into something a bit sexier and more voter-friendly, and in doing so have made more notable gains. One has to wonder if the liberals might actually want to keep the BNP alive rather than allow them to collapse and a new, prettier form of crypto-fascism arise from their ashes which would appeal to those concerns held by many Britains. The major parties until then have an awkward position - to "solve the problem" is to behave in a concerning and possibly illegal fashion, but as long as they can't be seen to be doing anything about immigration they leave it as an issue to be exploited by the far right.