United in their cry of nationalism, singling out ethnic minorities as growing threats and exploiting people’s insecurities of a rapidly declining economy, disappearing jobs , immigration and the perceived threat of Islam.
Dr Wolfrey discussed the real causes that have led to the surge in support of Far Right parties like BNP and Greet Wilder’s Party in Netherlands. English defence League riots across UK and incidences like the tragic stabbing of Marwa Sherbini in Germany have increased mistrust and racial tensions between communities. Samuel Tarry discussed how to contain the surge and spread hope in bringing communties together.
Dr Jim Wolfery: Thanks first of all for the invitation to speak. What I want to do is to talk about how we got here really. We are talking about a situation where we are faced with the biggest rise in fascist and populist far right organizations across Europe since the 1930s.
We have ministers in the Italian government who come from a political heritage that openly identified with Mussolini. We have incidents like the one in Switzerland where there are four minarets. There is a referendum about essentially about the fears of the Islamisation of Swiss society and so on.
So how did we get into this situation where parties mobilizing round these issues were able to achieve such success. That is without even mentioning in Britain where we have Nick Griffin, a member of a party that openly advocates rights for whites that has a racist fascist heritage appearing on question time last month.
So what I want to do is to look at the situation in France because one of the advantages of having two decades of this experience is that there are situations we can look at and draw lessons from. The BNP looks at the situation in France and says this is how to do it. In their literature they say this is how a group of people stigmatized for being extremists and outsiders were able to make themselves respectable and win offices. According to Nick Griffin this is what the BNP has to do and I think it is useful for us to look at some of the experiences that occurred in France, some of the mistakes that were made by anti-racists and to say this is how not to do it. We can learn from this.
So if we look at the period when the Front Nationale led by Jean-Marie Le Penn emerged into French political life in the 1980s. There is a question to be asked really which is why did immigration become such an issue in the 1980s. How did that happen. Looking back at the 1970s I did some research on the rise of the Front Nationale and in the literature of the far right it is very interesting because there were electoral campaigns in the 1970s where Le Penn was getting less than one percent of the vote and people were arguing in far right in publications that the reason Le Pen isn’t doing well is because he focuses all the time on immigration. Focusing on immigration means that people associate him with racism. Being tagged a racist is not a vote winner.
How then 20 years later is Le Penn able to come second in the presidential election of 2002 when people know his record on immigration. Why did immigration become a vote winner in the 80s and 90s and in the present decade and it yet it wasn’t in the 1970s. Was it the case that there was a big huge rise in immigration in the 70s. No. What happened was that a particular set of political circumstances allowed the far right to construct immigration as a political issue, to scape goat immigrants. They were able to point the finger at immigrants and create an immigration problem where one didn’t exist before.
That is what I want to explain in a little bit of detail and it is instructive when we look at what is happening today. How is it that we have posters with the Swiss flag and minarets on the Swiss flag as if they are some kind of threat when patently it isn’t a threat? Why is it that the burka in France which various studies show is worn by 400 minimum to a maximum of 2,000 suddenly worth legislation to ban it from public places? It is that mechanism whereby scapegoats are created that has some lessons for us.
What did change in the 1980s was that the socialist party was elected on a radical programme that promised end to French imperialism throughout the world, the right to vote for immigrants, there were going to be progressive policies on employment and a whole range of issues. Then an economic crisis intervened and they ditched a number of aspects of their programme and introduced austerity measures. Unemployment began to rise very quickly and the Front National slogan which they had like a stop clock since the 1970s started off at one million unemployed, one million immigrants to many, three million and then four million. It began to get a echo.
The important thing in that process was the complicity of the main stream parties making it acceptable to target immigrants. The Prime Minister in the 1980s said that Le Penn asks the right questions but gives the wrong answers. So in other words Le Penn is asking the right kinds of questions about immigration implying that there is some kind or problem. I would say that it was completely the opposite. Le Penn was asking the wrong questions and giving the right answers to the wrong questions.
If immigration is a cause of unemployment and you want to get rid of unemployment then it is a logical answer to do something about immigration. There was no proof that immigration and unemployment were linked and accepting that there is a link between these things led to a whole number of conceptions that led to the establishment of this immigration problem, to the extent that when academics looked at why people voted for the Front Nationale what they did is they said in the 1984 elections there is a big Front Nationale vote in the West of Paris. That is because there are a lot of immigrants in the West of Paris.
In 1986 there was a big Front Nationale vote in the north-east of Paris so they said that is because there are a lot of immigrants in the north-east of Paris. Then people asked why are we making this links between the presence of immigrants and the Front Nationale. The immigrants who live in the west of Paris are Portugese care takers, Spanish gardeners, people from the Iberian Peninsula who have been living as nannies etc working for rich people. They have been there for years.
Did these people who were employing these Spanish Portugese cleaners and caretakers suddenly think they were a hug problem? No there were other reasons why they voted. They were exercised about the European elections, European integration. Academics bought the line that immigration was a problem so the first things they looked for was the presence of immigrants.
Similarly in 1986 there was evidence to show that people were disaffected with the Socialist government and they therefore voted for the right and the extreme rights. It was not because they suddenly discovered that there were large numbers of North African living in their areas. They had been there for years.
So the acceptance that immigration was a problem led everybody to jump on that bandwagon whereas actually if they were looking for a correlation for reasons why people voted for the Front Nationale, they could have looked at a number of other things where there was a greater correlations: summer temperatures, the suicide rate, 9/11 – any number of things would have correlated more but they chose immigration because that was the issue that had been pushed to centre stage.
It was said that planes would be chartered to deport the illegal immigrants if necessary. Michele Rochard another Socialist Prime Minister said France cannot welcome all the misery of the world to its territory. This was then echoed by politicians of the rights: Giscard Distend a former prime minister talked about an invasion of immigrants. Jacaues Chirac made a speech before he became president to his own party members where he talked about immigrant families living with 15 or 20 children earning £5,000 a month in social security benefits.
He went through all these awful stereotypic images of the immigrant family. He said when you add to that the noise and the smell, the ordinary French workers is driven mad. So in other words the mainstream took on the rhetoric of the Front Nationale hook, line and sinker on the issue of immigration. There was very little done to oppose the scapegoating and this was notable by the fur ore on successive occasions over the wearing of the hijab where the anti-racist movement in France was also divided.
People failed to carry out the first anti racist reflex that any movement worthy of the name has to have is to defend stygatimised groups under attack. And I think it was the failure to do that that also led to a division to France between the Muslims and the organized anti-racist movement that weakened their ability to fight back against the rise of the Front Nationale. So in that context where people were accepting the Front Nationale had something relevant to say on immigration the organization was then able to construct its strategy. It was a very specific strategy that had been developed since the 1970s. There is a not a lot of time to go into it.
But I think another important factor when it comes to dealing with these organizations is to be able to identify what they are. There was big debate in France which said that Le Penn is just about immigration. If we deal with immigration Le Penn will go away.
Le Penn didn’t go away and the acceptance of the idea that immigration was a problem simply reinforced the organisation’s popularity. What people needed to say is that this was a modern form of fascism. That his organization, and it is easy to see if you read their literature, the organization was made up of people who engaged in the debate in the post war period which essentially said how do we adapt fascism to present-day conditions? How do we revive the heritage of Hitler and Mussolini in contemporary France?
They said first of all we have a problem because with anything to do with fascism we are ostracized in the public mind because of the images it creates: the horros of Mussolini’s Italy and the holocaust and so on.
So we have to call ourselves something different. We have to have a much more respectable image. We can’t dress up in uniforms and walk around talking about racial supremacy. So what they did is they wore smart suits, they talked racism not in terms of biology but in terms of culture and the Front Nationale printed booklets for their members where they said things like if you are arguing with people don’t say immigrants out. Say let us organize the progressive repatriation of immigrants from Third World countries.
So they argued that the way to engage in questions about race was not to talk about race but to talk about religion, the fact that Islam can’t be assimilated into French society. So there was a strategy openly articulated in the Front Nationale that said let us shift the terrain onto culture.
They were not content with just doing that. What they wanted to do and this was stated when they formed the organization was to reach a wider periphery of voters to what they called soft support. Then they would build a hard core of support that wasn’t just exercised about immigration but they wanted to identify with fascist ideas.
In the 1980s the party of Le Penn got its first set of parliamentary deputies but they were not content just with that. The following year Le Penn said that the holocaust was a detail of the Second World War. And what he was saying to all those people who had voted for the Front Nationale was you may be attracted to what we say in electoral terms. I don’t believe that the holocaust happened. Are you prepared to follow me now that you know I have said this.
It was a message to his supporters, it was a message to his members and every body who stayed crossed the threshold. They hadn’t done anything but somehow they had been radicalized by Le Penn.
In the same way in 1988 Le Penn got a record score in the presidential elections. He followed it up with a ten percent score in the parliamentary elections. Le Penn made a joke about the holocaust about the gas ovens. He made a pun targeting a politician. He was trying to trivalise the issue.
Similarly in 1995 the Front Nationale got a record score in the presidential elections and the following year Le Penn began to talk about for the first time, racial inequality. He said isn’t it funny when you watch the Olympics in the swimming finals all the people are white but in the running finals all the people are black. There must be racial inequalities for this to happen. So he introduced the issue having just won a previously taboo issue.
So respectability wasn’t an end in itself. They used respectability in order to then radicalize people and introduce subjects like anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racial stereotypes – subjects that had previously been taboo.
In this way they radicalized political debate and pushed it further to the rights. They were helped by the complicity of establishment politicians who refused to challenge them on the immigration question. In the early 80s the socialists had made a pamphlet for the 1983 municipal elections. The pamphlet was called living together – immigrants among us and it detailed a series of arguments in defense of immigration, in defense of all the benefits it brought.
All copies of the pamphlet were pulped, destroyed before the 1983 elections and instead they ran a campaign which said under the right 93 years of wild cat immigration, with the socialists at last effective controls. So they backtracked on this issue which gave space for the Front Nationale to propagate its ideas.
Another failure was the failure of anti racists to make common cause with each other across different communities. They allowed divisions over questions like the hijab to weaken the anti racist movement. That is not to say that there weren’t attempts to build the movement. The movement had a lot of potential in view of the current reality.
So how do we relate these questions to Britain. The first thing to say is that as I have mentioned, Nick Griffin and the British National party watch events in France very closely. In their publications they talk about the experience of France as a model to follow. They talk about the need to ditch wearing flight jackets, having shaved hair, looking like thugs and they talk about the need to use moderate language. They talk about the need not to inflame debate unnecessarily.
But they go beyond the need simply to win elections. They talk about the need to build an organization on the model of the Front Nationale. Broadly speaking that model means building an electoral machine on the one hand but also building a hard core of individuals who identify with a set of ideas that are based on elitism, notions of social hierarchies. They are anti democratic, they want to destroy their opponents. They want to destroy democratic institutions and they want to build extraparliamentary organizations.
So in embryonic form the Front Nationale has done this. It has a whole set of satellite organizations that organize people who own guns, former army veterans. The kind of things normal parties don’t engage in.
So the situation we are in in Britain is one where there are a number of alarm bells ringing: the debate over question time. The debate over question time reflects a pattern is being followed that reflects what is happening in France.
Griffin is not that dangerous – it is better to have the ideas out in the open and debate them. I think this was a very serious mistake because it allowed Griffin to do what Le Penn. I don’t think it matter particularly to them if they don’t win televised debates. What matters to them is that they introduce certain ideas into the mainstream so that the next day people can talk about them.
On that programme there were a number of things that Griffin said about the holocaust, about different cultures in Britain, about a racial notion of Britishness. They are not ideas that are normally discussed in public life. And I think the mistake of the politicians who were on the programme is that for all their rhetoric for bashing Griffin over the head and saying he is a nasty man, when it came to the question of immigration they were falling over themselves to say we are going to get tough on immigration. We are going to be the toughest on immigration, accepting that somehow there was a problem with immigration.
In this room with a multi-racial crowd there was an audience that demonstrated to what extent Britain is a multi-cultural society. But all the politicians were accepting that there is an immigration problem. So that to me rendered completely useless all the denunciations of Griffin because who is going to be the hardest on immigration. It is always going to be Griffin. He is always going to be the one who says let us get rid of all of them. That was a serious error – allowing him on the progamme and allowing him to introduce these subjects for debate and then capitulating to the principle argument.
There are some danger signs. On the one hand the experience of Britain of activists from various backgrounds working together in political campaigns is much stronger. There is a much tradition both in terms of anti racism and in terms of groups like the anti war movement, different groups, different communities working together for a common cause that doesn’t exist in France and that doesn’t exist in Switzerland.
But there are also some worrying signs about the ability of politicians do target in particular in the post 9/11 world to target Muslim groups, Muslim people across Britain and I am thinking here of statements made by Jack Straw about how it is not very good when people wear the nikab, this is divisive.
There are all kinds of debates about the role of Islam that need to be taken on in a much more confident way to prevent those kind of divisions arising among us. And I think people also need to be much clearer about the British National Party. This is a party with a fascist heritage, with a fascist outlook and that any scope they are given to infiltrate main stream institutions they will use with the eventual aim of trying to destroy those institutions.
We are a long way behind what has happened in the rest of Europe but we need to be on our guard and make sure that every time that these debates like the one we have just had on question time that we are very firm and we don’t allow them the scope they have elsewhere in Europe because we can see exactly where it can lead.
Samuel Tarry: I am just going to begin by saying a little bit about Searchlight and our campaign and make a few comments on the European situation and the threat that the far right constitutes. I would also like to say a bit more the threat of the BNP in the British context as well and the focus they have had on the Muslim community to stir up hatred and to use it to their advantage.
Searchlight was an anti-fascist magazine. It still is. It comes out every month. It was set up in the 1970s. It comes from a very long tradition stretching back to groups like the 62 group and the 42 group. They were militant anti-fascists formed after WWII and also during the 1960s in a response to what was then a much more violent threat from the National Front in this country.
About five or six years ago we had a really think about anti-facism, about campaigning against the BNP and the growing threat of the BNP. One of the key things that has led to the BNP in this country is their ability to take up some of the models which the Front Nationale used. This is basically the idea of professionalising themselves as a political party.
Six or seven years ago the BNP could only muster across the whole of the country in council elections 200 – 300 candidates. In next year’s elections they are going to be standing nearly 1,000 people and these will in about 50 key wards where they have a minimum of 15 percent of support up to places like where I am from, Barking and Dagenham or Stoke-on-Trent going above 40 percent in some of the constituency wards for the borough elections.
In Hope not Hate we had a sit down and thought about what had worked and what had not worked in the anti fascist movement. The idea was to come up with a way of mobilising, organising within communities so that you could bring together communities who were under threat be they Muslim or African or other migrant communities, people who are progressives and people who are from a variety of political parties who actually felt it should be part of their work to take on the BNP but to do it in a way that more people who are just ordinary citizens could get involved.
The reality in many parts of the country is that there is actually an anti-BNP majority, even in those wards where the BNP are polling as much as 40 percent. The other 60 percent do not support the BNP.
So we want to bring people into the campaign who are not typical political party activists, trade union activists because we realised that the campaign had to be massively broadened out to ordinary people who were not political and maybe felt themselves to being a little bit disenfranchised from the political process. This led searchlight to form the hope campaign. We have a huge online operation. It is run by the same people who ran Barack Obama’s online campaign called Blue State Digital.
Because of using that sort of technology and the way we link that in to organising communities over 135,000 people have signed up in some way or another to the campaign. Two weeks we organised an event against the BNP (we had actually done two months of training seminars to give people skills in how to organise their own community, to give them skills. We had 50 events across the country simultaneously. This is huge. The mainstream parties can’t compete on that kind of level in terms of that much activity happening simultaneously.
During the European elections we put out 3.4m pieces of literature throughout the country. We always try to make things as specific as possible and target specific communities. During the London election we produced a newspaper in association with David Mellor. We had specific sections in that written by and for the Muslim community.
We produced a tabloid style newspaper which had positive messages from the community coming together and about common interests but not afraid to face difficult issues regardless of what community you are from. There was the issue of unemployment and competition for various services in terms of some of the more poor areas.
But basically our campaign is about empowering communities, training people and organising people within their communities whether it is Edgware or in Dagenham where I am you have different religious groups involved and political parties, you have church groups. We are going through the process of mapping these out and going through the process of interest.
If you are from the African or Muslim community explaining about taking the fight to the BNP is a little bit more straight forward then it is taking it to a white, working class trade unionist who is angry about immigration and is more difficult to put the argument to them when they are actually facing pressures in their own area. It is about finding the appropriate message for each community and actually giving them the tools to talk to other people.
I very much believe and the best way to get people to see the threat from the BNP is someone from that community. I have the idea that someone from a mosque or a church is actually the best person to speak to someone from that religious community. Someone from a trade union is actually the best person to explain to someone from another trade union why the BNP wining power in their area would be detrimental to their workplace rights. A divided workforce (the BNP have actually tried to divide the workforce) is a workforce where the management can much more easily refuse reforms which is actually a threat to everyone.
We breakdown the issues in terms which actually mean most to people and which they can digest. It also means that we build bridges to put in place some of the gaps that have been there in terms of civic society. In places like Burnley we have been active with that method of organising. This has not only brought different elements of the community together so that they are now not isolated. They actually have strong links and they realise that democratic power actually lies with them regardless of the reservations they may have about the mainstream parties.
They are actually able to do something. If you are in any particular area you are able to turn out 500 or 1,000 people to go out and vote for any political party all of a sudden the politicians and decision makers start to listen to you a lot more closely than they did before. It is actually about bringing the democratic legacy to these communities who have been fractured and don’t have that capacity.
In terms of the European context I can’t add a lot more to what has already been said. The BNP actually have begun to form or have formed a group with Front Nationale – three MEP’s in the European parliament and also to form groups with some of the more extreme right wing organisations. They are looking to build on that and expand that so they get more money in terms of funding.
In terms of the political context the reasons for the rise of the far right are actually very similar both in this country and in other places across Europe. In this country there would be a strong case to make that we have not had a break through in terms of the far right ten years ago rather than now is because of our political system.
I am in favour of having a more proportional system of electoral election. It may be an academic point to make but it means that in this country the many areas that have been traditional areas of Labour Party support the Labour Party is actually going to take those votes for granted because they have been so-called safe seats.
This means that policies from the Labour Party have been very much focused on a different group of people. The people who will switch between Conservative and Labour or Labour and Liberal at an election. The policies are not targeted towards the people who have voted Labour for 40 years. Issues like education unemployment and health care are of very real concern but that is not to say it is the fault of migrants who have moved in. That is because you have not built the council houses that need to be built or invested more in education in those areas so it does not become a competition between two groups of people on the lowest rung but the provision is there to properly deal with these issues.
In terms of the European context in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria one of the main focal points of the far right parties are not about the colour of people’s skin but about using Islam as a kind of tool to talk about an accepted form of racism.
It is interesting that in London there is the English Defence League which is the more violent football hooligans crowd which focuses its campaign around mosques. One of the founders of the English Defense League is a north London businessman who has very strong links to people like Gurt Valders, some of the Swedish anti- Islam groups and has also been in contact with people in Hungry and Austria.
I think that is potentially a direction of travel which could be very dangerous because it is being used as a way to talk about race. The majority of people who are Muslim are actually of an ethnic minority as opposed to being white. In those countries they can talk about race without talking about race. It is almost like a code language, a dog whistle kind of politics. That links into what we said earlier about the Front Nationale and the messages that they would use.
Nick Griffin has quite clearly said almost apeing what Le Penn said that we can’t talk about race: We have to talk about culture. The BNP is trying to wrap themselves with the English national flag – wrapping themselves with cultural identifiers which have hidden undertones to do with race.
For me Austria is one of the most fearful places in the whole of Europe. Sixty percent of people below the age of 29 (and you can vote from the age of 16 in Austria) voted for the two far-right parties. They are not that far off from the BNP. In the past five years those far-right parties formed the government in Austria although it didn’t last for a long time.
But the potential is there. There is a generation of disenfranchised people who would previously turn to the social democrats, the socialist youth movements to get involved politically. Now they have tapped into the youth sub-culture and have tapped into that. To have 60 percent of the people below the age of 29 voting for an extremist party to me beggars belief.
There are some specific issues with Austria and its own historical context: things that happened or did not happen over the past 50 years. I do definitely think that that is where we could be in Britain in ten years time if we don’t take on the BNP head on.
In terms of the British context the key threat areas for the next six months leading up to the general election are East London, Barking and Dagenham. Nick Griffin announced just last week that he was going to stand there as a candidate. I am not sure that he is going to win there but I am sure he is going to bring it very, very close. His strategy there is to turbo charge the BNP’s vote across a few votes. They will stand 50 candidates. They only stood 13 candidates. If they stood more more would have been elected to at least 20 – 25 councils. If they are successful in doing that they then potentially take control of that council.
This lends legitimacy to people who may be racist but try to keep it behind closed doors. In Barking and Dagenham people are a lot more up front about saying that they support the BNP. I remember campaigning five years ago. People were very closed. They did not like talking to you on the door step. You know they would vote for the BNP but they would not say so. Now there is shame in voting for the BNP. That is a real danger as they have gone, in the eyes of the people in those areas, past the threshold of legitimacy. That is a real serious issue for the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement, that we push them back so they are seen as an illegitimate party.
Further out in Essex you have the BNP getting 20 percent of the vote. We have thought Nick Griffin was going to stand there in Furrick. They have a potential to multiply that to six or seven counties and hold the balance of power between the Labour and Conservative which have the same number of councillors.
North London (Epping Forest) the BNP have had a number of councillors. We were instrumental in creating a cross party community campaign there. We were successful in taking out three of their councillors but they had a big impact. Assaults and attacks have gone up in that area because they have a particularly nasty group of BNP activists there. Many of them have convictions for thuggery, assault and racist assault. Some of them even have terrorism convictions.
It is interesting that over the past 18 months there have been a significant number of BNP linked terrorists in the British courts. But this has not made the front pages unlike Muslims who have been involved in some kind of extremist act. That to me as an absolute disgrace. It needs to be exposed as the BNP as an organisation has direct terrorist links not just in this country but also to Northern Ireland to the loyalist para military groups there. It is no coincidence that the BNP’s new call centre is actually based in Northern Ireland. They have an 8am to 9pm call centre ringing their supporters, doing fund raising. That is linked to some very nasty people in Northern Ireland who have some very dubious connections to some of the paramilitary organisations there.
In terms of other places, Sandwell, we pushed the BNP back. There is a by election currently taking place in the West Midlands, Longeaton. Northamptonshire has the highest concentration of BNP members in the country. In places like Leeds the BNP is a threat in places like Alton and Burnley. The BNP have as much as eight percent support across the entire region.
We were disappointed that in Yorkshire and Humber North West our campaign was so big the BNP’s vote fell in those areas. But is was actually the mainstream parties and their vote falling by as much as a quarter of a million for the Labour Party that led to Griffin scrapping home and getting elected on a margin of just 1200 votes. If that had been the turnout in the previous election and the Labour Party’s vote had held up they wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of getting elected there.
In terms of talking about the BNP’s focus on Muslims in areas that have large Muslim populations it has been a tactic of the BNP to try and actually use that as a kind of focal point for their campaigns. In Barking and Dagenham there is a small Muslim community and they have actually focused on the African community. They had a whole thing where they put out an urban myth. They are very good and spreading myths. They go out to local community centres and pubs where there are lots of people they are able to speak to easily. And they start a sort of Chinese whispers campaign about an issue.
If you talk to people in Barking and Dagenham they will tell you that African people are getting grants of up to 50,000 pounds to move into the borough. This is a lot of rubbish. There was one scheme by Westminster council to move people out of central London to places like Barking and Dagenham. They got grants of up to 3000 pounds. Over the past five years there were four families which took advantage of that scheme all of which were white. So there was a small seed of truth but the exaggeration was quite ludicrous. The danger was that this has real traction and people do believe that.
What has happened in areas like that is because it has one of the cheapest areas in the whole country and greater London to buy or rent a house many migrant families think if I am living in cramped accommodation in Tower Hamlets of Newham I want to move out to somewhere where I have a garden, I have a bigger house or I can afford to buy or rent a bigger house.
In places of the north-west there has been more of a focus on the Muslim community there has been a direct attempt by the BNP to draw a dividing line between the communities. There is a really controversial issue which they actually picked up. They said that young Muslim men had been grooming young women got prostitution. These women were from the white working class community. There have been some criminal gangs involved in this sort of activity. They have absolutely nothing to do with the Muslim community.
So our campaign was to get some senior people in the Muslim community to speak out on our leaflets and to condemn the activity of these criminals and to explain that this is completely against Islam. But the BNP have divided the communities. They have gone through the town, using a very clever tactic. They handed out a green coloured leaflet that had this whole kind of myth about the Muslim community. They also said something about the new mosque which was going to be built. They had a truck and went along with a microphone and said the council have not allowed you to read this leaflet. And people were handing it out.
They are quite savy in terms of their techniques. They do quite a lot of the ground work in percolating these very divisive lies. So the focus of our campaign is to do some very tough myth busting and to find people in the communities who can be voices in our literature.
I would now like to talk a bit about our campaign. The BNP are planning to stand in the local council elections which will take place at the same time as the general election. They will have a thousand people across the country. There aren’t a thousand places where they can get elected but they have almost tripled every three and a half years the amount of people that are standing. This shows just how serious the threat is and the professionalisation of the BNP as a political organisation.
They are standing in many areas we never thought they would stand in and it is getting to the point of not just disenfranchised working class areas which have got grievances against the traditional parties.
In true blue Torry Ken the BNP got beaten to the ground by a couple of hundred votes. In Epping Forest they are winning votes of the Torries as much as they are winning votes off the Labour Party. So about 150 wards nationally are key threat wards in that they have at least 15 – 20 percent support for the BNP. There are about four or five places that the BNP are going to make a strong attempt in.
The key though in local elections are Stoke-on-Trent and Barking in Dagenham. They are both places that the BNP see they have got a chance if they get enough councillors or if they force the independent group to go in with them.
It was interesting that the Stoke-on-Trent had a directly elected mayor for a number of years. It is quite a powerful position as he can tell the elected cabinet what to do. The political parties came together and said we are going to abolish this position as the BNP will get very close to winning.
These are two important areas in the local elections. Griffin is obviously standing in Barking-Dagenham to accelerate the BNP vote. There are probably ten or 12 wards in which the BNP have got a significant majority vote at the moment or at least are neck in neck with the Labour Party.
So can you get involved and help out. First of all there are few copies of our leaflet and you can see our website. We have the guys who ran Barack Obama’s campaign – a fairly successful online operation. It tells you where you can campaign. You can also do online campaigning. But it will also tell you about offline campaigns – things that are going on in the community near you. We also run plenty of training seminars. So whoever you are in your community across London want to learn the basics of how to organise and mobilise people in your community about how to get organised and stop the BNP we will be only to happy to come and do that training with you.
* Dr Jim Wolfery senior lecturer in French and European Politics at King’s College London and co-author ( with Peter Fysh) of The Politics of Racism in France ( Palgrave 2003)
** Samuel Tarry as a community organiser for the Hope not Hate Campaign in Dagenham. Sam is also the National Chair of Young Labour.
