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Valley fever Ben Tullett reports on the battle to beat back the BNP in Halifax during the latest round of local elections Outside
London, the June 2004 council elections were particularly significant. Following
boundary changes, in large swathes of the country all seats were up for
election, meaning that instead of having just one vote, many electors got to
vote for three candidates. As
a result, this election was billed as a make or break event for the British
National Party. Would it remain a party restricted to the political backwaters
or become a mainstream contender? In
Calderdale, as in most other areas, the results were inconclusive. The BNP did
not make great gains but it did consolidate its position. Calderdale is divided
into two constituencies, Halifax and Calder Valley. By and large the BNP
concentrated on Halifax and ignored Calder Valley where the Liberal Democrats
have already exploited the decline of both the Labour and Tory parties. The
BNP started the election with three councillors in Halifax, and ended it with
three. However, boundary changes meant Mixenden ward, where the BNP had two
councillors, and Illingworth ward, where, because of a Tory defection, it had
one, had been merged. On the whole, the BNP concentrated on only three wards:
Mixenden and Illingworth, Town, and Ovenden. Many
players in North Halifax scrambled for seats elsewhere. Jennifer Pearson, widow
of the Liberal Democrat Stephen Pearson, who had defeated the BNP the previous
year, went to nearby Warley, and won. When the results were announced, the
Liberal Democrats’ vote disappeared in North Halifax as suddenly as it had
arisen, leaving one long-serving Labour councillor and two BNP in the new
Illingworth and Mixenden ward. Adrian
Marsden, the BNP victor in January 2003, secured a seat in central Halifax (Town
ward). Although this was hardly a breakthrough, it did represent a marginally
improved position for the BNP. In Ovenden, they gathered a respectable number of
votes but failed to gain a council seat, allowing the Labour Party to retain its
rump in Halifax. In
other Halifax wards, they fielded only one or two candidates in an attempt to
cash in on the fact that these were all-out elections. Their thinking is that if
electors have three votes, they might cast one for a new party, for the sake of
novelty, while casting their other two votes for the party they normally
support. The Greens tried the same trick in Calder Valley ward and slipped into
fourth place just ahead of the most popular Labour candidate. In
the wards where they fielded one or two candidates, the BNP’s vote was
respectable, but got them nowhere near winning a seat. In contrast, the Red and
Green Party, an anti-Blair alliance unique to Calderdale, which issued a
populist left-wing shopping list of a manifesto, fell far short of achieving
anything significant, rarely getting more than 300 votes per candidate. Perhaps
most significantly, in Town and Illingworth and Mixenden wards, the BNP’s
unsuccessful candidates lost by only a handful of votes. Conspicuous
braver Calderdale
Unity against the BNP was very active during the campaign and at least one of
its activists showed conspicuous bravery by turning up alone, sporting a Unity
ribbon, to a BNP public meeting. The attack on the BNP in its leaflets
concentrated on the substantial criminal records of some of the BNP’s leading
activists, the BNP’s inactivity on Calderdale council, and their councillors’
acceptance of the vastly increased council allowance, which the BNP initially
said its councillors would not pocket. I thought the leaflet was good and showed
that the anti-racist organisations were thinking on their feet, but I could not
honestly say that the results of such thinking had any impact. Although
many activists in the Labour Party are sympathetic, others are not and believe
Unity does more harm than good by attacking the BNP directly. The Liberal
Democrats by and large dismiss Unity entirely. The sceptics tend to advocate
‘concentrating on the issues’ such as dog-shit, road crossings and the like.
They may have a point in the short term, however uninspiring the strategy, as
negative campaigning is conspicuously ineffective. It is common in local council
campaigns for negative references to other parties in election literature to
alienate voters. However, in the long term, the ‘issues’ strategy hardly
challenges the underlying causes of the BNP’s limited success, and it is
difficult to let the racism, hypocrisy and, in some instances, criminality of
BNP activists go unmentioned. Helpfully,
before the election one Burnley BNP councillor defected because of her horror at
the BNP’s racism and she spoke to the press about it. This was widely
reported, especially in The Yorkshire Evening Post, and one was left wondering
why she joined the BNP in the first place. Perhaps she genuinely believed that
the BNP was a community party concerned about crime and asylum seekers, and that
its attitudes to race were neutral. However, her testimony had little
discernible effect in Halifax, although the Post‘s stand may have had an
impact in Leeds where it is more widely read. In
any event, the BNP’s racism doesn’t worry some voters. When I challenged a
work colleague in Halifax, who’d expressed sympathy for the BNP, to name one
actual BNP policy, she was stumped until she came up with ‘sending all the
Pakis home. I agree with that one.’ Exposing the racism of the BNP will not
worry voters such as her. It may have had some effect in Burnley where the BNP
won only one more council seat, but there was no sign that the defection
overturned their apple cart. Regionally,
the BNP did well in Bradford, where they now have four councillors, mainly in
and around Haworth’s Bronte country. Readers familiar with Wuthering Heights
will recall that Heathcliff, a dark-skinned outsider, was not exactly welcomed
to the area in the 19th century either. However,
in Leeds the BNP failed to make much of a showing. In every ward where the BNP
stood, save Kippax and Armley, it only fielded one candidate. Whereas the BNP
vote put the Alliance for Green Socialism (and often the Green Party itself,
which did exceptionally well in only one ward to get three councillors), in the
shade, it never seriously challenged the status quo. By and large, it didn’t
embarrass itself either, but if it is to gain seats in Leeds, it must be
prepared for a very long and arduous haul subject to the usual vagaries of
political fortune. It
certainly had nothing like the success of ‘The Morely Borough Independents’,
which wiped out the main political parties in Leeds City Council’s disgruntled
southern satellite. How much this lack of success was due to the strongly
negative coverage in the Yorkshire Evening Post is hard to measure, but it would
be surprising if its unrelenting exposure of the BNP failed to make an impact.
The Post is not famed for its progressive politics and it may have had more
credibility with the electorate than those ‘broad-based’ campaigns organised
by a left that flopped in every Leeds seat it stood in, even Chapel Allerton. Ethnic
mix Another
feature which may have made a difference is the ethnic mix in Leeds, which is
very diverse. The same can be said for Huddersfield in Kirklees. The BNP is
doing noticeably better where white communities are close to strong
concentrations of Pakistanis or, in the south, Bangladeshis, but meets more
scepticism from white voters in genuinely multi-ethnic areas. In
Kirklees, the picture was very similar although the BNP did pick up a council
seat in Heckmondwike and made a strong challenge in Cleckheaton and the three
Dewsbury seats. However, balanced against that is the fact that once again it
fielded only one candidate per ward and, as a result, its percentage of the
total vote still puts it on the political fringes. It still seems incapable of
making an impact in even slightly cosmopolitan areas. Nationally,
the BNP plateaued, getting a slightly smaller percentage of the vote than
before, although turnout was much greater because of postal voting and the
desire of the electorate to give new Labour a warning after Iraq. Significant
gains were only made in Epping Forest and the BNP struggled to retain its
position in the West Midlands. Crossroads Where
this leaves the BNP is hard to say. There now appears to be a split in the BNP
between the Nick Griffin wing of the party, which is electorally pragmatic and
perhaps prepared to go down the route of xeno-phobic right-wing populism rather
than fascism, and the BNP’s founder John Tyndall and his supporters. They seem
to want to reclaim the party for blood-and-guts fascism, which, if successful,
would perhaps make the left’s job in combating it a sight easier. The
BNP, therefore, stands at a crossroads. If it can become a serious political
party (or at least as serious as the Liberal Democrats), then it has some
prospect of building a significant and odious presence in local politics.
Alternatively, it may just start arguing among itself and decline. The left
needs to be prepared to meet it, and should have a long-term, effective strategy
to challenge it. Whether
the BNP will survive or not is open to question. The recent TV documentary
showing the psychotic racism of some BNP activists appears to have led to calls
from Nick Griffin for a purge of members who are ‘hate-filled’ because of
the scars they have suffered ‘living in a multi-cultural society’. As he
sees it, ‘The BNP is facing a wave of co-ordinated attacks, both
administrative and propaganda. The aim is to disrupt our campaign to turn the
thousands of inquiries we received during the election campaign into members,
and to criminalise the party in the eyes of a sufficient proportion of the
public to “justify” the temporary internment of senior BNP officials in the
event of a major Islamist terror strike against the UK.’ It is difficult to
imagine anyone voting for this sort of rubbish, or to believe the BNP’s
leaders can move very far into the terrain of sane, let alone normal politics. The
election results tell a different story, however. They imply that the left needs
pro-active and developing policies based on community engagement, rather than
just negative campaigns or merely more of the same at a local level. There
are some positive developments in Calderdale, albeit very nascent. The Art
Gallery held a black and white photographic exhibition showing the ethnic
diversity in Halifax (which has a Serbian church as well as a Mosque) and the
Refugee Council organised a Refugee Week publicising the plight of asylum
seekers. In particular, one event concentrated on the situation in Darfor just
before it really hit the headlines. The desperate requirement for asylum, and
the public sympathy this event has provoked, may provide the sort of information
and human interest stories that will counter the attitudes the BNP currently
plays on. Of
course Calderdale being Calderdale, there was one final, ludicrous twist. After
the elections the Council remained hung, with the Tories as the largest group.
One of the first acts of the Tory group was to appoint the BNP’s Adrian
Marsden to Calderdale’s Racial Equality and Community Cohesion Working Party
Committee. This caused a national outrage and the committee was scrapped
‘because it has achieved its objectives’. Oh, yes. Then a new one was
created without the BNP. On
occasions, Halifax politics would be too weird even for The League of Gentlemen.
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