Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right by Daniel Trilling

Author:Daniel Trilling [Trilling, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2012-09-09T22:00:00+00:00

A few days after they were elected, Burnley’s three new BNP councillors – all local candidates, and none with easily identifiable roots in fascist politics – gave their first press conference. Choosing a patch of wasteland in the deprived ward of Burnley Wood, the image they put forward was that of ordinary Burnley folk, pushed into politics by Labour’s neglect of the town. ‘ “We’re just normal people”, say BNP trio’, ran the headline in the Burnley Express.28 One of the three, David Edwards, told the paper: ‘We are just normal people representing the normal people of Burnley. We work and have children.’

The press conference was a propaganda trick: the BNP’s breakthrough had not centred on urban Burnley Wood, but on the outlying villages of Cliviger and Worsthorne, which normally voted Tory. This was the only part of the borough that the minuscule local Conservative Party could usually consider a safe bet. Similarly, the areas of Gannow and Rosegrove, where the two other BNP councillors had been elected, were at the smarter end of working-class Burnley.

These relatively well-off voters were the ‘builders, joiners, electricians, mechanics, etc.’ and were the targets of Smith’s leafleting. In many people’s minds, support for the far right was a snarl from the most run-down sink estates. But the BNP breakthrough was something else: it was a protest from people who had something to lose, and felt they were in danger of losing it. Resentment appeared to be based on class as well as race. As one BNP voter, a self-employed tradesman who lived in one of the town’s more affluent wards, put it: ‘It’s not that I disapprove of all Pakis, it’s all these that’s not working, and it’s the same with whites. It’s not just them, it’s whites as well.’29

Over the next year, the BNP began to pick up votes away from towns directly affected by the riots – with the asylum panic and worsening attitudes towards Muslims as a backdrop. As the Blair Government beat the drums for war with Iraq, a BNP councillor was elected in Blackburn after distributing leaflets claiming that the town was to build replicas of the giant arches made of crossed swords installed by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The party won a council seat in the Hertfordshire borough of Broxtowe – a white area with no direct experience of immigration – based on a toxic combination of fears about asylum and a deeper-seated hostility to nearby multiracial London.30 In the 2003 local elections, the BNP won a further six seats on Burnley council, making it the second-largest group – and spread out further into Lancashire and West Yorkshire, winning seats in Halifax. In the latter, as with Burnley, the initial breakthrough came in wards that normally voted Tory.31

Yet again, the BNP’s own internal tensions hampered progress. While the electoral successes had put an end to the challenge from the Freedom Party, and Eddy Butler had rejoined the BNP, Griffin tried to impose tighter control of the local party in Burnley, scaling down Steven Smith’s role.

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