While the BNP made a rather nasty incision into the European Parliament at the elections, it is hopefully, for the time being at least, a localised outbreak of a racist virus which will not, hopefully, become a UK wide epidemic. But it is not a forgone conclusion...
It is hard to argue that the reason for their poisonous victories is merely down to the recession, or just the public outrage at the MP expenses scandal, or a lack of jobs or affordable housing in the North West. I expect that the root of the dramatic turn to the right is that many voters, of whatever class, can see quite clearly that the UK Government no longer stands for them, or their interests. The UK Government stands, it appears, for nobody's interests other than themselves, an intellectual elite of Polly Toynbee supporters and a few powerful lobby groups such as the LGBT organisations and ethnic minority issue pressure groups.
There can be no doubt left whatsoever, that something, somewhere went terribly wrong in our democracy and it has little to do with MPs fiddling the system in order to feather their nests. That is really the fruit of a sorrowful rupture that has occurred between the politicians and the people they claim to serve - the people who, more or less, kept on voting for them until they had had enough.
The blame lies solely at the door of the 'reformers' of the Labour Party, perhaps, even for the rather unimpressive display by the Conservative Party this week. Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown and many others all played their part in taking the Labour Party, persuading its core support of voters that they knew what they were doing and to trust them, and then turning it into a kind of militant, hardline Party of Guardian readers. Hell-bent on appeasing the powerful lobby groups such as Stonewall, feminist think-tanks and Islamic societies, the Labour Party became like one gigantic house party where anyone who said, "Yes, well, you know, I'm still feel a bit funny about this whole civil partnerships lark," was asked to get his coat and leave.
The Labour Party, over the past 5 or 10 years has gradually been spending so much time trying to re-educate the British public on what it means to be 'tolerant', that the British public have begun to find the Labour Party utterly intolerable. They have spent so long, so much time, so much energy and wasted money on initiatives designed to reinforce a kind of engineering of the public consciousness, that when the Party finally gets to a point when it is reliant on its core vote - the voters it abandoned in its thirst to obtain power - those voters have flung their arms in the air and said, "Why on earth should we vote for you!? You've done nothing nor even said anything for us or our interests?!"
The driving force of the Labour Party in the 21st century was not so much tolerance of ethnic and social 'minorities' as one gigantic piss up at Downing Street, inviting every PC think tank and liberal pressure group in to boogie with Blair at the bar, Mandelson on the DJ decks and Brown and Balls nursing private grievances in the spare room, plotting the downfall of the Prime Minister, while wrongly assuming that the raft of painfully patronising and largely suffocating equality legislation was going down a storm with the middle class, the working class and the upper class. The huge New Labour Leviathan, an ugly monolith of politically correct, utopian, political theorists lauded it over the British public so much on what a modern Britain should look like, that in the end, ordinary British voters who hadn't swallowed the ideology hook, line and sinker rejected the Party.
Meanwhile, because of the electoral success over the past 15 years, of the New Labour product, David Cameron has gone all 'soft' and 'wet' as well. Cameron too now speaks the same language as Tony Blair. The two major political parties don't do politics anymore. They do political correctness. Cameron too, is cosying up to the LGBT lobby and other single issue pressure groups. He uses the same language of 'rights', 'responsibilities' and 'modern compassionate Conservatism' which, in all truth, has been lifted out of the 'How to Get Elected: For Dummies by Tony Blair'. He has not realised that while Britain is indeed a tolerant nation, whole communities, and that is real communities rather than communities based on same sex attraction, are being decimated. He's going to put in an appearance on the Gay Pride March this year. He would do well to put in an appearance at some of the towns, cities and regions of the country which feel desperate in the face of a near unprecedented time of strife and unemployment.
Unfortunately, Cameron hasn't cottoned on that in a time of recession, the average, working class voter doesn't want a prospective leader to hang out with scantily clad men, ladies and ladymen, but to know what he is going to do to help him get a job, keep a roof over his family's head and somehow keep his head above water. He looks around and who is saying anything that actually resonates with his personal experience? That's right. It isn't the Conservative Party. It's the BNP who know full well that that the average working class, British chap needs a job and a house and can't get either. Meanwhile he perceives that people of a different colour are getting precedence over his family based solely on the colour of their skin, due to the Council's over-zealous enforcement of equality measures and understandably begins to feel resentful.
If Cameron (because we can assume that the Labour Party is dead in the water awaiting discovery on election night, floating, lifeless in the swimming pool of political correctness) does not get his act together and begin to appeal to core voters in the UK, instead of a few one issue obsessed pressure groups, his party too, will be joint victims in Labour's self-inflicted demise. If Cameron keeps talking about recycling, the rainforests, and equalities then the BNP will only grab more votes that in this unprecedented time, rightfully belong to the Conservative Party.
New Labour, aided by the Conservative Party have tried to legislate for people's speech and thought in equality legislation, terror legislation and a raft of race and religious hatred legislation. The trouble is that people are still thinking it. And because of the times, because of the breach of trust with the British people, people are starting to say it...and they're saying it at the ballot box. Very, very few people really like what Britain has become. Doubtless, the public will find anyone who has a vision of what Britain used to be very appealing indeed. Unfortunately for us, and really that is all of us, black, white and asian alike, the only Party appealing to a vision of what Britain used to be is the BNP.
Morrissey was widely ridiculed in the press relatively recently, before the surge in support for the British Nazi Party. I don't believe that he is a racist or an actual supporter of the BNP or National Front. I believe he may, having grown up in a Manchester housing estate, know that it was not entirely unpredictable that the issue of a future backlash against immigration was going to rear its ugly head sometime...Now it is happening. Say a prayer for David Cameron. I think he is our only hope...because if he doesn't take the leadership of this country at the next election and walk through the door of No.10 Downing Street, it is highly likely that somebody far more unpleasant will.
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