The influx has had a striking effect on many small market towns, but is most obvious in places such as King's Lynn, East Dereham, Swaffham, and Great Yarmouth. The most cosmopolitian town of them all is the resort of Great Yarmouth, where at least 4,000 Portuguese workers have come to live, in addition to Poles and other East Europeans. The town also has a sizeable refugee population, many of the refugees originally dumped there by London boroughs unconcerned at the often Rachman-style landlords they handed them over to.
Despite this very sudden influx race relations in Great Yarmouth and Norfolk in general have been notably harmonious and there have been few incidents to marr the overall picture.
Attempts to stir disharmony - perversely - initially seemed to come from the race relations "industry". They gleefully trumpeted exaggerated figures for the numbers of migrants settling in the county, claimed to find "racism" here, there, and everywhere (when nobody else could), and caused a storm of protest in Great Yarmouth with the divisive demand that the Portuguese community be given a special say in the town's affairs. To some extent this "industry" continues to meddle (they have jobs to justify, after all), but for the most part Norfolk is getting on with the business of integrating - because, left to their own devices, that's what people tend to do.
Racist organisations have been notable by their absence in Norfolk, but recently there have been ominous stirrings - tales of leaflet drops made under cover of darkness, sticker campaigns, loose talk in public houses, and hints on internet forums.
Nick Griffin's lazily updated "Chairman's Blog" tells, in cod-travelogue style, of a trip to Norfolk in mid-March. Griffin's first stop was in King's Lynn. According to him there were "more than thirty people [at the meeting]. One carload have come over from Norwich to support their fellow Norfolk comrades, and a few are from smaller neighbouring towns like Dereham, but the vast majority are local. Some are regular activists, others are recent enquirers."
As with most things Griffin says, this can be taken with a large pinch of salt. If there is one thing noticeable about the BNP organisation in King's Lynn it is the fact of its virtual invisibility - unsurprising, as you can count the number of activists on your fingers. One hand will normally do.
Griffin then reaches Norwich for an evening meeting. This he says was attended by "some eighty people" - perhaps. Diplomatically, Griffin calls this "the Norfolk meeting", as the BNP organisation in Norwich could never muster so many. In fact it could have been called the "Norfolk plus" meeting, as the disputatious "eighty" were clearly augmented by many from beyond the county's borders.
The next day Griffin lighted upon Great Yarmouth, which is "another hitherto ‘unenriched’ town which is being transformed by a torrent of immigrant scab labour". Exactly how these hard-working people may be described as "scab labour" is something Griffin leaves unexplained - as well he might, since locals aren't falling over one another to work in East Anglia's harshly disciplined poultry-processing factories to hack turkeys and chickens to pieces for a living.
Griffin claims twenty people for the Yarmouth meeting, which, given what we know of the BNP in Great Yarmouth, seems rather many (especially as this was a lunch-time meeting). No matter. Giving the blogger the benefit of the considerable doubt that Yarmouth has anything approaching twenty active BNP members, we'll pass on to Nick's purpose.
The BNP has long salivated over its prospects in Great Yarmouth, prospects only hampered by the fact that it has had next to no organisation in the town. The National Front does have a small presence, and its chairman, Tom Holmes, lives locally. Holmes stood in the Borough's Regent ward - its poorest - in last May's local elections and scored around 20% of the vote - something not unnoticed by Griffin.
"We desperately need to stand candidates here for the first time," writes Griffin, "and I work as hard as I can to convince the still doubt-filled local ‘possibles’ to make a firm commitment to stand. The little meeting may just have done the trick."
There can't be much decent potential candidate material available at a meeting attended by a mere twenty bigots (which goes a long way towards explaining their lamentable performance elsewhere), but if Nick has "done the trick" then the BNP faces something of a dilemma.
The only Yarmouth ward likely to elect a racist councillor is Regent ward - a strange political division that encompasses much of the northern seafront, but also contains some of the Borough's worst poverty - in fact it is one of the most poverty-stricken areas of England, - and houses numerous refugees and immigrants alongside large numbers of benefit-dependent whites.
The BNP have for some time gazed longingly upon Regent ward, but the National Front beat them to it and now consider it "home turf". They intend to contest this ward. So will the BNP impolitely step in to antagonise the NF and wreck any chance either of them ever had of winning?
That remains to be seen.
What is certain is that the BNP is coming to Norfolk. They are unlikely to stand more than a handful of candidates through lack of manpower, but the candidates they do stand will be injected into communities which - despite all the difficulties - have remained relatively peaceful and harmonious
We must ensure our communities remain that way and that BNP membership in our county does not grow by exposing the mindless bigotry of the BNP for what it is, by exposing the disgraceful record of criminality, fraud and violence that characterises their councillors and candidates, and by exposing the BNP's own internal corruption and division. See you on the door-knocker!
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