Loughton result confirms BNP's downward trend

Ever since the May local elections, when eight out of nine of its sitting councillors lost their seats, the BNP has looked in vain for electoral cheer in a series of summer by-elections. They thought they'd find it in Nuneaton and Bedworth's Slough ward, and shamelessly hyped their chances of winning the seat, only to find themselves broken against the in-built strength of the Labour vote in a former mining town with deep Labour (not New Labour) and trade union traditions.

The BNP were further disappointed when one of its sitting councillors resigned his seat on Loughton Council, Essex, necessitating a by-election in the town's Alderton Ward.

The racist party needed this by-election like it needed a hole in the head. It needed to retain the seat to save face and to bolster the sagging morale of its supporters, and was perhaps heartened by the fact that the history of municipal by-elections shows that it is more difficult to lose a seat than it is to win one.

The BNP duly fought the Alderton ward by-election last Thursday, and won. Since then the party has been crowing to the high heavens with news of its 'victory', its members gleefully posting the result wherever they can on the Internet.

But this wasn't a 'victory'. The BNP did not increase its vote - if it had, some serious questions would need to be asked. As it was the result passed off without a great deal of comment for the simple reason that nobody seriously expected the party to lose its own seat.

What is worthy of comment is the fact that even though they retained the seat the BNP vote fell by 5% - a pretty steep drop in anybody's book and one that would have most political parties seriously worried.

To the BNP, retaining the seat on a reduced vote represents an apparent success. Well, all political parties spin bad election results, and nobody has more reason to spin than the BNP, especially in the case of its Alderton ward result, since here we (and they) have ample confirmation of what we saw in May - that the BNP has stalled and that its vote is falling.

No amount of spin can disguise the party's continuing downward electoral trend, though you'd never know there was such a trend if you were to read its own report of the by-election at its style-challenged website. Here we read that the result is an 'unprecendeted win' made against overwhelming odds - according to the whinge-prone BNP just about every other party ('who invariably choreograph their campaigns') fighting the by-election attacked it, and there is an attempt to link the party's only serious challengers in Alderton ward, the Independent Residents Association, with the anti-racist organisation Redbridge and Epping Forest Together.

Add in a few swipes at the rump UKIP, the busted flush against which the BNP likes to measure its supposed success, don't mention the massive resources the BNP poured into its campaign, and you have a long piece of nonsense designed to bolster internal morale by creating the illusion of a great victory gained in the teeth of the massed ranks of the party's opposition.

It's so much whistling in the dark. If there had been the slightest evidence of any increase in BNP support we would have seen it in Alderton ward. We did not. We saw a 5% slump in their vote, and nothing at all to justify the BNP's hyperbole.

There's still a long way to go and there may be some nasty surprises to come, but the BNP's May results, its summer by-election results, and latterly the Alderton ward result all irrevocably point to the slow but steady evaporation of the BNP's vote.

But the business of spin extends beyong simple vote-juggling. The need to bolster the seriously-flagging morale of the average BNP branch is forcing the party to madly applaud anything that can be manipulated into some show of success, no matter how ephemeral. A couple of days ago, its Regional Voices page had one example of the puffery that has become necessary to blow any little event up into something that the leadership hopes will dispel the gloom.

'Hot on the heels of the Epping Forest victory comes new [sic] of yet another recruit to add to [the] Eastern Region’s tally of local councillors. Sitting Parish councillor Simon Deacon has formerly joined the BNP and notified his parish clerk of the change...'

Simon Deacon is the only councillor in the 40-year history of his former party, the National Front. He took his position of Parish councillor completely unopposed, not a single vote being cast to let him take the seat because nobody else could be bothered to stand given the political inconsequence of the average Parish councillor.

Such is the reality of the BNP's much-vaunted recent 'successes' - a seat kept but with a 5% drop in the vote and the gain of an unelected Parish councillor from one of the most virulently racist parties in the UK. The Emperor has no clothes and these are certainly no great successes, no matter how hard they are spun.

(Article by Denise G and Antifascist)