Searchlight - The year ahead

Nick Lowles looks at the year ahead and stresses the need to improve our campaigning in order to keep the BNP in check.

There were few smiles as first Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, rose to speak, then Eddy Butler, the party’s national elections officer. Around the table were gathered the leaders of the British National Party, key regional organisers and those involved centrally in the election campaign. They were meeting to analyse the party’s performance in the May local elections.

A week before the polls the BNP had confidently predicted it would win 30 to 60 local council seats. In the event the party won just nine, one more than it lost. Even the BNP leadership admitted it was a poor result.

“Our opponents have now worked out how to keep us out,” the audience were told. “In key wards we were out-organised. In many cases we have a very good base vote, but to win we need a spike of support on top. As a direct result of our repeated electoral success, in particular our pioneering use of postal votes in our crushing by-election victory in Barking three years ago, the Labour Party has undergone a paradigm shift in the effectiveness of its election machine. They and their union allies are now capable of out-organising us in a limited number of places, thereby cutting off the top of our support spike.

“It was this ability, carefully targeted, that held us back from winning in several dozen wards in May.”

May seems a long time ago now. These elections are now history and the battleground has already moved on. If anyone believes the BNP has been beaten they are gravely wrong. In areas where anti-BNP groups and political parties took the BNP seriously the fascists were beaten, and beaten well. In areas where the old dogma of ignoring the BNP prevailed, principally in the East Midlands, the BNP performed very well.

Over the next 12 months there will be new challenges and an increased threat. The BNP is attempting to learn from its recent political failures in time for next year’s local elections. The London Assembly elections, contested under proportional repres-entation, will give the BNP a real chance of securing a seat, and if there is a general election the BNP is likely to field a record number of candidates in what the party is likely to treat as a dry run for the elections for the much coveted seats in the European Parliament in June 2009.

In facing these new threats there can be no room for complacency. We need to build on this year’s results, further improve our campaigning techniques and mobilise even more people to get out and vote.

Lessons

It is clear that the BNP is attempting to learn the lessons of last May. At the election analysis meeting the BNP leadership discussed quite openly the shortcomings of their own operation and discussed strategies to overcome these. If the BNP can find a way to put these ideas into action – after all it has promoted them before but the rank and file membership have been unwilling or unable to carry them out – then we will be facing a more determined BNP effort.

The BNP does not admit it overstretched itself in putting forward over 700 candidates in May though it recognises that it needs to widen the number of wards it targets intensively. It also intends to focus more directly on people with postal votes. In the first instance it wants to try to reduce the number of people using postal votes by means of a scare leaflet later this autumn which will claim that there is a high chance of one’s postal votes being stolen or manipulated. Then, during the election campaign itself, the BNP wants to ensure that local units properly target postal voters before they vote, which has not happened in the past.

There will also be a greater effort to identify BNP voters and get them out to vote, another admission that despite talk over several years stressing the importance of canvassing and Voter ID work, most branches fail to do such work. We are likely to see a bigger profile for the BNP campaign, Operation White Vote.

However, the key work being promoted by the leadership will be an extension of community politics – clearing up litter and getting involved in drug rehabilitation and youth groups, local festivals and neighbourhood watch schemes. Not only does this raise the profile of the BNP and its potential election candidates but, and probably more importantly, it gives a positive image of the party which contrasts greatly with the negative anti-BNP literature that is widely circulated.

To assist with this work Mark Collett and the BNP publicity department have committed themselves to producing a monthly leaflet with space for local community activities and feedback forms. But given that he was unable to supply many BNP branches with their targeted glossy leaflets during the election campaign – a widely held gripe that was raised at the meeting but largely brushed aside by Griffin – it is still uncertain whether the new leaflets will materialise.

In addition to a more effective BNP campaign, we will also face more difficult elections. The London Assembly elections will be contested under a form of PR and with 5% of the London-wide vote guaranteeing representation it is going to be a tall order to keep the BNP out. In 2004 the BNP was just 5,000 votes short of gaining a seat, with 90,365 votes (4.8%). The election was held on the same day as the European elections which obviously boosted the UK Independence Party, which polled 156,780 votes (8.18%), securing two seats in the London Assembly. Since 2004 the BNP has emerged as a significant political force in outer east London while the UKIP has declined, and the BNP will surely be looking to eat into the UKIP vote.

The general election, likely to be held in spring, will present advantages and disadvantages for the BNP. It is likely to field many more candidates than in 2005 and save a greater number of deposits. The free mail drop and party political broadcasts will get the BNP message into many more households than in a local election when leaflets have to be delivered through the door by activists and this will greatly increase the party’s profile ahead of the European elections.

The party’s key targets will be Barking and Dagenham in east London, all three Stoke-on-Trent seats and West Bromwich West in the West Midlands, and Dewsbury and Morley and Outwood in West Yorkshire.

There are also likely to be as many as 25 constituencies where the BNP vote will be bigger than the margin of victory. This will be a particular problem for the Conservatives who will be competing with the BNP for those people who are angry with Labour’s immigration policy.

However, the BNP is likely to be squeezed by the major political parties in many constituencies around the country and outside its key targets it will find it difficult to establish a profile. If the general election is on the same day as the local elections it will be even harder for the BNP.

Our response

The BNP will undoubtedly put in place a better election operation next year than this and we will need to continue improving to ensure that it fails to make any significant breakthrough. It is not a matter of radically altering our campaigning strategy but of expanding it. We won this year because the political parties rose to the challenge, their candidates worked harder over a longer period and re-engaged with voters. Complimenting them was Searchlight, trade unions and local anti-BNP groups which delivered targeted anti-BNP material, operated phone banks and knocked up anti-BNP voters.

One of the most successful elements of the campaign was the local specific leaflets that Searchlight produced for some candidates. Everywhere where these were produced, including 15 of the most vulnerable wards, the BNP was defeated.

Tom Watson, the MP for West Bromwich East, believes that it was this partnership that helped drive down the BNP vote in Sandwell considerably. “Searchlight worked closely with us and inspired us to work harder. The Sandwell Day of Action [when 220 people delivered 45,000 newspapers] gave us the extra push to defeat the BNP. In addition, the story about local BNP criminality, which was on the front page of the paper, really resonated with people who might have previously voted for the BNP. I’m still getting people in my constituency telling me that they liked what the BNP say on many issues but didn’t vote for them because of their sinister side.”

The role of the trade unions too was vital in many areas this year. They were more integrated into the overall anti-BNP campaign than in previous years and this paid off politically.

Hard work, engaging with voters and year-long campaigning appears a simple recipe for defeating the BNP. However, if we are honest there are still too many areas where this is not being done. Too many local political parties merely pay lip service to good campaigning and not enough local anti-BNP groups are working on the estates where the BNP gathers its support.

To keep one step ahead of the BNP we need to ensure that this strategy is followed through. To help with this Searchlight will be holding a series of seminars across the country, including an organisers’ school aimed at political activists and local anti-BNP groups.

There will be a special focus on London in the run-up to the London Assembly elections, more of which will be revealed in Searchlight over the next few months. We will also formalise our general election strategy which will recognise the limitations of anti-BNP campaigning in a general election but will focus on the core areas, not only to limit the BNP vote but to use the election as a Voter ID-gathering exercise that will be vital in subsequent local elections.

Much of our work over the coming 12 months will form a prelude to the major battle in the European election campaign. Let there be no mistake about the seriousness of these elections. If the BNP wins seats in the European Parliament, it will have made its political breakthrough. The financial and political benefits will mean that we will forever find it difficult to push the BNP back into the margins. What we do now will impact on those elections. This May the BNP vote fell in many of the party’s key areas. If we can continue this then we can prevent the BNP from achieving any success in 2009. If we let up then the BNP will get MEPs elected.

Griffin and Butler compared their struggle with the life cycle of bacteria. By defeating the BNP this year, they claimed, we would suffer as the party came back stronger “more virulent” than before.

The analogy is fitting. The BNP is a bacterium that constantly needs defeating and like bacteria the consequences of not ridding our society of the BNP could be very dangerous indeed.

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