Is this the end of social democracy?

The BNP is capitalising on the fear and anger caused by the cultural destruction of the working class

The BNP is filling the political vacuum left by New Labour's abandonment of the working class. In core Labour constituencies like Dagenham, Rainham and the new Morley and Outwood constituency it poses a direct electoral threat. Mainstream opinion argues that BNP successes are about economic deprivation and migrants being blamed for taking scarce resources like housing. But the problem goes deeper. The current successes of the BNP are a symptom of the historical changes in Britain's class system.

In Labour heartlands there is a powerful feeling of being dispossessed. As one BNP supporter, who appears on a YouTube video puts it, "the majority of our policies, if you bother to read them, veer toward socialism. We are probably the old Labour party in essence. We care about the working class people." She points across to a counter-demonstration and says, "When some of those people stand over there and tell me I have no rights ... I have blood and I have history on this soil and that's what I'll fight to defend."

Paranoid it may be, but the BNP is capitalising on the fear and anger caused by the cultural destruction of the working class. Capitalism is destroying class relations and recreating them around new kinds of production and consumption. Deindustrialisation has left large sections of the working class unemployable or working as if they are a reserve army of labour. Millions are economically inactive, or working in casualised and temporary jobs.

Life continues in this time of dislocation and destructive change, but the cultural symbols and institutions that once gave it meaning are disappearing. Those who flourished in the old class culture find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the new uncertainties. A people subjected to cultural destruction lose the means to defend themselves against more dominant cultures that seek to redescribe them. Media representation of the working class has become unremittingly negative with its images of chavs, feral children, obese men and women, teenage mothers, drunken brawling and the pursuit of mindless hedonism. The BNP draws its strength from this currency of cultural humiliation.

To lose a way of life is to lose a sense of hopefulness. It is this loss that provides the BNP with its political agenda. Its racism and blaming of migrants resonates with the insecurities of large numbers of people who feel that they live as strangers outside the community. By promoting culture wars around race, gender and religion it constructs boundaries of identity that define a sense of belonging and entitlement. Its sentimental nostalgia feeds a cultural melancholy in which the past always glows brightly as a better place. At a recent meeting in Dagenham, BNP leader Nick Griffin eulogised the bucolic days of his childhood in Barking, contrasting them to the loss of childhood in our dangerous, insecure times.

The cultural destruction of the working class threatens the existence of the Labour party itself. Not only because of the intense anger at its abandonment of a people in need of political representation, but also because the class and its institutions which once supported it are fragmenting and disappearing. In many of its heartland constituencies, party branches exist in name only. The politics of class are realigning in a way that is threatening the future of social democracy. The BNP is the warning light flashing danger.

Exactly 50 years ago the socialist writer Raymond Williams published a short essay called Culture is Ordinary. It begins with an elegy to his working-class boyhood in the farming valleys of the Black Mountains and the generations of his family who had lived there. Williams describes a way of life that emphasised neighbourhood, mutual obligation and common betterment. He belonged to a class that gave him his personal resilience and social anchorage. It gave him a culture and political representation through the Labour party and a trade union movement.

Williams knew that culture was shaped by the underlying system of production. He recalls how from the mountains he could look south to the "flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset". He wrote at a time when his class was already undergoing momentous change, but he could not have imagined the day when there would be no second sunset and the system of production that had shaped his class and culture was turned into scrap. After that, what would come next? It is a question we are now faced with.

Comment is free