Barking madness

Political controversy based on race – and fake facts – is still being stirred up by the BNP in east London

According to some, race-based politics will soon be over. The battle has been won and we can all go home.

Boris Johnson was one of the first to see it coming. Writing back in October, the London mayor declared: "If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it."

As an unhappy target and an unwilling associate of such race-based politics, you can understand why he would hope this to be so. Unfortunately, nobody has got round to telling the British National party about it.

Speaking about the prospect of Obama's election, its leader, Nick Griffin, said: "The core impact on the millions of third worlders is that if you have a third worlder there... they will see the most powerful job in the world has gone to a black man that means that there is nothing that a black man can't do which is unfortunate because the black men and women who aren't very clever and I am not saying that's all of them, but some of them aren't very clever...

"The moment they can't get promoted because they're not actually very clever, they will think 'well I'm being held back, I'm being discriminated against' and they have already got a chip on their shoulder because of all the stuff about slavery... and so they see one of theirs who can make it to the top of America but think 'well I can't make it to the top of this branch of Jewsons and I am being discriminated against' and instead of one chip they get a second chip so there will be trouble.

"And some of them, when they have got a chip on their shoulder, well they can't take it out, they don't want to work anyway, so they find a white kid on the street and they beat the hell out of them... and the result of Barack Obama being at the top is that it will strengthen that, it will make them feel more confident, more pushy, more resentful if they don't get their own way. So it will just add a bit of a tweak to what is in fact a one-way, low-level race war."

In order to give it a tweak of its own, the BNP have been busy distributing a leaflet called Racism cuts both ways to schools, businesses and homes across the country.

Daubed with blood-red splashes and dodgy case studies, it is everything you would expect a BNP leaflet to be.

However, since then they have suffered the public humiliation of their membership list being leaked and the public realisation that their numbers, if not their support, are remarkably small.

But despite this setback, the BNP are determined to let their low-level war carry on. In order to take a look at it in operation, I took a journey to the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham. The borough, which is the BNP's stronghold in southern England, now has 12 BNP councillors.

Inside the chamber last week, there was little sign of an end to race-based politics. Barking's BNP group leader began by calling for the immediate resignation of the council leader for allowing immigration into the borough, before shouting "Nazi" at him across the chamber. Another BNP councillor refused to apologise for having likened sex education to paedophilia, before launching into a lengthy rant about immigrants, which got him removed from the chamber.

Other vital matters raised by Barking BNP have included the supply of Halal meat to schools (they think it shouldn't be) and the plight of the "native minority" in the "Labour borough of Ealing" (it's a Conservative borough and there's no "native" minority).

Outside of the chamber and the BNP's Richard Barnbrook has also been fighting hard, spreading mistruths about knife crime in Dagenham and making time-wasting "complaints" about non-existent bullying in City Hall.

But beyond these passing rows, the long-term effect of the BNP's low-level war in London has been the kind of small but often paralysing disruption that I saw in Barking last week. And as long as London politicians continue to be distracted into squabbling about Halal meat and Barnbrook's dyslexia, the real meat of their work is being put to one side.

So while it is convenient for some to herald Obama's victory as a sign of the beginning of the end of race-based politics, in areas where BNP support is rising, a debilitating battle continues every day.

Adam Bienkov
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