The ugly truth behind a BNP council

On Friday, May 7, Britain could wake up to its first British National Party-run council. The previous day many parts of the country will hold local elections - and the far-right party is in striking distance of winning control of Barking and Dagenham Council.

The BNP is already the official opposition there, with 12 councillors. Its leader, Nick Griffin, is standing in Barking in the general election.

"Our drive to take the council, well, that's the real prize. It really is," Griffin said earlier this year.

Last month, BNP councillor Bob Bailey said: "We are on the verge of making history by taking this council and Margaret Hodge's and Jon Cruddas' parliamentary seats."

What would a BNP council's policies be? What would it do on schools, on caring for the elderly and most vulnerable? How would it allocate a £200million annual budget? The shadow budget drawn up in Barking and Dagenham last year and the party's manifesto allow us to see how BNP policies would work.

Should it win in East London, its strategy is to set its sights on Stoke-on-Trent, which has similar elections next year. Barking and Dagenham would be the science lab to test these dogmatic ideas...

HOUSING
The BNP plans to take a new homes site identified by the council and use it instead to park 1,000 caravans as local authority housing. At just £1,000 each, these old caravans led local campaigners to dub this a "Steptoe & Son solution" to social housing. The site would be a potential eyesore with no facilities, nowhere for kids to play and no substitute for real homes for some of the most vulnerable.

Under BNP policy, social housing - and caravans - would go to "UK citizens only", leaving vulnerable people to sleep on the streets.

CARE
Social work professionals say the best place for children in care is with foster families, but the BNP differs. It wants to take the several hundred children in care in Barking and put them into boarding school. While some children do still live in care homes in Britain, there are rarely more than eight per home.

The BNP's proposals would mean a return to Victorian-style "workfare", their alternative to welfare.

TEEN MUMS
The BNP plans to build an institution in Barking & Dagenham for all mothers under 21 to live in, with single mothers and babies taken into care. Failure to comply with the homes rules could result in the mother being sent to prison and the baby being taken into to care.

COMMUNITIES
The Corporate Grants Programme, which would affect 27 organisations including Victim Support, Relate and the Volunteer Bureau, all of which provide vital community services, would be halved by the BNP.

Bob Bailey, leader of the council's BNP group, calls the arrival of people from ethnic minorities into Barking and Dagenham "genocidal". He says the BNP would cut the "PC madness" of translation services, where one of the key groups of people to be affected would be blind people who require translation to and from Braille.

POVERTY
Bob Bailey claims that "only by voting for the BNP and electing a BNP council will the elderly and poor have a real champion in this chamber". Yet nationally the party supports the Tories in raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1million and it wants to cut "personal taxes".

SCHOOLS
One of the areas the BNP has earmarked for cuts is the Building Schools for the Future programme. This would delay much-needed work on all the borough's secondary schools. National policy is to scrap GCSEs for O levels and to cut the Talented and Gifted Young People programme.

EDUCATION
In its 2009 county council election manifesto the BNP says mixing white and non-white children is "destroying perfectly good local secondary schools". It adds that schools are "riddled with tension between pupils from an Islamic background and everyone else". This is despite the fact that schools in Barking and Dagenham recently received their best ever performance rating as most improved in Outer London.

BNP deputy chairman Simon Darby has called integrated schools "political paedophilia". The BNP would prefer to segregate children in an apartheid system, so that children from other ethnic backgrounds are taught separately - leading to a divided community, destroying children's friendships, and setting up ethnic tension in the future.

The party also wants all children with special needs to be taken out of the mainstream and put into special schools.

COUNCIL TAX
The BNP plans to cut council tax to "among the lowest of any London borough" in five years, yet its proposals cost almost £1million above existing spending. Its savings would be £18.6million, while its proposals cost £19.5million. Leader of the BNP group, Bob Bailey, says Labour relies on council tax for "loony left PC projects". But in the wake of a global recession tax cuts could severely impact on the poorest in society.

LOCAL EVENTS
The BNP would get rid of the popular Dagenham Town Show, slashing the events budget and ending opportunities for local families to have a free weekend out every July.

SPORT
In Barking and Dagenham, the BNP voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It does not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British, and previously held a policy of supporting Denmark - and not England - in a World Cup as the only all-white team.

The party also opposed grants to local sports clubs including Barking Rugby Club and Dagenham and Redbridge Football Club, who between them coach hundreds of local children every weekend. Instead they suggested spending £50,000 on fixing up the town hall so they could webcast meetings.

KNIFE CRIME
The party likes to talk up knife crime in Barking and Dagenham. In September 2008, Richard Barnbrook, a BNP member of the London Assembly, broadcast a video blog about two murders in Barking that never actually happened. He was censured for his deliberate scare tactic. Yet when the council launched a campaign to ask the Government for stronger powers to deal with shops that sell knives to children, the BNP opposed it.

ENVIRONMENT
The BNP claims to be the "only truly environmental party unlike the fake 'Greens' who are merely a front for the far left of the Labour regime". Yet the party would end the building of wind turbines in Barking and Dagenham - London's first wind farm - and opposes "climate change dogma".

Mirror