Sandwell disaster - BNP routed

Working on the principle that in the expectation of bad political news it sometimes pays to get one’s excuses in first, the editor of the BNP’s monthly “newspaper” Voice of Freedom, Martin Wingfield, admitted that yesterday’s self-inflicted by-election in Sandwell’s Prince’s End ward “will be a very difficult one for the British National Party to gain any satisfaction from”.

Wingfield added: “Our excellent candidate Karen Parkes, faces the almost impossible task of trying to defend the Prince’s End seat on Sandwell Borough Council.”

As pre-emptive damage limitation goes this was rather excessive, since even the lowliest political activist is not going to tell the world that an election his party is contesting has been lost even before a vote has been cast.

We would have thought that the editor of the BNP’s most important interface with the general public should have known better, but Wingfield’s lack of propagandist skills and gaffe-prone nature were in evidence again when he told visitors to his blog: “When they [new BNP recruits] come from the Tories, I tend to think ‘I wonder what they are after?’ I’m afraid I can find little in common with people who belonged to a Party that sold off this country’s ‘family silver’ and essential services to private and in many cases foreign concerns.”

Still, in a party where the leadership can and has referred to dues-paying members as “vermin” we suppose Wingfield’s insulting of a large swathe of the BNP’s membership counts as small beer.

Not that Wingfield hasn’t been on the end of an insult or two himself. From Searchlight we pinch this delicious quote: “Wingfield also spent a brief spell ‘inside’ for non-payment of a Race Act fine. While this was the correct thing to do, his main motivation was to make himself a martyr and boost his popularity in preparation for the factional struggle which he was already planning.”

Author: Nicholas Griffin, recalling one of the many destructive spats on the far-Right in which he always contrived to play a pivotal role.

All highly entertaining, but not entirely relevant to Sandwell’s Prince’s End ward by-election, brought to us courtesy of a more humble but no less colourful cast of BNP characters.

Sandwell exists only in a political sense. Cobbled together from bits of Staffordshire and Worcestershire, it came into being with the local government reforms of 1974 and formed part of the unpopular and now defunct West Midlands County.

A unitary authority, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council encompasses Tipton, Smethwick, Oldbury, Rowley Regis, Wednesbury and West Bromwich. Sandwell sits squarely in what is still known as the Black Country, a name gained due to the disfiguring effects of smoke and pollution in the district’s industrial heyday. The intense concentration of heavy industry which once characterised the area is long gone, and Sandwell in particular suffers from higher than average unemployment levels.

The most recent available figures give the population of Sandwell as almost 80% white, 14% Asian, with the remainder made up of Afro-Caribbeans, people of mixed-race race, and “others”.

Large-scale immigration began in the early 1960s, which, together with steady industrial decline and increased competition for jobs and decent housing, led to some notoriously racist west Midlands election campaigns, most notably that of Conservative Peter Griffiths, contesting nearby Smethwick in the 1964 general election campaign with the infamous slogan “If you want a ni**er for a neighbour, vote Labour”.

Griffiths won.

Despite that legacy, and the attempts of far-Right groups such as the original version of the British National Party and Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement to cash in, racist politics did not take off in the west Midlands. In the 1970s the National Front had an organisation in the area, but it was never electorally successful, splitting badly in the 1975/6 National Front/National Party division, and suffering further losses as individual members drifted towards Mrs Thatcher’s revitalised Tories.

It would be many years before the racist politics of the extreme-Right would enjoy success in that part of the world.

The BNP won its first seat on Sandwell MBC in May 2004, the candidate being the interesting James Lloyd, of whom more anon, and the ward he fought being Prince’s End.

In May 2006 Lloyd was joined by three more newly-elected BNP councillors, two of which might be described as “interesting” - Simon Smith and Russell Green.

Smith became known for Holocaust denial, UFO belief, and telling the Nazi Stormfront website that “The reason why Blacks disproportionately don’t vote is that the frontal part of the brain associated with postponing immediate gratification is not so well developed as in other races”, as we reported here.

Smith also achieved notoriety when he was suspended for publishing “hateful and abusive” material on his council-owned webpage, and for staging a walkout during a council vote to elect a Sikh as mayor of Sandwell .

Unfortunately for Smith, he backed the losing candidate in the BNP’s rigged leadership contest and was one of the first casualties in Nick Griffin’s purge of the vermin.

So far, so unlovely.

Of Russell Green, this month’s Searchlight has this to say:

One of the BNP’s two remaining Sandwell councillors has done little to distinguish himself since his election in May 2006 but does have some interesting links on his official council website. Under the heading “My Politics”, alongside the websites of the BNP and its front groups, Civil Liberty and Solidarity, Russell Green lists the aptly named “Conspiracy Planet”. This site espouses pretty much every lunatic nazi and antisemitic conspiracy going, including that the 9/11 terror attacks were an “inside job”. Also there is “The Truth Seeker”, which carries articles that suggest HIV is a harmless virus and does not cause Aids, claims to reveal the secret powers behind the Vatican and argues that Jewish bankers brought Hitler to power.

Which brings us back to James Lloyd.

Lloyd ran one of the most disorderly public houses in the West Midlands, Sandwell Council stripping the then Councillor Lloyd of his licence after a series of violent incidents. Lloyd’s woes didn’t end there. He found himself embroiled in a council voting scandal, and his son Ricky, a local ne’er-do-well, was returned to prison after committing offences while out on licence.

But all’s well that ends well. In October Lloyd was ejected from his Prince’s End seat for non-attendance at council meetings, necessitating a by-election.

The BNP last fought Prince’s End ward in May, their candidate being Karen Parkes, who stood again for the BNP last night. The result then was (percentages in brackets):

Lab 898 (35.71)
Con 498 (19.80)
Ind 241 (9.58)
BNP 878 (34.91)

Total 2515

Parkes came within twenty votes of taking the seat, but fortunately signs of electoral reverse had set in for the BNP, notably in the West Midlands, where it fell back by thousands of votes. This had just enough effect to deny Parkes a seat.

Voters are certain to punish the BNP for the actions (and lack of them) of the errant James Lloyd, the question being - how badly? For us this complicates the task of separating out the anti-Lloyd backlash from the general downturn in the BNP’s electoral fortunes.

Sandwell Prince’s End ward by-election result:

Lab 796 (48.07)
Con 517 (31.22)
LibDem 29 (1.75)
BNP 314 (18.96)

Total 1656

A comprehensive and well-earned defeat for the BNP, with Labour and the Conservatives gaining in roughly equal measure from the BNP’s dramatic loss of votes. It is also crystal clear that Liberal Democrat voters, knowing their candidate had little hope of success, swung behind Labour and the Tories to keep the BNP out.

Our feeling is that 10-12% of the BNP’s lost votes can be attributed to the bad publicity generated by Lloyd (not helped by Smith and Green), but that the remainder can be ascribed to the general downswing in their electoral fortunes over the past months.

Under normal conditions, and without the antics of Lloyd, it is difficult to believe that the BNP could have come anywhere near winning this seat.

There is a lesson to be gleaned from all this. Looking at the sharp increase in the Conservative vote, don’t all those ex-Tory BNP members insulted by Martin Wingfield have a sneaking sense that they’d have been better off staying where they were?