TMP Online

The Electoral Reform Society’s Michael Calderbank explains how a major shake-up of our democratic system is necessary to see off the BNP threat. 

At the national conference of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) earlier this year, it was repeatedly claimed that ‘people know which party is best placed to defeat the BNP’. The conference was told that, when combined with grassroots campaigns to expose the ‘nazi’ character of the party, targeted campaigns to maximise the anti-racist vote can be used to mobilise the mainstream majority.

From this perspective the challenge facing anti-racist forces is clear: we must put all our energies into a mass campaign aimed at informing voters and encouraging them to cast their votes most effectively to keep BNP candidates out. It is possible to point to individual instances in which such action appears to have been effective. However, in general such a strategy holds only if certain assumptions are already in place. Sadly, the reality confronting anti-racist activists on the ground is more complex than this simple ‘educate and mobilise’ philosophy will allow.

For example, this takes for granted that the BNP successfully appeals to voters by managing to disguise its viciously racist core beliefs, and that voters only need reminding of the party’s ‘true’ face in order to persuade them of the need to switch away. It is of course true that BNP voters are not all ideologically paid-up fascists consumed solely by racist hatred. In the real world the motivations of far right voters are far more complex. The far right vote tends to grow in areas where people feel entirely neglected by, and alienated from, the mainstream political parties and see a party like the BNP as the best way of making the political establishment take notice.

So whilst people are not solely voting BNP because of their deeply objectionable racism, it does not appear that they entertain such views are in themselves sufficient to repel BNP voters. Indeed it is the very fact that voting for such a party has the power to scandalize the political establishment that seems to make a vote for the BNP a significant form of protest. The adoption of a ‘respectable’ media image is not simply an attempt to fool the voter, but a more sophisticated attempt both to facilitate an appeal to racist prejudice whilst disavowing the full scale of their anti-democratic extremism.

Read the rest of this entry »