How to beat the BNP

The investigation of the battle between the BNP and Labour in the local elections by Peter Oborne in last week’s Spectator has triggered a furious controversy about the threat of the far Right. Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, told this magazine that the BNP ‘are on the verge of a major political breakthrough’; New Labour’s fixation with middle-class voters in swing constituencies had, he claimed, created an angry tribe among the white working and lower-middle classes.

Margaret Hodge, the employment minister, subsequently told the Sunday Telegraph that eight out of ten of her constituents in Barking, east London, were threatening to vote BNP on 4 May. Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, parried by claiming that the far Right ‘pose a very localised threat and I am worried that if we give them too much coverage, it can back up the notion that they are a potent protest vote’. On the Tory side, Ann Widdecombe warned that ‘there is a genuine unease with what the major parties are doing’.

The worst possible response would be for Labour and the Conservatives to confront extremism by seeking — albeit deviously — to trump it. The history of such ploys in recent years has been embarrassing as well as morally feeble. William Hague never truly recovered from his dreadful ‘foreign land’ speech. Michael Howard’s emphasis on immigration during the last election looked like half-hearted sloganeering, and was scarcely rewarded on polling day.

The Prime Minister, for his part, has intermittently unleashed tough rhetoric as a substitute for a cool appraisal of what has gone wrong with the immigration and asylum systems. In May 2002 No. 10 floated ‘plans’ for Royal Navy warships and RAF warplanes to intercept refugees, ‘plans’ that were self-evidently intended to generate headlines and then be forgotten.