Will the fall of the BNP mean a rise in racial violence?

Is Britain about to be engulfed by a race war promulgated by white, dispossessed, millennialist fantasists? No, of course not, don’t be so stupid you fat oaf, is the right response to this suggestion. But a survey out this week concerning the supporters of the country’s far-right parties suggests that a certain appetite for interracial violence is present and possibly growing.

Intriguingly, the electoral failure and consequent political disintegration of the British National Party may be one of the causes of this unwanted development. There is evidence that those on the far right feel betrayed by the political system and are prepared, hypothetically at least, to take the law into their own hands to defend what they see as ‘the British way of life’ against an onslaught by non-whites and, particularly, Muslims. Whereas once the BNP offered a legal, democratic and, for a while, semi-successful conduit for these aspirations, its stunning collapse in the past two years has seen a sort of split emerge: some have toddled off to join the new right-wing kids on the block, the English Democrats, or Ukip (which is ploughing an increasingly anti-immigration furrow); whereas some of the others seem to have retrenched into a position of antipathy to the political process and resignation that some sort of war sho’ is gonna come, bubba.

The survey of more than 2,000 affiliates of the BNP and Ukip was carried out by Dr Matthew Goodwin of Nottingham University and Professor Jocelyn Evans of Salford University. It is, the authors stress, merely an exploratory piece of work, more indicative than definitive. Its principal conclusion, according to Goodwin, is that there is a tranche of supporters within the far right who are ‘clearly expecting violence and indeed planning for violence’.