A Crawley and Horsham UAF got a little bit closer to being established tonight at a meeting we had.
As there is currently no proper organisation, everything is a bit chaotic so the main topic was how to use what resources we have to counter the BNP candidate sin 4 wards in Crawley and 2 in Horsham.
There will be a lot of frantic leafletting activity in the next couple of weeks in Southgate, Tilgate, Ifield, Furnace Green, Denne and Roffey North. If anyone wants to lend a hand just let me know and I will put them in touch with the organisers. I am not putting the dates, times and places up here in public for what ought to be obvious reasons.
After deciding what to do in the short term we managed to get some long-term plans in place. We all agreed that we need to get the campaign properly established and organised. And funded – we have some support already from the Crawley Campaign Against Racism but will all be going cap in hand to our trade unions in the near future.
There is no point trying to do all that before the elections, so we will not even try, to the relief of those of us who are candidates and won’t have a lot of spare time. Instead we have plucked the date May 23rd out of the air and will try to find a suitable venue for a proper public meeting on that date, with whatever advance publicity we can drum up.
I think that those of us who have been involved so far would be not-so-secretly pleased to see lots of new faces turn up and get voted in as officers, especially if they are younger and more dynamic than us!
One of our ambitions is to see more young people involved in the campaign and we would really like to see some concerts in Crawley and Horsham under the Love Music Hate Racism banner. Once the general public get involved there might be new people with new ideas involved, but I would hope they would also see the benefits in such awareness-raising events.
As soon as a venue is confirmed and the date is firm I will be shamelessly plugging the meeting at every opportunity.
Once again, can I stress that this is a cross-party campaign. Tories, Liberal Democrats, Greens or whatever are equally encouraged to take part, as are those with no affiliations at all – don’t let the fact that I’m a Labour member put you off volunteering to help out.
Ever thought that your going about this in the wrong way? – instead of shoving leaflets through doors or holding concerts why not address the issues that cause people to vote for the BNP in the first place?
The only places where the BNP have been electorally successful are where large numbers of Labours core voters have decided that Labour are not listening to them or addressing their concerns so they switch to a party that does.
I come from Barking and Dagenham where large numbers of Labours core voters have switched to the BNP and I doubt that had you given them a leaflet or a concert that would have changed their mind.
Ash:
>The only places where the BNP have been electorally successful are where large numbers of Labours core voters have decided that Labour are not listening to them or addressing their concerns so they switch to a party that does.
Really? That’s not borne out by the evidence. They won a seat on a council deepest Tory Essex, didn’t they? In Burnley they won seats which had previously been Tory, and I’ve seen what appears to be a pattern of voting where some Tories vote BNP if the Tory candidate has a foreign name.
Additionally, the BNP win with larger turnouts, which suggests that it is previously non-voting people who are voting for them as well – perhaps if the NF/BNP had been standing every year instead of just recently, we’d have more information about their support.
Of course, if the leaflet addressed those issues that you speak of (and you don’t list them), perhaps it might work?
Evidence? – how about the fact that where the BNP are electorally successful its in places like East London and northern cities where Labours core, working class vote have switched to the BNP because they feel the Labour Party no longer listens to their problems.
And if you dont believe me then can I suggest you bother to listen to the views of the Labour MP’s in those areas like Jon Cruddas and Margaret Hodge who have said that the rise of support for the BNP is down to Labour voters switching.
But somehow I dont think you’l bother – far easier to blame the beastly Tories – funny though how theres no upsurge of support for the BNP in the Tory heartlands…..
Hey, what’s your beef with the Babies’ National Party anyway?
Ash, speaking as one who lives and votes in the North of England, could you explain how, in the last council elections we ended up losing a tory councillor and gaining a BNP one in my ward? I would like to think that most well-informed yet disaffected labour voters would vote Tory, Lib-Dem or Green rather than BNP. Maybe they voted BNP because the BNP leafletted copiously (mostly slagging off all the mainstream parties) and the mainstream parties sat back and let it happen.
The other question is whether anybody truely believes that the BNP will actually address the problems that are disaffecting voters. Around here they often don’t bother turning up for meetings or voting. I think we need to credit voters with more intelligence and give them the information to make a decision – hopefully that will include the track record of existing BNP councillors.
I cant speak for the North of England but in East London the old Labour voters of my aquaintace would vote for anyone (including the BNP) rather than the Tories.
I agree with you that the BNP are very clever – their left-wing policies are targetted at the disaffected ‘old Labour’ voter very carefully, So I doubt that concerts and leaflets are going to have much effect.
Surely the best way to stop disaffected voters turning to the BNP is to address their concerns over housing, jobs, wages, immigration etc. – simply taking the core white working class Labour vote for granted looks as if it is starting to backfire.
Ash, I was objecting to the use of the word ‘only’ in your assertion. I found it to be simplistic and from experience of talking to voters, inaccurate.
The election of a BNP councillor in leafy Broxbourne, Herts, suggests that your further assertion, ‘funny though how theres no upsurge of support for the BNP in the Tory heartlands’ is false.
I am well aware that some ex-Labour voters, or people in overwhelmingly ‘Labour’ areas have voted BNP. But it is not as simple as you make out. The phenomenon of the ‘Working Class Tory’, suggests that there are also plenty of working class people who will never vote Labour.
The past 15 years of voting trends suggest that the Tory vote collapsed between 1992 and 1997. It has yet to fully recover. Since 1997, the Labour vote has slipped as well.
There are a significant number of people who never vote in any elections, or only for General Elections, until a ‘protest’ option is present.
Equally, there has always been a latent set of voters who would naturally back the BNP, but until recently have not had that option. Some may have voted Labour, others Tory.
BTW, I do listen to Cruddas, he’s got a lot to say. I’m leaning towards voting for him as Deputy Leader, in fact. Not sure that you’d agree with all of what he says though, Ash.
Going back to the original question, I don’t think we are going about this the wrong way as that implies there is only one way.
There is no reason why the symptoms and the cause cannot be tackled at the same time.
I do feel that the main parties are concentrating too much on the few floating voters in a few marginal constituencies to the detriment of everyone else, and I try to do what I can as an ordinary member of a large organisation, but that need not stop me also joining in with what the UAF are doing.
Remember that many members of the UAF are not Labour party members or members of any party, and they are just doing what they can.
While there is some truth in the accusation that mainstream parties are not addressing the concerns of their core voters, I do not think the BNP are either. What they are doing is just pretending to do that. If they ever got control of anywhere we would see that they have no practical policies and where they get individuals elected anywhere we have seen that they do little or nothing at all.
They do thrive in a vacuum, and the UAF is actually doing something. All the BNP literature I have seen is persuasive on the surface and if nobody makes it clear that there is nothing (good) under that surface that persuasiveness will do its job.
The BNP are also helped by low turnouts, which can throw up unlikely results. I don’t know if anyone has looked into whether that is a bigger factor than whether an area was previously Tory or Labour? Having Labour (or Tory) core voters stay at home could be as much a factor as having them switch to the BNP.
Danivon – we can all pull out individual cases of the BNP winning in the odd seat here or there, but they are irrelevant. The BNP become a problem when they gain enough power as in Barking (and the Northern towns) that they become the second biggest party.
The ‘working class tory’ was never much of a phenomenon in East London – tories have been rarer than hens teeth in Barking for decades – when my father returned after the war in 1946 only one councillor was Tory, every other Labour.
Much of the core white working class Labour vote has always been fairly racist – remember that it was the dockworkers who marched in support of Enoch Pwell after he was sacked by Heath.
Sorry skuds but I feel you are on the wrong track. The BNP are very good at tapping into the concerns expressed by the local people – housing, employment, wages etc – issues that Labour are not very good at addressing, so simply saying that the BP are bad and you shouldnt vote for them is not going to have a great effect.
Until Labour actual start adressing the issues of concern to its core white working cass vote then you are never going to overcome parties like the BNP.
Of course there is the argument that now that Labour has become a right-wing Thatcherite party it doesn’t need the support of its old core voters so it can afford to ignore them…
Ash, you may well be right about East London (although I’m pretty sure I’ve met white working class people from EL who would never vote Labour). However, you must admit that you extrapolated your theory to the entire country, and that may possibly have been incorrect. Be careful of your use of the word ‘only’ if you don’t want to be accused of oversimplification.
The question is, Ash, what are the issues of concern, and how do you ‘address’ them. I’ve heard suggestions that sound an awful lot like aping BNP policies to me. That’s not the solution either, because it legitimises the BNP view.
You say that they are housing (And I do think that Labour government policy is appalling on housing, but not in the way that the BNP will tell you), employment (yet employment is higher than ever) and wages (again, at the lower level, these are higher than before – low inflation is also protecting wages).
So, if they are the major issues, 2/3 are already being addressed by the Labour government to an extent. Of course, there is also the point that people have to accept responsibility themselves, and not rely on governments and/or Parties to solve their problems.
Clearly housing was a big issue in B&D though it was made rather larger by the BNP’s lies about the mythical ‘Africans for Essex’ scheme. The lie was compounded when Richard barnbrook and his merry band of liars attempted to take the credit for the decision to build a couple of thousand houses in the constituency – a decision that was years in the making and had absolutely nothing to do with the BNP.
Yes, there are issues with the standard political parties that need to be addressed seriously but the lies and opportunism of the BNP do nothing to help.
“So, if they are the major issues, 2/3 are already being addressed by the Labour government to an extent.”
Danivon if you think that the concerns of the white working class in East London are being addressed then that probably explains the rise of the BNP in that area.
Housing – Labour have done nothing to address the problem of immigrants being given priority over the local people.
Employment and wages – Labours policy of no limit to immigration has made it harder for local people to get work and then when that work is available it has kept wages low. I spent this lunchtime in a pub in the East End with a group of builder friends and the influx of immigrants has meant that they are on lower wages than they were 3 years ago.
The BNP make much capital out of Labours failure to address these issues and from my experience on the ground support for the BNP is growing every year.
This comment from the BBC website sums up the attitude of many working class in London.
“For the first time in my life I am going to vote BNP. I use to vote Labour but the middle class posers who make up the Labour leadership are totally alien to me. They regard white working class males like me as less than human and ensure that every other group’s interests – ethnic minorities, gays, asylum seekers etc take precedence over mine. BNP is the only party that represents white working and lower middle class people’s interests. The BNP has moved on from what it use to be – they don’t wear swastikas, do the Nazi salute or advocate violence against ethnic minorities. But they do want a better deal for ordinary white people whose families have lived her for generations.”
So unless labour get a grip the rise of the BNP is not going to be stopped anytime soon.
Ash:”Housing – Labour have done nothing to address the problem of immigrants being given priority over the local people.”
Because that is a lie. They are not. Everyone is prioritised based on need, and sometimes that means that a brown family gets to the top of the queue. If less white people get council housing, it’s because less of them are in dire need.
“Employment and wages – Labours policy of no limit to immigration has made it harder for local people to get work and then when that work is available it has kept wages low. I spent this lunchtime in a pub in the East End with a group of builder friends and the influx of immigrants has meant that they are on lower wages than they were 3 years ago.”
Well, not only are there controls (not quotas), but much of this is down to the EU. The same rules that make it very easy for white Britons to move out to Spain too. Additionally, we recently had a skill shortage in the manual trades, so wages went up faster for them than for many other types of worker, before the influx of Eastern Europeans put them down again.
The BNP lie and they misrepresent. They may have hidden the skinheaded swasika wearers, but the core values are still there. Look at places where they had success a few years ago – it ebbed after people realised that their new councillors were useless and it still made no difference.
A broad campaign (including leaflets, which the BNP use to great effect themselves, you know), and a more responsive government are what is needed.
Generalisations and repeating BNP propaganda are, I suspect, not helpful, unless of course you want to see the fascists do well, Ash.
I don’t normally comment on the political posts here, as I don’t often have much to say. But on this one I do.
I’d like to see how long an all-party coalition such as UAF can hold together and present a single front to the target populations. Based on the showing on this comment thread so far, not very long.
You’ll need to do a whole lot more than argue about whether the BNP voters are disaffected Tories, (“No they’re not, they’re disaffected labour supporters!”, “Oh no they aren’t!”). While you’re doing that, some BNP slimeball is sidling up to yet another white working-class voter in our village, MY village, nudging his elbow, and coming out with stuff like this:
“Yeah! It’s not right is it mate! All that money going to them Asians! Look at them all, driving round in their flash cars and laughing at you! While your job gets outsourced to India and you end up on the dole again! That’s your money, it should be going to you! Eh! Eh! Vote for me mate. I’ll look after you.”
Members of my own family have flirted with the BNP. I don’t know, and don’t want to know, if they’ve translated that into an actual vote.
We have to respond to all this a lot better than wringing our colletive hands, calling the BNP Nazi Fuckeads, calling the people who vote for them thick, and blaming the opposition mainstream political party to your own.
You certainly have to do a whole lot better than calling anyone who tries to engage with the issues that concern the wavering voters, closet BNP sympathisers.
Where the BNP put out lies, they need to be countered with FACTS. And I don’t mean just vague lines like “the BNP are lying”. Give figures of relative employment levels in white and non-white areas. Then explain the figures. Give details of how funding is applied across white and non-white areas. Then explain the figures. If they make uncomfortable reading, explain them the harder. Where the BNP give scare stories, scotch them with reality. Then show what charlatans the BNP are once they get into power. Show how they are more interested in stupid self-publicising gestures (our local BNP bought a Christmas tree for the village this year. Then leafletted the whole fucking lot of us to crow about it), than taking real, tough political decisions. Show that, because under the veneer, they have nothing concrete to offer apart from divisiveness.
So good luck Skuds, with holding together an all-party coaliton and message. I think you’ll need it.
Rant mode off.
(The original version of this post was trounced by the anti-spam message. So this is, believe it or not, the second toned down version)
Ah yes Rob. Sorry. There are a couple of specific words that cause comments to get trashed. I forgot about that. Must remove that filter.
The irony is that since I moved servers and installed this captcha thing I have only had one single comment go into the Akismet queue as suspected spam, and that was Ash’s last one. I still can’t work out why.
It may be hard to believe but all the UAF meetings so far have been extremely civilised, with everyone showing enormous respect to everyone else. Attendance has been mostly SWP and Labour with a few civilians and there has been no hostility or arguments. (Just a couple of gentle, good-natured wind-ups)
I have passed details of the meeting and events on to the leaders of the Tory and Lib Dem groups and had positive responses from them. In the past Bob Lanzer of the Tories has been very supportive of the UAF and has been out with us.
So far it is holding together quite well. When we were out handing out literature and talking to people a couple of years ago the public response was extremely positive, especially from those who have never been politically active but had fought in WWII.
I hope it lasts, but up to this point everyone has been willing to leave their partisan political opinions behind.
Ash,
How likely is it, do you think, that the comments you quoted were actually not written by a BNP activist? It sounds typical of the sort of thing all parties try to get into forums and local paper letter columns. In fact I am surprised they have not been here alreasy with their usual list of Labour, Tory, and Lib Dem councillors who have ever been in court.
Thats the big question here – am I being overly cynical or are you being naive? All I can say is that the BBC website comment sounds like a plant to persuade the gullible, and it also sounds like it is Succeeding.
Here’s a question. Take as an assumption that the working classes feel ignored by the Labour party and it does not follow that they would flock to the BNP for that reason. We might not all agree with Respect, but they can’t be accused of ignoring the working class.
So why is it that the BNP are picking up the votes and Respect are not? Can it really be that the BNP are better and writing persuasive literature and getting it delivered frequently?
Surely not – because you say that leaflets don’t have any effect and do not change any minds.
There is an element of the press happily allowing certain assumptions to thrive (ironic as the first thing a fascist party would do in power would be to close down the free press) and without that groundwork the BNP would have no bandwagon to jump on to, but there is no organised attempt to challenge those assumptions – or the extrapolations the BNP make.
Nationally the UAF is making an attempt to counter the propaganda. A healthy, local branch would be able to produce robust rebuttals of the specific local claims instead of relying on generic national literature, but for now thats all we have, and it is a start.
I agree with Rob above. I may not have put it very well, but what I was trying to do was to break the assumption that it’s only one section of people to whom the BNP are attractive.
I wasn’t actually saying that it was ONLY Tories who are moved to switch. It’s clear that it is not.
The UAF is not really a coalition, as much as a parallel organisation. As a result, it doesn’t get involved in what the parties do and say for themselves, it just attempts to counter the BNP directly – which some parties and candidates sometimes feel reluctant to.
Of course, equating the comments thread on a blog to an actual campaign is unfair – and it makes the assumption that we all want the same thing. I’m not sure what Ash wants, as most of what I see from him is anti-something/someone.
“Because that is a lie. They are not. Everyone is prioritised based on need, and sometimes that means that a brown family gets to the top of the queue. If less white people get council housing, it’s because less of them are in dire need.”
danivon your starting to sound like one of the ‘middle class posers’ the guy on the BBC was complaining about.
I can assure you that simply telling working class of East London that there is no priority given to new immigrants when it comes to housing is just going to make you a laughing stock. Try reading ‘The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict’ by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young and you might get a better understanding of why the core working class vote is turning away from Labour.
There was a good comment piece in the Guardian that explained it quite well:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/comment/0,,1708369,00.html
Skuds – they are precisely the sort of comment I hear every time I go back to the East End – I can understand why you may wish to trash their views but unless you understand the problem then you very unlikely to come up with a solution.
And I’m still not sure what influence you think your leaflets are going to have – unless you have actual policy’s to tackle the issues then all the leaflets in the world are just so much more recylclng watste.
‘…all the leaflets in the world are just so much more recylclng watste’
Not so. All information is of value. People who receive BNP leaflets generally believe the content until they are told the truth and the BNP (and other similar groups) are exposed as the liars and manipulators that they are.
So Ash, what is your solution? I’m not sure that I am middle class, but that’s by the by really. The fact that housing is allocated on points systems that are based on need, and that the perceptions that non-whites get preferential treatment needs to be challenged seems to annoy you.
So what is the alternative? Give in to people’s prejudices?
My solution? – well I happen to agree with Labour’s ex Minister of Welfare Reform, Frank Field who believes that people who have lived in an area for years should be given priority in the allocation of homes.
“The policy ought to be that the old working-class values of contributing to the community should be rewarded and that those people who are then in crisis – homeless families, single-parent families and so on – should take that housing which is then vacated.”
But then thats the old working class in me – and like Frank the working class dont seem to have much sway in Noo Labour
Well, Frank isn’t working class either…
So, how does that deal with the problem of internal migration, such as happened after industry collapsed in the North of England? Do people who’s pit village died and who seek employment elsewhere have to wait while people feather their own nests? Can’t see much working class solidarity there, mate.
Do people who move away and return lose out, or do they leapfrog people who moved in in the meantime?
Of course, if there’s loads of housing to spare, you can fiddle with it by ‘rewarding people’ for not having the imagination to move to a new place. Still, if there’s an imbalance – like the housing needs don’t match, you can’t do that sort of thing.
Such as, if the people with the greatest need are after 3 bed houses, as they have kids, and the people who are waiting around are single, and in 1 or 2 bed accomodation, and the newly vacated properties are 3 bed, do you give the locals a nice big house and the ‘incomers’ get shoehorned into a flat? A nice idea in principle, until it hits that big thing called reality.
Now, what about employment and wages, then Ash, your other major issues?
Employment and wages – well as it is immigration that has driven wages (and kept the same number unemployed for the last 10 years) then how about controlling immigration?
Government policy is that there should be no limit to immigration, or that was the policy until a short while ago, I’m not sure whether they have any policy at the moment but Liam Byrne at least is starting to say that it should be controlled – whether it will or not is another matter.
But getting back to housing – yes its easy for those middle class Labour members to say that the present system of allocation is fine – they dont have to rely on it – its those working class that do need to rely on it that see it as a problem and if Labour are unwilling to respond to that they are bound to look to parties that are.
Is it immigration? Or could it be the erosion of union power, the increase in the global economy – why pay a bloke in Britain a living wage when you can pay a bloke in China a much lower living wage. If anything, immigration reduces the employment pool abroad, thus increasing their wages and so reducing competition.
Besides, unemployment is down. Again, it is unemployment which keeps wages low – if there are a lot of people who can replace you and are prepared to do it for less money, then that’s a downward pressure on wages. If we were really seeing immigration levels that drastically affected the job market, we’d see a lot more unemployment (say, at 1980s levels).
You could argue that due to the growing disparity between the numbers of old and young in this country that we will need immigration in order to keep the economy going so that the current and future pensioners (state and/or private) can continue to survive.
That baby boom and the sudden switch off in the 1970s is causing no end of problems.