The British National Party’s leadership’s war against party members has resulted in the inevitable decline in the party’s fortunes as illustrated by the results of yesterday’s by-elections.
In all the by-elections, the BNP vote plunged and the UKIP vote surged.
The BNP leadership will doubtless try to argue to its decreasing band of followers that the Tories and Lib-Dems also did poorly, but that is a straw argument: the reality is that disaffected voters, seeking an alternative, are increasingly choosing UKIP to register their disgust.
In Rotherham, for example, the UKIP vote jumped from 2,220 votes (5.9%) in the 2010 general election, to 4,648 (21.79%, and increase of 15.87%) in the by-election held on 29 November 2012.
The BNP vote, on the other hand, dropped from 3,906 votes (10.4%) in the 2010 general election, to 1,804 (8.46%) in the by-election held on 29 November 2012. This was only a few votes ahead of the barely disguised Islamist party, Respect, which polled 1,778 votes.
It will be, as said earlier, of little solace to know that the Tories polled 1,157 votes, or that the Lib-Dems polled 451 votes. Rotherham should, like many northern England seats, be prime BNP territory—and it would have been, had the party leadership not deliberately destroyed the organisation from within.
In reality, the fact that the BNP vote held up at all in Rotherham is exclusively due to the powerful local candidate, Marlene Guest, who has worked tirelessly for years in the constituency.
In places where there is no such strong local personality, the BNP vote slumped to derisory levels.
In Middlesborough, another Labour area where the BNP should be making inroads, the results bear this out.
Once again, UKIP increased to 1,990 votes (11.80%) in the by-election of 29 November. This was up 8.10% from their 2010 general election result of 1,236 (3.7%).
The BNP vote, on the other hand, crashed to just 328 votes (1.94%) from the 2011 general election result of 1,954 votes (5.8%) in 2010.
In Croydon North, the National Front’s foray into the extremely hostile territory of one of the most colonised areas of London, saw an expectedly poor result of 161 votes (0.66%). No nationalist party even contested the seat in 2011.
However, even there, the comical black UKIP candidate Winston McKenzie polled 1,400 votes, up 3.97% from their 2011 election result.
The trend of declining BNP votes is on-going, as the result in the Manchester Central by-election of 15 November 2012, showed.
In that contest, the BNP polled a derisory 492 votes, compared to its 2010 result of 1,636.
There can therefore be little doubt that the BNP is now in a serious decline. Those with longer memories—and more experience of the nationalist movement—will recall this exact same scenario playing itself out in the NF in the early 1980s.
Incredibly enough, the very same personalities who destroyed the then NF, are the same ones who have destroyed the BNP, after inveigling themselves into leadership positions.
It is a sad day for British Nationalism, and a situation from which it might take a long time to recover. Let us therefore hope that the country is not completely overrun before the disaster of the current BNP leadership is removed.
Michael Woodbridge
- Edit
Tragic though much of the recent British National Party’s decline may be, without an obvious alternative organisation, we need to focus on ways of improving our ideological basis. Once we have ideological integrity and a new spirit of honesty, petty factionalism will appear irrelevant. For instance, without really facing up to reality, we could be lumbered with discredited, weasel words like “democratic” to describe ourselves by.