nick’s (n)-line life

This year’s local elections are now wrapped up and the results are as follows:

The real winners were the Conservatives, with the Lib Dems holding their own, and labour falling flat on its face. The BBC have published a  very useful Interactive election map and estimated next year’s general election results will be CON 40%, LIB DEM 27%, LAB 26%, OTH 7%.I’d love to see the lib dems become a true viable party in the UK, but I’m not sure we’re at that stage yet; our first-past-the-post system (vis single-transferable-vote) leaves us with a two-party system as people don’t want to “waste their vote”.

Even The Sun runs sensible headlines occasionally.

The primary concern coming from these elections is the increasing prominence of the far right of the political spectrum, primarily the British National Party, BNP. One might describe their policies as: anti-foreigner, anti-gay, and pro-white and two of the leaders were recently prosecuted under the Race Relations Act.

More info on the party can be found at Wikipedia and this BBC interview with chairman Nick Griffin is very insightful.

These people are the great shame of the British people and the fact that Nick Griffith is a Cambridge educated law student is very sad for the University and affiliates (including myself - although I draw some small pleasure from his 3rd class degree).

To pick up a few points from the BBC interview it seems totally pathetic to attempt to ban halal food in schools in the guise of protecting students from Anorexia, and don’t even get me started on the “mixed marriages are morally wrong” argument (um… why, Mr Griffin?).

While, to me, it is not appropriate to prohibit the BNP from campaigning or participating in the political process, as party leaders say: free speech remains important in this process and I’d agree with Pickled Politics. But their campaign goals are beyond objectionable and one really does have to ask why are people voting for them?

It scares me a little that the BNP supporters can be heard chanting “free speech” in this support video filmed following the announcement of the retrial for their leaders. My instinct is that free speech is good and I’m almost unable to reconcile this with BNP perversions of one of our constitutional rights. I’m definitely with the anti-BNP vote here (for example see Neil’s World). I know that I recently commented that I’d rather nail my hand to a tree than vote Conservative, but I don’t even have the words to describe my feelings on the BNP.

In 2004 an undercover BBC reporter recorded BNP leaders expressing racist comments discussing crimes and threatening to take action against non-white groups:

Steve Barkham, confessing to a violent assault on an Asian man, and a prospective election candidate admitting to a campaign of pushing dog excrement through the front door of an Asian takeaway.

The documentary led to 12 arrests and several men were subsequently prosecuted under the Race Relations Act (something I noted in an earlier post but didn’t comment on). The trial collapsed because of a hung jury and a retrial is currently pending.

The views of another BNP leader - yes, another racist leader of the party - are that Black people are “dangerous”, “dysfunctional”, “have lower IQs”, don’t deserve to have public funds spent on them and will “probably mug you”. The full Sky TV investigation video containing this taped conservation and an interview are well worth watching (via Stupid Evil Bastard)

Their website, like the leaders, is full of crap creative propaganda. There are major inconsistencies between the articles they publish, as each article is used to push a issue according to their underlying racist agenda. While they claim not to be racist refuse membership to non-whites and publish comments like this

BNP Site - Like anything that’s wrongly and massively overdone the Marxian use of the word racist as a smear, although once all powerful, is losing its sting.
[...]
I believe that almost everybody’s racist, at least mildly.

Making arguments against the BNP is like explaining integration by parts to a 6 year-old. The obviousness of the point leaves you feeling ill-equipped to explain the inadequacies of their arguments.

How do the BNP respond to their critics?

BNP Site - The popular press seem to have decided that it’s their job to be the BNP’s judge, jury and executioner. Perhaps they think that the British people are too stupid to make up their own minds and need firm guidance in these matters? If the BNP are so foul, why not give a big platform to their views and let them condemn themselves out of their own mouths? My suspicion is that fear is preventing this. Fear that their policies will strike a chord with the ordinary British person and that they will do well, just as the nationalists have elsewhere in Europe.
[...]
Looking at the BNP’s website reveals policies that, if disseminated widely among the electorate, would undoubtedly stir up enough interest to grab a significant share of the vote.

So basically, they don’t like newspapers exercising free speech to comment on their views… hummm… they’d probably object to me calling this a “double standard” as well then! :)

Anyway, their latter point is probably true. Many of the policies that the BNP peddles are indeed favourably for many “British people” (by which the BNP means the white working class who have been let down by the current Labour government). However, as Labour Party Chairman McCartney points out:

They take up legitimate local grievances and they exploit those issues for their own racist aims.
[...]
The BNP’s strategy is straight out of the Nazi textbook.

In this way the BNP plays on people’s fear - fears such as unemployment and immigration - and uses this to target hatred at other ethnic groups and gain votes.

Spiked - Most of those who vote BNP do so, not because they are hardcore racists or because there is anything attractive about the BNP, but rather as a way of giving two fingers to the mainstream parties. When large numbers of people feel turned off by party politics - and when the best reason that the mainstream parties can give for voting is that if we don’t the BNP will get in, a kind of electoral blackmail - is it so surprising that some express their disaffection by voting for the BNP?

The BNP suggests that it is acceptable to treat individuals differently based on nothing more than their country or birth or the colour of their skin or sexual orientation. Worse still the BNP attempts to argue that this is “natural” and thus proper. By analogy might one attempt to argue that without consequences rape, murder, and theft would be “natural”, because these negative consequences are part of human nature, and are thus permissible?

Augh, I surrender, putting a counter-argument causes me great anguish. Just take a look at the BNP homepage; it’s filled with the sort of objectionable viewpoint that typify the BNP. Not content with this? Then look at all of the criminal prosecutions and take a look at the Stop the BNP campaign. While n-line is regularly a bit of an asshole, he feels that the BNP may well be truly bad people.

To move on, the elections and heavy political feel in the UK provide a good lead-in to a series of posts I’ve been planning to run, discussing some of the democratic and political freedoms we enjoy in the west and their applicability in the Eastern world. More in this shortly…