BNP success in the European elections is a boost for British Democracy?

derek tatton, 2 July 2009

BNP success in the European elections is a boost for British Democracy?
ODDc   Tue 30 June 09 at The Blue Mugge pub

These notes using comments and questions from TC, EB and DT.

1.   Where does BNP support come from?

2.   Has the two-party/first past the post system, linked with a move to the centre by
the main parties, left sections of the population feeling marginalised?

3.   Will the BNP gain of two seats in the European elections lead the main parties to
address legitimate concerns of those who feel alienated and disenfranchised from the political process?

4. The BNP claims to represent/support the ‘indigenous, white working-class’. What’s wrong with that?

5. Visit the BNP web-site:   read-up on their policy on immigration and note that the BNP leader this month ‘Denounces Racist and Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland’ > debate on the nature of racism and fascism.
……………………………………………………………

What part does History play?

BNP Mission Statement:     ‘The BNP exists to secure a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands… We use the term indigenous to describe the people whose ancestors were the earliest settlers here’.

BNP success in the European elections is a boost for British Democracy?
ODDc Tue 30 June 09 at The Blue Mugge pub

These notes using comments and questions from TC, EB and DT.

1. Where does BNP support come from?

2. Has the two-party/first past the post system, linked with a move to the centre by
the main parties, left sections of the population feeling marginalised?

3. Will the BNP gain of two seats in the European elections lead the main parties to
address legitimate concerns of those who feel alienated and disenfranchised from the political process?

4. The BNP claims to represent/support the ‘indigenous, white working-class’. What’s wrong with that?

5. Visit the BNP web-site: read-up on their policy on immigration and note that the BNP leader this month ‘Denounces Racist and Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland’ > debate on the nature of racism and fascism.
……………………………………………………………

What part does History play?

BNP Mission Statement: ‘The BNP exists to secure a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands… We use the term indigenous to describe the people whose ancestors were the earliest settlers here’.

6. What % of the current population has a direct ancestral link with the ‘earliest
settlers here’ (20,000 years?).

7. Our ancestors can be traced back, apparently, to Africa 200,000 years ago. Then about 100,000 years ago they moved to the Middle-East, then Asia… then…
What do BNP policies and statements tell us about history and myth?

8. A national newspaper asked ‘eight leading historians’ on 9th June
“Are we facing the threat of fascism?”. They all replied, ‘No’.
One said: “Any comparisons with 1920s Germany are completely overstated’’
Another: ‘The BNP is different in style and structure from fascism in the 1920s’.
Eric Hobsbawm stated: ‘It is not the threat from the extreme right that is the most striking characteristic of these (European) elections… The real crisis is that of the left…’.

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13 September 2009 - 2:50am

1) BNP support comes largely from people disenfranchised with the establishment who the BNP, with the complicity of the corporate media, has been better-placed to take advantage of by presenting scapegoats for their problems (ie, migrants) than politically conscious socialists have been to educate them in the real causes of and genuine potential solutions to their problems. A lot of people believe this is a calculated ploy by the establishment itself to split the opposition and provide a reactionary alternative to distract people from revolutionary ideas, and in some cases - as seen in Greece over the past year, and as was seen in early Weimar Germany - fascist organisations like the BNP (and in the case of the Greek paramilitary organisation Golden Dawn and their parliamentary arm LAOS, which the BNP even have direct links with) have in the case of support for revolutionary ideas reaching levels immediately dangerous to the ruling class been used as unofficial shock troops to do the especially dirty stuff the state can't be seen to endorse.

2) Yes. No doubt about that.

3) No. It will lead them to further encourage, and pass further legislation in support of, the prejudices promoted by the BNP.

4) The interests of the 'indigenous, white working class' are inseperable from the interests of the British and global working class as a whole. What the BNP does is help to entrench prejudices within the working class which in the long term, as well as to a lesser extent the short term, serve to hurt white, British workers as well as non-white and/or non-British workers and only benefit the ruling class.

5/6) I don't see much of a point. The BNP denounces (thereby admitting the existence of) racism in Ireland only because their audience is in Britain and has no direct connection to Ireland beyond instinctive solidarity which at least for the time being they see no benefit in undermining. As for 'indigenous', not that it's relevant but the first settlers of Britain were the Celts and only a minority of Britons - or for that matter of white Britons - are actually descended from the Celts.

8) Was this paper by any chance the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Daily Star, the Financial Times, the News Of The World or the Sun?