Complacency is the BNP's best friend

This generation is distant from Oswald Mosley and his band; it wasn't born when the National Front smashed our lives up just because we were black or Asian. We who were there in the 1970s have not told them those stories - strong reminders that racism and fascism are very light sleepers, easily stirred.

I, too, have been too complacent about the BNP, too busy attending instead to the drift to the Right and xenophobia in mainstream society and institutions. That vote in the hall was a wake-up call.

Rome has just elected a neo-fascist thug as its mayor. Here, the BNP is now sophisticated, gaining entry to respectable broadcasting channels. It has picked up the art of politeness, spin and presentation skills. It endorses Boris Johnson, not to embarrass him but to further the move into acceptability. The idea of another useful connection is planted, whatever the truth.

Don't be fooled. This party attracts supporters who would happily see black and Asian Britons, Muslims and Jews banished or butchered.

Just in time, and I hope not too late, a number of high-profile people are warning voters about the extremists. Alan Sugar, Jamie Oliver, former Spice Girl Mel B, boxer Amir Khan, Meera Syal, Jamelia, Billy Bragg and Paul O'Grady have written an open letter before the elections, stating that: "The BNP are trying to exploit tensions. They have a vision for Britain of division, hatred and fear."

Whatever the frustrations of life, fury felt about politicians, tax, housing, schools and, yes, even immigration, none of these is an excuse to vote for a party that believes in apartheid, which wants to ban mixed relationships and deny citizenship to "coloured" people, and whose leader, Nick Griffin, believes Hitler's Mein Kampf has some "really useful ideas". A vote for the BNP signals deadly pessimism. Londoners must not let that hopelessness prevail.