Londoners must join forces for the Battle of Barking to stop BNP

Matthew d'Ancona
16.11.09

Earlier this year, while preparing a Radio 4 series on Britishness, I spent a day in Leicester interviewing its citizens about national identity.

Much the most striking encounter I had was with a young Indian-born mechanic. Surrounded by his tools and engine parts in an upstairs workshop, he declared to me that he intended to vote BNP.

Did he, as an Asian Briton, not see the contradiction of supporting a party that opposed immigration and used the word "British" as a euphemism for "white"?

Not at all, he replied: he was sick and tired of all the Eastern European immigrants who were, in his opinion, ruining Leicester. Such, now, is the potential breadth of the party's electoral appeal.

I was reminded vividly of this exchange when I heard yesterday that Nick Griffin, the BNP's leader, is to stand as a parliamentary candidate in Barking.

A seat in the Commons is the party's next logical goal after its successes in local and London Assembly elections, capture of two seats in the European Parliament, and Griffin's own appearance on Question Time last month.

In 2005, the BNP's candidate in the east London constituency polled 16.9 per cent of the vote, a long way behind Labour's Margaret Hodge, who will be defending a majority of almost 9,000.

But Griffin's calculation is that everything has changed in the past four years, that the political and economic landscape has rarely been so propitious for a nationalist party of protest, and that he stands a fair chance of doing to Ms Hodge what George Galloway did to Labour's Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow four years ago: forcing out a high-profile incumbent with a relentless and (no doubt) very unpleasant local campaign.

This is a deplorable prospect indeed, and all Londoners who care about this great city's traditions of tolerance, diversity and pluralism should join forces to defeat Griffin and his acolytes.

The BNP feeds like a parasite on the anxiety of recession and the collapse of trust in the political class - and it believes that its moment has come.

The conventional wisdom is that the party's rise is a direct consequence of the mainstream parties' failure to offer immigration and housing policies that address the fears of the white working class.

According to this orthodoxy, New Labour and the Cameron Conservatives have become so obsessed with courting the 150,000 swing voters whose support may determine the outcome of the next election that they have forgotten the great mass of Britons and their fears.

Certainly, one doesn't have to look far to find evidence of the immigration system's malfunction, and the corresponding failure of successive governments to negotiate the problems presented by multicultural Britain.

The best Home Secretary of recent times, John Reid, famously described the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as "not fit for purpose".

Ms Hodge herself has long warned of the sense of grievance felt by her white constituents about the allocation of housing.

"Most new migrant families are economic migrants who choose to come to live and work here," she wrote in May 2007. "If you choose to come to Britain, should you presume the right to access social housing?"

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the way to beat the BNP is to pander to its supporters, or for the mainstream parties to offer the electorate a sort of BNP-Lite.

All the great cities of the industrial world confront a fundamental dilemma: how to reconcile the population mobility that is an integral feature of a globalised economy with the necessary levels of behavioural and cultural stability that any society requires to endure and to prosper.

In this country, we have yet to settle on an agreed set of non-negotiable norms to which all sections of the community must sign up (although Gordon Brown has tried to do so, seeking to define a set of basic British "values" upon which we can all agree).

This is, to put it mildly, work in progress. It needs robust education policies that require all citizens to learn English and acquaint themselves with British history and institutions.

It means an immigration system that works, and is seen to work, and a more nuanced, localised approach to social housing.

What it doesn't mean is caving in to anything the BNP demands, or even agreeing to its terms of trade. For let us be clear: the BNP are themselves a bunch of refugees.

They seek asylum from modern life. They demand escape from the real world.

On the homepage of the party's website, there is a clip of a Welsh activist in Wembley, filming black and Asian families going about their business and - shock, horror - a Muslim Welfare Association.

In his outrage, this particular spokesman sounds like a cross between Daffyd from Little Britain and Alf Garnett: the Only Racist in the Village.

"What you're about to see is horrific," he declares in the mournful tone of the valleys. "It's not our country any more.This is total colonisation." Except it isn't, really - is it?

You can't appease people who come out with such vile nonsense. But nor should you underestimate them, or their political cunning.

Which is why (though generally opposed to electoral pacts) I hope that on this occasion the three main parties will collaborate and field a single candidate to ensure that Griffin is defeated comprehensively and definitively.

Nothing less than the honour of our city is at stake: the Battle of Barking is too important to be left to chance.