- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday April 27 1999 16.45 BST
An immediate question is whether the European elections - the first UK elections to be held by proportional representation - will allow the far right to make the breakthrough it has sought for more than 20 years. PR is designed to accommodate minorities, where second votes count: will it benefit the far right?
The British National Party certainly has high hopes. It is the leading force in what remains of the racialist right in modern Britain. It hopes it will make its biggest ever electoral impact in the June elections. The Tory party is in disarray and the BNP hopes to reap the benefit - all that agonising over English identity in the wake of Scottish and Welsh devolution, talk about an English Parliament. The Tories will suffer further if, as expected, the multi-millionaire Eurosceptic Paul Sykes decides to run another expensive anti-single currency campaign.
Exactly how much effort the BNP should put into the June elections has been the subject of fierce debate between its leader, John Tyndall, and Nick Griffin, his one-time appointed successor and a former leader of the National Front. The latter has been seen as a 'moderniser' who wants to target the suburbs rather than its traditional areas of support in the derelict inner cities. He has set up a media-monitoring unit and is pushing hard to bury its racist past in an appeal to middle England.
The BNP is by far the dominant group within the far right although the remnants of the NF and a splinter group, the National Democrats, also put up candidates at the last general election. (No candidate of the latter two groups achieved more than 2 per cent of the vote.)
Far right politics peaked in the Seventies, in terms of electoral impact. Since then it has been downhill. The advent of Mrs Thatcher's government with its 'swamping' rhetoric on immigration appears to have rendered the separate far right parties impotent and many activists simply joined the local Tories. The NF put up only 60 candidates in the 1983 general election, averaging 1.1 per cent of the vote. It did not bother at all in 1987, blaming the increased deposit.
The BNP has dominated the field since 1990 and won public attention in 1993 when it secured a council seat in a byelection in Tower Hamlets with a 'rights for whites' campaign. In the following three months racial attacks rose by 300 per cent in the area. The BNP lost the seat after five months. More recently its hand can be seen in anti-asylum and anti-paedophile demonstrations.
In the 1997 general election, the BNP put up 55 candidates: just enough to secure itself a five-minute national party election broadcast. But BNP candidates kept their deposit in only three seats. In Bethnal Green and Bow, which includes the scene of Saturday's nail-bomb attack, the party got 3,350 votes or 7.5 per cent of the poll and in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, 2,232 votes or just over 5 per cent. In Poplar and Canning Town, John Tyndall himself received 2,849 votes or 7.3 per cent. In all three cases the BNP stood against and beat candidates from Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party.
The 1997 broadcast was openly hostile to Britain's minority ethnic communities and used montages of newspaper headlines, scenes of West Indians and a mosque in British city streets. Channel 4 refused to broadcast it after the BNP failed to make cuts removing identifiable black and Asian people. ITV and Channel 5 insisted these scenes were cut before showing it. The BBC broadcast it unedited. It brought complaints from 76 viewers.
After the event, the Broadcasting Standards Council suggested that the 'confusion' about party election broadcasts be cleared up. What has changed is the height of the threshold. The BBC said yesterday that to qualify for a party election broadcast in June, a party must put up a full list of candidates in every region being contested. The implication is clear. Unless the BNP puts up the maximum number of candidates in each of the 11 regions it will not get a party election broadcast.
Deposits for the election cost £5,000 each and the BNP would need to back 84 candidates o qualify for a party election broadcast. That means being prepared to lose £420,000, even before the costs of making the broadcast are taken into account. The BNP does have money - among its sources of finance are skinhead rock bands - but that kind of sum is thought to be beyond its reach.
It could be an absolute loss. The threshold proportion of votes for an election candidate to keep their deposit isn't easy to compute. It is 100 per cent divided by the number of seats on the regional list plus one. So in London where there are 11 seats it works out at around 9 per cent or more than 175,000 votes. Searchlight and other observers believe that neither the BNP nor NF have any chance of getting above this hurdle, given their combined general election showing of about 37,000 votes for the whole country.
There are other benefits to be had from standing. The Home Office confirms that all candidates will be eligible for free distribution of election addresses to every household, but the privilege will be available only in the region in which candidates are standing. The rule is that as long as one candidate is standing for election in one region the Post Office will distribute their leaflet. But the party still has to provide the literature and the cost could easily run into the tens of thousands.
According to Searchlight (the ever-attentive anti-fascist magazine), the BNP's attempt to 'modernise' includes accepting that the majority of British people totally reject fascist and anti-semitic ideas; which leaves anti-black feelings to exploit. The party has targeted what it calls 'white flight areas' in outer London and the home counties with a 'nowhere-else-to-run' campaign. A quick glance at its website shows it is still a party obsessed with the idea of a 'non-white' takeover of Britain.
But there's no evidence such an appeal is going to win more than the derisory numbers of 1997 - even with proportional representation. PR will not bring Britain's far right the same breakthrough that has led to the rise of the Front National in France or the resurgent fascist right in Germany.
Find links to more Guardian information about the BNP here.
How strong is the British National Party?
The British National Party is believed to have about 1,500 members and won a total of 35,353 votes in the 1997 general election. It is a direct descendant of the National Front (which still exists, in a much attenuated form). The NF peaked in the late Seventies with some 17,500 members and put up 300 candidates in the 1979 election, winning 3 per cent of the total vote. The BNP website is www.webcom.com/bnp. Searchlight magazine is www.s-light.demon.co.uk.
