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The BNP's big decline in Oldham

Michael Crick | 12:10 UK time, Friday, 14 January 2011

An interesting side story last night was the battle on the right, and the big decline in the BNP vote.

The BNP came fourth last May, with more than 5.7 per cent of the vote, and 826 votes ahead of UKIP (who lost their deposit last time). And they did even better in the seat in previous elections, getting 11.2 per cent in 2001.

What's more, Oldham and east Lancashire have traditionally been one of the BNP's stongest areas. Indeed, their leader Nick Griffin is an MEP for the North West.

This week the BNP only really became visible in the seat within the last 24 hours, whilst UKIP had previously erected huge posters on billboards throughout the seat, and attached placards to many local pubs.

Last night the BNP were leapfrogged by UKIP, and pushed into fifth place, 469 votes behind their rivals. It was almost a reversal of their relative performance in May. This time UKIP saved its deposit, and the BNP didn't.

After the disastrous results for the BNP in the general election last year, it puts huge pressure on Nick Griffin. Those activists who'd like to get rid of Griffin as leader will no doubt feel angry and emboldened.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    IS JACK STRAW THE NEW 'UNACCEPTABLE' FACE OF POLITICS?

    Surely Bellwether Jack (Straw) is telling us the PC dam has burst? We CAN now call a spade a spade?

    I suggest fringe BNP voters have reaised sanity is on the way back regarding 'sacred ethnicity'. Hence their vote is lower.

  • Comment number 2.

    I ONLY SUGGESTED STRAW HAS CHANGED THE PC 'CALCULUS OF RISK' (#1)

    I think the Blogdog is now biting shadows. My point @ post 1 was that Jack Straws amazing lurch, along the Arch of Cant - BNP continuum, could easily cause a few BNP fringers to drift off. I suppose, if I want to be careless of intemperate, with impunity, I must get a job presenting edgy TV or radio.

  • Comment number 3.

    Of course the BNP aren't on "the right", they're a socialist far-left party.

  • Comment number 4.

    one in the eye for Mr Crick...to hear NN the night before poll you would think that Labour were going to have a hard time and yet they walked it with a three and half thousand majority, obviously Mike is talking to the wrong people and instead of going to the local media outlets walk a few blocks out of the town centre and see the deprevation that exists, the thousands of jobs to be lost and are being lost and then you wonder how Michael could have got it SO wrong, with him being a Mancunian and the 2000 jobs that have just been earmarked for disposal I would have thought he would have well sussed that one out.....

  • Comment number 5.

    BNP a far left party?? Shurely some mistake....

  • Comment number 6.

    I wasn't even thinking about the BNP aspect. So thanks for bringing it to my attention.
    It seems like most voters were like me - concentrating on the three largest parties and rather overlooking the British National Party.
    Thinking about it now, it seems cowardly to me that Nick Griffin did not contest this seat; it would have given him a platform for whatever he wanted to say on behalf of his party. Maybe his decision rested on his party's failure to gain any seats at the previous general election.
    I do remember Candidate Adams releasing a video I think soon after the general election in which he spoke about how Britain has changed over the previous decades, and not for the better. There were images of ethnic minorities to illustrate BNP claims - with young white faces representing Adams’ vision of some kind of idyllic past.
    I remember too, Adams took a shot at David Miliband; a picture of Mr Miliband was accompanied by the words "Coming from immigrant stock I know the importance of letting anyone and everyone come to β€˜our’ country", a reference to Miliband's Eastern European ancestry.
    Despite leader Nick Griffin’s claims to have changed the party, he missed a great opportunity to demonstrate this to the voting public.

  • Comment number 7.

    I was appalled by the BNP's leaflet, delivered last night.
    "OUR CHILDREN ARE NOT HALAL MEAT."
    It claimed that girls "are being groomed by Muslim paedophile gangs all over Lancashire and Yorkshire" and that "police chiefs have ordered officers to turn a blind eye."
    The leaflet was, frankly, hate speech and the BNP should feel the full force of the law.

  • Comment number 8.

    Jack Straw was given a platform by Newsnight from which to hijack the BNP's most atavistic political issue.

    He appeared on that platform alone - labelled simply "Cabinet Minister 1997-2010". Debbie Abrahams' front page on her website has a picture of her looking up adoringly at Jack Straw.

    Mr Crick tells us race played no part in the election campaign.

    The Pakistani Muslim candidate lost thousands of votes from white people who chose to vote Labour because of the racist climate and Labour's claim to hegemony over the BNP on the "grooming" issue.

    It is inconceivable that Jack Straw would not have scuttled last Friday's Newsnight platform, had Oldham Labour Party chosen either of its Pakistani Muslim shortlisted candidates.

    Not one election correspondent has asked any candidate for a response to Jack Straw's Newsnight comments. Why?

  • Comment number 9.

    So what can we rationally and democratically do to have a sensible debate about where immigration is going?

    The BNP are tolerated by the ruling class as a way of disuading us from holding a sensible public debate.If we ask for a debate we are told that we have an outlet through joining the BNP.

    This allows our main political parties to duck the issue in the way they duck Europe by saying we can join UKIP.

    And the journalists and academics are no better because they also avoid confronting what everyone knows is a matter of concern to far more people than can fairly be thought of as BNP extremists.....and that will increasingly include the sons and daughters of immigrants who are being displaced by fresh waves of immigrants from other cultures.

    Because however the liberal patrician Establishment and the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ use the BNP and UKIP to create a smokescreen there are simply far too many foreigners who might qualify for entry to Britain...there are billions of them ....and we are sleepwalking our way to serious social unrest by ignoring this fact.

    It`s a simple fact of life that in a first world country in a free market economically liberal mass migration economy the rich and powerful will happily dump the excess peoples of other societies on our very desirable welfare state and public services and they are.

    And if there is no political party rooting for working class/underclass people ...asking how all this is fair to their members a great injustice will carry on being done to ordinary British people.

    The only person to have really stood up to the global capitalists (and the liberal internationalist pro-immigration left) was Enoch Powell.

    He asked (quite reasonably) what justice there was in displacing traditional working class communities with foreigners.

    Is that really racist?

    Would you like to be treated like the Palestinians and told to shove off from your homes and community so capitalists could bring in cheap labour to take your jobs.....or get pilloried as a racist bigot by the "Labour Party"?

    We are drifting rudderless into a very dangerous stage in our history while still fantasing about our capacity to take on more and more disparate groups of outsiders on the frankly bizarre assumption that we "need" them to "look after us in our old age"......and without allowing ourselves ANY means to challenge this and all the other counter-intuitive ideas we are force-fed by the political class on a "take it or get persecuted" basis.

    I have never heard anyone answer this following question satisfactorily.

    Why are we taking in more and more culturally incompatable foreigners into our advanced and expensive welfare state ....when it`s been obvious for decades that we can`t even provide prosperity and a decent jobs market and housing and public services for more than a fraction of the people who were born here and whose forbears contributed to the creation of this advanced society we live in now?

    We HAVE to talk about why there is no rational political way of discussing this and a whole lot of other issues which our mainstream politicians avoid discussing or addressing.Either that or now abandon the idea that we live in a democracy of any crediblity.

    And before the usual ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ bully-boy accusations begin ....I joined the Labour Party in 1964 and voted Labourup to and including 1997..... when I finally despaired of Labour ever giving a thought to the needs and interests of ordinary British working people ....who are some of the most unrepresented and politically beleagured people in the western world.

    Anyone wanting to debate this should call a public meeting on a sink estate ...and invite a few of the current confidence tricksters we call politicians to come along and face the ire of a REAL audience...not a ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Question Time selected one!

    ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ...get your finger out!

  • Comment number 10.

    IS THE ANSWER THAT WESTMINSTER IS PEOPLED BY VERY STRANGE INDIVIDUALS? (#9)

    Jim, entirely reasonably, asks why we KNOWINGLY import more and more CULTURALLY INCOMPATIBLE individuals into this country.

    I could ask why, for decades, we have KNOWINGLY connived at disease and death by tobacco; bizarrely trumpeting the NHS, concurrently.

    I could also ask how Baroness Warsi is an asset to the Conservative cause, when Conservatism embraces sodomy, as a legal activity (within certain constraints - like tobacco use) while the Baroness, clearly cannot. (Think carefully before you bite Blogdog.)

    I have often posted about the selection process (party PRE-selection) for installation at Westminster. The CITADEL chooses 'its own'. The behavioural requirements placed on MPs are both odd and oppressive - sort of 'public school' - hardly surprising. This β€˜proves the pudding’, in both senses. They don't leave in droves – oh, god help us, Westminster SUITS THEM.

    I DON'T THINK THE COLLECTIVE PSYCHE OF WESTMINSTER IS ONE YOU WOULD TRUST YOUR DAUGHTER TO - OR WANT TO SIT NEXT TO ON THE BUS. This is the root problem we face. They play a game called POLITICS, but pretend to themselves, and to us, IT IS GOVERNANCE. But it is all done WITHIN THE LIE and NewsyNighty is in there with them.

    The British have forgotten how to rebel. Perhaps it will take imported revolutionaries to do that for us!

  • Comment number 11.

    10..Thanks Barrie...the answer to your points is that the world is not run rationally....but very obviously by and for the benefit of global capitalists ... and they profit from the irrational mess we live in far more than if we lived in a real democracy over which we had some control.

    Just think of politicians and journalists holding Equity cards and learning the lines they are given by rich "playrights" ...for a clearer picture.

    There`s little evidence that we English EVER learned how to be revolutionaries..and those who did got kicked out to the colonies!

    In fact....as a Celt...I feel closer (emotionally) to the politics of France....while the indigenous English are like the Germans.

    Some incomers do have much more courage... but I fear it`s often dircted AT us rather than WITH us! Abu Hamza ripped us off...he didn`t lead us into battle....and nor did Lord Paul or Baroness Udin or Sir Robert Maxwell.

    I am fond of Baroness Warsi.

    She doesn`t pull the regular incomer`s stunt of pretending to be socialist or Labour ....(when she`s really an openly opportunistic natural Tory)...and better still....she`s been known to challenge the Islamic community`s old guard ...who expect women to know their place..(and vote how they are told to vote) ..and good for her!

  • Comment number 12.

    TOP TABLE (#11)

    Don't go all Celt on me Jim - I am just a mongrel. I shall have to use gratuitous abuse to raise my self-esteem.

    I get the impression your Equity card carriers are my 'Globopoly' players.

    I further suspect Ms Warsi 'knows HER Book'. I think we shall hear a Halal Chicken crow shortly. One thing seems indicated - she is suited to Westminster.

  • Comment number 13.

    We are all mongrels Barrie and the few that are racially pure suffer from all sorts of genetic problems that the Beeb would never allow us to discuss here.

    Here`s a little tip ....look at the countries which are most likely to take over the world from our ridiculously named Anglo Saxon countries... and ask yourself how like modern Britain they are?

    They are natoinalistic and based on one strongly predominant culture and "faith"....not the multi-mongrel dog`s breakfasts that we inhabit.

  • Comment number 14.

    The BNP were finished within seconds of the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ's Question Time demolition of their leader finished. There is no hope left in the communities that supported the BNP, they have surrendered to the inevitable.

    Remember when the ruling elite even claimed that the issues that gave people cause to be attracted to the BNP should be addressed by mainstream political parties. They don't need to say that anymore. They can go back to the default mode of dismissing them as being merely a 'bigoted woman', or man, women or men.

    Now anyone who questions the sanity of allowing seven figure migration into the UK in a single figure number of years while the outsourced jobs were heading out in the other direction and with youth unemployment steadily climbing, will be rounded on by one and all and dismissed as an ignorant racist.

    Progress indeed!


  • Comment number 15.

    I can quite understand your reasoning TMR @ 14......but QT is the liberal Establishment`s substitute parliament and Court of Star Chamber rolled into one!

    And as the economy dips and the remaining jobs are done for cash or exported to other countries...I think more and more people will tire of being force-fed the Gospel According to the Guardian!

    And while their lives and communities fall apart ....and the liberal aristocracy and the financiers (between them) carry on selling ordinary Brits down the swanny river .... more and more non BNP members (who voted Liblabcon in vain) will ask themselves why they paid taxes and worked all their lives ...so that incomers came to be the only folk with a proper bed in our crazy British asylum!

    How many of us really think the buka is a sensible idea in a modern western society? Well the QT team seem to.

    How many people think calling for British jobs for British people is some form of racism/xenophobia? But guess what the panel concluded?

    I dearly wish the QT programmes could come from sink estates with an unselected audience....so viewers could see what a state this country is in and those odious overpaid con merchats we call pundits and politicians could get some authentic audience reaction to the drivel they spout.

  • Comment number 16.

    Stevie, the BNP are Far Left, make no mistake. They believe in centralised command control, trade tariffs, state owned businesses ... The term "Nazi" comes from "National Socialists".
    There seems to be something of a feeling from the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ that all extreme political views are "right wing", this is demonstrably not true.

  • Comment number 17.

    16...Yes ...now the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ seem to have become a sort of political opposition party surely it`s time we knew what it`s real "manifesto" is?

    I think I could write it for you but the Moderator of the Church of Fashionable PC Causes" might choke on her organic yohurt and consign my impudent ramblings to the cyberbin post haste!

  • Comment number 18.

    The Waffen SS and the Nazis put Jews, Communists, Gypsies into the death camps and they were not of the right, regardless of what you think of Stalin and his pograms, his detestation of the ruling class surely proves he was no fan of Mussolini...the victims were all of the left....and not one would get into Nicks party

  • Comment number 19.

    re#13

    complete rubbish,

    So India isnt an up and coming country even though it's also a "multi mungrel dogs breakfast" as you put it.. with its different races and faiths trying to get along with eachother

  • Comment number 20.

    19 India is a very complex country with a huge underclass...parallels would be very difficult to draw strontium...but how are things going in your Israeli quest to provide an harmonious multiracial multifaith society?

  • Comment number 21.

    Stevie...the liberal left have cleverly managed to pass responsiblity for any nastiness in society onto what they call "right wing people" but this is an act of political and historical ignorance.
    The national socialists were a reaction to global usury as practised by Wall Street and it`s true that (just as in 2008) there were many Jews in the Wall Street finance industry.
    The problem is that ninety-nine per cent of Jews weren`t financiers but ordinary folk like us and I remember that many were socialists and communists.So they were then blamed for spreading Bolshevism and murdered by so called national socialists.
    Hoping that sheds more light than heat!

  • Comment number 22.

    I find myself largely agreeing with WorcesterJim, although I don't think it is useful getting into a discussion over left or right wing.

    The BNP were never going to prosper. Although you could make credible arguments for stopping immigration and jobs for British workers, they could never escape the fact that if you scratch the surface, what lies just below is a bunch of racists. If you want to be a racist, at least have the good grace to be honest about it.

    I think there is a place for people with views similar to the policies the BNP pedalled. We should have national discussion about immigration and jobs for British people. These things need to be discussed because they bring out strong feelings in many people.

    I also think, connected to this, there should be thought given in this country to whether we are happy to be multi-cultural. I personally don't think multi-cultural works at all and I think our country is a good example of that - religion sets many peoples culture and it causes division and segregation in society. I have no issue whatsoever with a multi-national society (within restrictions as to how many people we allow into this tiny island), but I personally think religion should be a personal thing practised behind one's front door and we should focus on the people born or wanting to live in this country being British rather than being Christian, Hindu, Muslim etc. There is plenty of non religious culture we can and should all share and embrace to bring everyone together as British. Religion segregates rather than unites. Multi-national, not multi-cultural.

    The problem is that with the exception of UKIP, none of the main political parties have the guts to raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist. If the Tories raise the issue the Labour party will accuse them of playing the race card and the Labour Party will never raise it becasue they seem more than happy to let as many people in as possible, and as for the Libs, well as pro-EU they no doubt are happy for the whole of Europe to have the right to turn up here whenever they like. They should stop worrying about political capital and start addressing a serious national issue.

  • Comment number 23.

    22 Thanks Will....it`s good to read that there are others with the courage to broadly agree with me ...though I share your perception that it`s a very dangerous idea to express if you want to succeeed in a professional career of any sort...and I certainly got a lot of flack from some people in my profession of social work!

    Like so much that`s daft in Britain I suspect it`s another American idea which makes a lot more sense in their very different country.

    Here and over there it is really a capitalists wet dream of a policy .....because it completely sabotages organised labour and any welfare system a country has established ....and throws the left of politics into a complete tizzy....!

  • Comment number 24.

    The BNP started to disappear when they were allowed to speak. Freedom of speech was being destroyed until the appearance on Question Time. The ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ can be proud of that even though it had a fat ulterior motive. The left should stop trying to impose a gag on everyone they disagree with. Stalinists are the worst kind of fascists.

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