Former Labour MP Kitty Ussher writes in response to the BNP Question time debate which has attracted much comment on the Beehive this week:
I was the MP for Burnley until this election and also used to be the PPS to Margaret Hodge, and spent a couple of days with her in Barking during the election campaign. She ran a brilliant, energetic and positive campaign and has also attracted a reputaion locally as a hard working constituency MP, particularly in her campaign to get the maternity unit at Barking Hospital open which I am sure explains much of the result.
But I also heard with my own ears many people telling me that they were voting Labour because they did not want Nick Griffin to be their MP. They simply wanted to drive him out of Barking and were prepared to lend their vote to Labour in order to achieve that.
In Burnley we gained a council seat from the BNP last week, again because people responded to our very well known local candidate.
In general, although the BNP has substantial support in Burnley, particularly in the ward of Hapton, they are nowhere near as fashionable as they were eight years or so ago.
I thought it was a great idea to have Nick Griffin on question time, because he is the leader of a legal political party in our country and so it prevented him from being able to say he had been banned from appearing and looking like a martyr.
And because his policies are so ill-thought through and opposed by all the other parties and the mainstream media his appearance on Question Time meant he was roundly ridiculed, which also meant it became less fashionable to support him on the street. I do think this affected the mood music around the BNP, in a way that was negative to them, even if it did at the same time increase awareness of their existence.
The turnout argument doesnt stack up. When the BNP does well they tend to manage to get people out to vote who normally don’t bother: turnout is high when BNP win council seats. This time those same people came out for Labour. Its quite simple: some people who had voted BNP in the past, chose instead to support Labour.
Nick Griffin increased the BNP vote in Barking by over 1,700 votes – the largest ‘Far-Right’ in any general election constituency EVER. And yet he was roundly beaten.
Why is that? Demographics played a very large part – the number of Africans in the borough has increased exponentially since 2005. But another major factor was campaign funds. The BNP is a tiny organisation with around 10,000 members – the Labour Party has a huge, well-oiled party machine, backed by trade unions. As if this isn’t enough, they also have a Third Party organisation called Hope Not Hate funded by the, er, trade unions, that pumped vast amounts of resource in to fight the BNP – which meant effectively saying ‘Vote Labour’.
It’s a miracle actually that the BNP did so well in these circumstances