What’s happening to the BNP?

"It’s tempting to write the BNP off...but...one of Griffin's saving graces will be the distinct lack of leadership calibre among potential would-be-successors..."

Aside from a bigoted woman in Rochdale and the rise of Nick Clegg, one of the stories of the 2010 campaign was the prospect of a breakthrough by the BNP. This was especially true in outer-east London, where all eyes focused on the ‘Battle of Barking’ between Labour incumbent Margaret Hodge and BNP leader Nick Griffin. Eyes also focused on local elections, where the BNP looked poised to take control of Barking and Dagenham council.
As I predicted in an earlier blog, the performance was a disappointing one. When all votes had been counted Griffin was pushed into third while his party lost every one of their seats on the local council. The BNP went from being tipped to take over the borough to being kicked out in one night. Their activists went from anticipating control over a £200 million budget to being, in the words of Griffin, “heartbroken”. What happened?

Before answering the question a reframing exercise is needed. Despite media claims which have followed the election, the core BNP vote did not collapse. The party more than doubled their number of votes, saved more than 60 deposits and their average vote in seats contested stood at around 3.8 per cent, down only 0.5 per cent on the result in 2005 despite standing more than three times as many candidates. The party also polled well in several seats where there was little or no campaigning on the ground. Even in Barking, Griffin attracted more BNP voters than in 2005 and, in fact, received more votes than any BNP candidate in the party’s history.

These votes, however, were swamped by a resurgent Labour vote and a boost of 11 per cent in turnout. This turnout enabled Hodge to increase her majority in a contest which saw almost 100 Labour MPs lose their seats. The mobilization of the Labour and anti-fascist votes owed much to the activities of the Hope Not Hate campaigners in and around Barking.

Reflecting the changing nature of anti-fascist opposition, these campaigners even recruited the help of an Obama strategist and employed innovative techniques to mobilize the anti-BNP vote. The campaign was also geared around Margaret Hodge, who took the campaign and Griffin’s challenge incredibly seriously and personally. In the face of this approach, the BNP’s pavement politics didn’t have a chance.

Yet there were internal problems too. In the weeks leading up to polling day, a court had ruled that the party’s membership policy remained discriminatory, a leading activist allegedly threatened to kill Griffin and the party became engaged in what many activists saw as an unnecessary dispute with Marmite (an early version of the BNP broadcast had featured a Marmite logo and, unsurprisingly, Marmite took legal action). Nor did footage of a BNP organizer brawling in the street with Asian youths improve prospects.

These factors combined to stifle the breakthrough. After returning from the count in Barking, Griffin perhaps took his mind back to 1979. The parallels between the performance of the BNP in 2010 and the National Front (NF) in ’79 are striking. Like the NF, Griffin ignored calls for a more targeted approach and went ‘all out’ by fielding 338 candidates, the largest number in the history of the extreme right. And like the NF, when this strategy failed to deliver the party descended into their favourite pastime: infighting.

This infighting has since escalated to the point of rival activists setting up their own website to call for far-ranging changes inside the party. Some of these activists are very influential and respected voices. The changes they propose are organizational rather than ideological: greater financial competence and transparency are the main ones.

But they also provide a striking insight into the political incompetence which has been at work inside the BNP. For instance, some claim that over the past year the BNP has distributed in the region of 30 million leaflets which feature a mobile phone number that was no longer in use.

This infighting will head in one of two directions. Either the activists coalescing under the banner of greater professionalism and financial transparency will exit and establish their own organization. Or, Griffin will hang on and be forced to make significant internal changes to acquiesce their concerns, most likely by opening up party accounts or distancing himself from a businessman in Belfast who has grown increasingly influential within the party.

It’s tempting to write the BNP off. But I said this week in The Guardian, one of Griffin’s saving graces will be the distinct lack of leadership calibre among potential would-be-successors. Some have too much baggage; others have sat in a council chamber but flounder in the face of media scrutiny. Griffin might have handled Question Time badly, but he’s easily the best of a bad bunch. He’s also keenly aware of the mistakes made in the 1970s, and his leadership is based on a party constitution which makes it virtually impossible for him to be removed. Success or significant internal reform will need to be delivered, and delivered promptly if the party is to endure in their current form.

Matthew Goodwin

A New Study on BNP Support: Why IPPR Got (Some of) it Wrong

"Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years..."

With each election comes a new wave of panic about the possibility of a BNP breakthrough. One problem with debate about the far right is that often remains completely detached from the rapidly-growing evidence base on what drives support for these parties.

We are not where we were in the general elections of 2001 or 2005: we now know a great deal about what motivates some Britons to vote BNP and the characteristics of communities where the far right tends to poll well.

A report released this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) attempts to add to this evidence base. First, even though the report completely glosses the academic literature on this topic we should take a moment to applaud IPPR for trying to add to our understanding of this important issue. Clap clap.

The think tank community has something which some academics often crave: immediate impact and an ability to bend the ears of journalists and politicians who desire a quick digestible soundbite based on ‘the evidence’. If they play it right, think tanks can help shape agendas.

It is precisely for these reasons that think tanks need to remain as close as possible to the underlying evidence base which informs our understanding of questions like who votes BNP, or how can we explain the rise of the far right?

Unfortunately – as is the case with IPPR’s latest report on BNP support– sometimes this does not happen.

There are many things which are correct in this report and corroborate our existing work on these questions. Crime and unemployment have little effect on BNP voting. True. The party performs less well in areas where education levels are low.

True. We agree with these. But then there are other things in this report which are seriously problematic and need to be flagged.

We will highlight these flaws against the backdrop of the press release which accompanied the report. This release tells interested journalists and policy wonks that it is ‘not immigration but alienation and an ability to overcome social challenges such as isolation and low skills which are the main drivers for BNP support’.

It continues, ‘this important finding contradicts the argument that immigration is to “blame” for pushing voters into the arms of the BNP’. Enter the co-director of IPPR Carey Oppenheim who concludes: ‘What our findings can finally lay to rest is the mistaken popular belief that it is the experiences of immigration which leads to people voting for the BNP’.

Ok, so here are the problems as we see them.

Problem #1: The report tells us nothing about actual BNP voters or their motives because it is focused at the level of local authorities. This is a common approach in many early studies of the far right. It has potential to tell us something about the types of areas where parties like the BNP prosper, but tells us next to nothing about individual BNP voters and – crucially – their motivations.

By looking only at local authority level the report glosses over an enormous amount of heterogeneity and is susceptible to what academics call the ‘ecological fallacy’ whereby people start making inferences about the behaviour of individuals based on the characteristics of the communities in which they are based.

We are told, for example, that support for the BNP is less about immigration than political and social exclusion. Why then do BNP voters rank immigration the most important issue facing both their families and the country?

It might not be the direct experience of immigration which is fuelling BNP voting, but anxiety about immigration is a major driver of the party’s support, like it or not.

Problem #2: The methodology of the report is flawed, in several respects. First, the report has not corrected BNP support to account for ethnic diversity which means that they look at support for the party by looking at all voters rather than the ones who really matter here: white British voters.

The report compares support levels for the BNP among the entire electorate instead of support levels for the BNP among its target electorate of white voters .Unsurprisingly, this leads the researchers to find that the BNP does less well in ethnically diverse areas. Of course they do! Such areas include a large population that the BNP doesn’t target and which give it no support.

Problem #3: The report adopts a blanket approach to ethnic diversity. The claim is that ‘areas with larger numbers of non-white people are less likely to vote for the BNP’. Yet the report does not break ethnicity down by different groups, choosing instead to lump everyone into the category of ‘non-white’. As our research has shown, taking the time to make this distinction makes all the difference.

We (and other academics if the authors had read the existing literature) find a strong relationship between higher levels of BNP support and large Muslim communities. We also find that non-Muslim Asians have no effect on BNP support and that BNP votes are actually lower in areas with large numbers of Black voters (read my earlier blog).

Simply looking for a correlation between the proportion of non-white and BNP voting misses the point: support for the far right is far more complicated.

Problem #4: The report measures turnout by looking only at turnout in one general election (2005). This glosses the critical importance of local elections to explaining the BNP’s rise, where turnout has not always been low.

Initial local BNP gains in one ward in Burnley in 2002 took place against the backdrop of a rise in turnout, likewise in local elections in Barking and Dagenham over the years 2002-06.

Looking only at one general election and drawing conclusions about turnout and party support is risky business.

Problem #5: The report puts most of its chips onto the argument that there is ‘strong evidence that recent immigration is not driving people to vote for the BNP’, and that ‘immigration to an area appears, on the whole, to make people less likely to vote for the far right’.

The authors allude to the fact that it is less objective experiences of immigration which motivate far right support than subjective experiences of immigration, i.e. I might not have seen or interacted with immigrants on my street, but I’m concerned about the effects of immigration on my society.

This is a crucial point but is downplayed throughout the report. Instead, the ‘finding’ that objective experiences appear less important (which is itself based on limited evidence) is taken as evidence that immigration per se is not a major driver of support for the BNP – which run counter to all the evidence we have from actual BNP voters.

With these problems in mind, the point about all of this is that future research – whether from think tanks, academics or others – needs to think more seriously about ways of building on what we already know, rather than spinning out a convenient headline finding to journalists and politicians.

Despite the claims of IPPR’s co-director, no popular beliefs have been laid to rest here. We already knew most of this, while the ‘new’ claims lack the robust evidence which is required to turn them into facts.

Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years. It is for these reasons that we need to think and research together in order to answer the challenges thrown up by these phenomena.

Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford

The BNP and Islam

"It might be tempting to dismiss this strategic shift as political opportunism and move on, but there are good reasons to take the BNP’s embrace of Islamophobia seriously. "

As Nick Griffin made clear in one interview this week, Islam remains a top issue for the BNP during the election. Like similar parties elsewhere in Europe, the BNP has increasingly shifted its discourse away from the crude ‘anti-black’ racism of its predecessors toward placing much stronger emphasis on Islamophobia.

The BNP first launched its ‘Campaign against Islam’ in the hours following the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Griffin has since recruited sympathizers within the Sikh community to communicate the party’s position on Islam to voters, such as during the BNP’s election broadcast for the 2004 European elections.



It might be tempting to dismiss this strategic shift as political opportunism and move on, but there are good reasons to take the BNP’s embrace of Islamophobia seriously.

Our study of BNP voting – ‘Angry White Men’ – provides evidence that Griffin’s party recruits higher levels of support in constituencies which have a large Muslim community. Moreover, we find that the presence of non-Muslim Asians has no significant effect on BNP voting and that support for the BNP is actually lower in areas with large black populations (nor are we the only researchers in Europe who find this relationship). The point is that the drivers of support for the far right are changing and becoming more complex. As we argue in our study, the appeal of Griffin’s BNP is more subtle than the crude racism and xenophobia of the old 1970s National Front.

The ‘traditional’ approach to the far right has been to talk tough on immigration and undercut its support (as with the classic reference to Thatcher saying voters are feeling ‘swamped’ about immigration). But branding the BNP simply as “anti-immigrant” misses the point and won’t appease the modern day BNP voter who is driven by a diverse array of concerns over perceived threats to ‘British’ values and culture. Anti-immigrant the party is, but in some parts of the country the BNP is also successfully mobilizing intolerance toward Muslim communities. These communities are already settled and are not going anywhere which means that it is going to be much more difficult for mainstream elites and policy makers to formulate a coherent and convincing response to the far right.

Talking tough about limits on immigration is one thing; talking about voters’ concerns over communities which are already established and which contribute to social and political life is another matter altogether. As Lauren McLaren notes in an earlier entry, in this election the mainstream parties are unlikely to thrust immigration to the forefront of their campaigns, but they are even less likely to talk about concerns over Muslims and Islam.

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, aside from coinciding with the increased salience of immigration the rise of the BNP has also taken place amidst a broader pool of anxiety and concern among voters over the role of Muslims and Islam in wider society.

At the time of Griffin’s breakthrough into the European Parliament last summer one poll by YouGov suggested that 44 per cent of voters agreed with the statement that ‘even in its milder forms Islam poses a danger to Western civilization’. The most recent British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey similarly suggests a reservoir of latent support for parties which specifically adopt hostile positions toward this minority group, indicating that only around one out of four voters have positive views toward Islam and five out of ten would be ‘bothered’ if a large Mosque sprung up in their local community.

As elsewhere on the continent, this anti-Muslim ‘frame’ is an important tool for the BNP because unlike its earlier emphasis on anti-Semitism arguments about the alleged ‘threat’ posed by Islam have support among sections of British media and the political establishment. In turn, the far right’s message is being delivered amidst a climate which is more favourable and might inadvertently legitimize this message in the eyes of voters.

Take, for example, the invitation to Geert Wilders last month to show his anti-Islam ‘Fitna’ film to members of the House of Lords, or coverage of Muslims in sections of the tabloid press. Few mainstream outlets endorsed anti-Semitism in the 1970s but today we don’t have to look too far to find support for Islamophobia – and BNP voters are much likely to read the Daily Mail, Daily Express or The Sun than other papers.

It is for all of these reasons that Griffin is working hard to claim ownership over the anti-Islam issue. Most voters remain unconvinced by Griffin and still hold extremely negative views toward the party. His Question Time debut was generally seen as a disaster, with only 4 per cent of voters afterward saying they would “definitely consider” voting BNP. But it is also for these reasons that it would be mistaken to overlook the changing message of the far right and ignore deeper currents within public opinion on which the party is preying.

Matthew Goodwin