Mainstream political parties rounded on the BNP today after its breakthrough in the European elections.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, condemned the election of two MEPs for the far-right party as a sad day for British politics, while David Cameron described the result as desperately depressing.
“The BNP are completely beyond the pale. They do not even let black and Asian people into their party, they are an appalling bunch of people,” the Tory leader said.
A sign of the times.
I completely agree how appalling this is, though the extremists always come out of the woodwork in times of economic and/or social stress. But have a listen to the BNP’s mirror image at the other end of the spectrum, and remember they have been represented in the various parliaments for years. They are at least as hard to take, especially as they are accepted with little or no comment.
When the major parties fail to address concerns of citizens, opportunists like the BNP will fill the void.
Most supporters of the British National Party are working class people, natural supporters of the Labour Party, who are dismayed by massive immigration, political corruption, endemic unemployment among the unskilled, the dominance of the European Union over Britsh sovereignty, and the noisy and sometimes violent salience of Islam in the UK today. They feel like strangers in their own country. The decadent political class, allied to the financial institutions who bankroll their schemes and the metropolitan media elite (who despise British history and tradition) created these problems. The British people are not naturally extremist or antisemitic.
~4 with you in every word that you say. Those doing the lamenting are totally responsible for creating the dissilusionment and fear which foul people like the BNP feed off
rather than demonize them, the mainstream pols could show some leadership and address their concerns (which many, probably most Brits have as well). but that requires……work – oh, never mind….
We have watched the growing decadence iin Britain, the failure of standards, and all that. The “fundamentalists” have responded by demanding clear demarcations, bright lines, a narrowing of limits which protect identity. Heaven’s knows we are familiar with this in the US, and in the liberal tidal wave that has swept away all the “fundamentalism” that preceded it, we can see the consequences, and the inevitability of going from extreme to extreme. See again Yeats’ Second Coming. Larry
#4, you said it better than I. Agreed.
Sometimes I talk to our wild and disfunctional youngsters who are fine individually but can be antisocial in a group: drinking, fighting, sometimes drug taking, but are mostly unemployed, bored and alienated.
What has most disturbed me from this is hearing support for the BNP and their attitudes and although I can’t speak for other areas I didn’t get the impression that this is unusual within their peer group.
What we may be seeing is disillusionment with mainline politics from this group and those who appeal to their concerns about jobs and immigration have found an audience in white working class youth. It is a tragedy all round. I am not sure criticising them will be effective, they have to be shown and engaged by something better.
I have kin in the UK who voted BNP as a protest against the mainline parties. They are not working class and do not support the BNP’s essentially socialist economic policy or its extremist views about immigration and race. They just felt that the mainstream parties had betrayed the public trust and wanted to give them as nasty a shock as possible. Probably a lot like what happened at the end of Weimar, though the BNP is pretty tame compared to the Nazis.
If the policies of our Fed gov’t continue, you will see the same sort of reaction in this country. Believe it or not, educated white males are very much beginning to feel like strangers in their own country in these United States.