Ask The Ones Who Voted BNP

The post-mortem on the two BNP MEPs' success, and the access they now have to great pools of taxpayers' cash (the Telegraph suggested £4m over the four-year period of this EU parliament) threatens to become the main source of liberal angst for the time being. No bad thing, as the man-made global warming guff is sooooo yesterday (or tomorrow, or next year, or 2020).

Me? I think it's a good thing, on balance. This is not because I am a racist or a Hitler admirer or a xenophobe. It is because the endless triangulation of policy by the three main parties had led us into a cul-de-sac of effete liberal consensus on immigration and multi culturalism. This was an airless place in need of a damn good blast of fresh air. I hesitate to suggest that the rank mixture of BO and Lynx anti-perspirant from Griffin and his mates is fresh air, but it will have the same effect.

The left's response has been completely predictable, with a bunch calling themselves the UAF hitting the media sofas and emoting about the potential "normalisation" of the BNP in British politics. There will be a great deal of airtime gobbled up by Sonia Earnest asking Gregory Angst about the reasons for this, and vice versa.

Waste of time. What they need to do is to undertake the difficult, unpleasant, and potentially dangerous task of interviewing the many thousands of people who voted BNP, and find out why. Some, doubtless, will be Nazis, like the charming man above (thanks for the pic, Thud). Others will be flippant protest-voters. Still more will be anarchists.

But the majority, I estimate, will be standard British salt-of-the-earth: in other words, mildly racist, but not offensively so; champions of British-is-Best, even if a lot of it is pants; buggered if they understand why economic migrants get away with this asylum racket, and get all those flats and houses and healthcare and benefits and, unsatisfied with that, want to be productive and take our bloody jobs as well! Normal British working class, in other words. No wonder the middle class politician hasn't a clue about them.

New Labour is trying to find out what went wrong on Thursday, and soon the penny will drop that it was THEIR splendid ex-voters who trooped into the BNP lobby. Of course there will be a few far-right folk in there as well, but any analysis of BNP policy will tell you that it is designed for racist socialists.

So let's find out what the hopes and fears of the 1 million people who voted BNP really are, and see if we want to address them. If you don't ask them, you run the risk of getting your information from Nick Griffin and his Lieutenants, which is not advisable if you seek the truth.

Wannabe polemicist James Delingpole, who is a bit hit-and-miss, is mostly 'hit' with his blog on this. And amusing about the achingly centrist types who have dominated the thought process of our main parties for too long.