Riddell: BNP is Labour's Fault

I would ordinarily pay less than no attention (if that were possible) to the weekly non sequitur barfs of token loony left Torygraph columnist, Mary Riddell, but on this occasion, she has - albeit unknowingly - made a startling admission that is probably worth the highlight. Submerged in her usual nonsensical meandering flow, this time on the alleged boons of Labour's 12-year immigration tsunami, was this utterance:

Far from resiling from Alan Johnson’s confession of Labour mistakes, the PM is expected to sound even tougher. As well as promoting rigorous border controls and a points-based system, he plans to embroider his much-vilified theme of “British jobs for British workers”, arguing that young Britons need to develop their skills to compete for those jobs. Mr Brown will walk a tightrope. Reaching out to the white working-class voters who fled to the BNP is fraught with risk, not least because their discontent is thinly rooted.

Yes, I know: totally illogical. Why, for instance, if the "discontent" of "white working class voters" is so "thinly rooted" is reaching out to them "fraught with risk" for Labour? That, along with the rest of the article, and just about every other article this menace to good sense and stranger to intellectual honesty and rigour has ever penned, simply doesn't add up. Her credentials as a Labour mouthpiece generally, and Brownite lickspittle specifically, are therefore completely in tact, of course.

There is a point here, though, but not quite the one she intended. The admission, finally, by a mainstream leftwing apologist, that it is Labour's failed (deliberate?) immigration policies that have pushed erstwhile, putative Labour followers into the arms of extremism ("white working class voters who fled to the BNP," she says, remember) buries once and for all the utterly dishonest assertion peddled by the likes of Hain, Harman, Straw (most recently on Question Time with gargoyle Griffin) and, yes, Brown that all parties are responsible for the rise of the BNP in core Labourist areas, that what they like to tag "voter disconnect" is linked to all MPs' destruction of the public confidence in parliament because of the expenses scandal. Sure, there a dent has certainly been made, but this has nothing to do with the drain of the Labour vote to the nationalists - and Riddell has witlessly accepted that. Well done her, then - sort of.

Whatever delusionals like Riddell and her ilk in the left media would like to believe, and like us to believe, the reality is rather different. No one is particularly happy with uncontrolled immigration, but no one is more unhappy than Labour's core vote and that is where the extremist boost has come from.

As if we - or she (or they) - didn't know.

"I Thought He Would Grow Out Of It"

Young gargoyle in training: who's his hero, do you reckon?

According to Telegraph comment editor Ceri Radford, citing the Mail, chief gargoyle of the BNP Nick Griffin's own wife thinks he is bonkers and had hoped that he would "grow out of" playing at "stupid politics". I thought this was jolly funny.

Never mind that David Aaronovitch column pointing out exactly howthe BBC should
hold Nick Griffin to account for his holocaust-denying, racist,homophobic views;
my favourite piece of criticism on the BNP leader this week comes from no other
than his wife.

“I worked my a*** off trying to keep us going,” Mrs Griffin has moaned, according to the
Mail. “I’ve been … working to keep us going financially and bring up four children while he’s spent his time playing at stupid politics.” She added that she “though he would grow out of it”.

Not quite her hero, then.

I have my doubts that Griffin will be anything more than a side show on Question Time tonight, thankfully. There are many other things to talk about of far greater import than the sweaty racial fantasies of schoolboy bully who thinks Adolf Hitler was a really cool guy. The Mail says he is "dangerous and deluded". I'm not so sure. Deluded, certainly, but dangerous? Possibly, if his goonery spreads. But the one thing that the Euro elections clearly demonstrated was that pricisely that had not happened to anywhere near the degree expected.

I'm not suggesting for one moment that there should be any complacency, but that on the part, at least, of the Tories there should be no hand-wringing and no shame; they did not create this problem, Labour did. So let Labour wail and gnash their teeth and wonder where it all went wrong. Dismiss their slurs and smears and false associations between the BNP and the Tories for what it is: dishonest propaganda designed to deflect reponsibility for the emergence of a "party" which is as much a product of socialism as Labour itself. As I said in a previous post, the Tories should just ignore Labour's lies and get on with the rough, tough job of clearing up their mess, in this case a serious sociopolitical one.

Do tell me how the programme goes if you're watching it. I don't think I'll bother.

The BNP Is Labour's Fault

Labour's anti-semitism: inspiration for the BNP

Iain Martin has blogged today that the "rise" of the BNP represents a failure of "all the mainstream parties". While I am a fan of Mr Martin, I'm afraid on this occasion I'm forced to disagree. It is not the fault of the Conservative party. Nothing could be further from the truth and, if you read his article, that is exactly what he demonstrates. His conclusion that the emergence of the BNP is somehow every party's fault just does not follow-on from his argument and cited examples.

In the process of answering his own question of just why the BNP managed to gain 6% of the Euro election vote in the first place (in core Labour regions), he simply reveals the craven hypocrisy and disastrous hate politics of the Labour party and its leader, Brown - and nothing else. And yet Martin seeks, illogically, to apportion blame for the emergence of extremism in Britain equally. See for yourself:

The answer is that Britain’s three major parties, the wider political class and the media have all, to varying degress, badly let down their fellow Britons. They have done this by setting narrow terms for the national debate which exclude the concerns of millions of voters and force them out on to the fringes. Some decide there’s no point voting but a portion of them have ended up in the arms of the racist BNP.

Take immigration. Britain has had a dramatic increase in its population in recent years. In 2007 alone more than 500,000 immigrants arrived. There are many good economic arguments in favour of being a magnet for those who want to be in Britain to get on in life. But there should be sensible limits because of the pressure it puts on public services, housing and the stretched social fabric.

But it is not just that these concerns were ignored, anybody trying to raise them was shouted down and quite often smeared. In the 2005 general election, Michael Howard advocated limits and was branded an extremist by Labour, which simply wanted to make the Tories look old-fashioned and weird. Much of the media happily played along with the game, questioning Howard’s motives. Thus mentioning the I word condemned the speaker as obviously not as sophisticated as the metropolitan types who live in London and run politics and the media.

But what message did this send to those struggling to cope with the fall-out of this experiment on the ground? It said quite clearly: Your views are unpleasant, you don’t matter, we’re not listening, shut up. Thus a great many people felt they had been abandoned for a simple reason. They had been.

So it's the Tories' fault for being smeared by Labour for trying to respond to people's concerns over high levels of immigration, aided and abetted by a tame mainstream media, during a general election campaign, is it? I don't think so. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. Nick Griffin, possibly the most ghastly man in Britain (Gordon Brown only manages a close second), like some overweight cuckoo has found his way into the Question Time nest in yet another example of media exploitation of a potentially explosive confrontation.

What makes it worse is that it's the BBC that's arranged the spectacle in what is in my mind an example of abject ratings-chasing. This, of course, being the same BBC that, as Martin puts it, "happily played along with the game" of Labour wickedly smearing Michael Howard in 2005 by branding him an "extremist" simply for seeking to manage immigration, something which Labour had, and still have had, notably - and in many ways spectacularly - failed to do.

Whatever the ins and outs of the debacle, to me it all boils down to one word: honesty. If Iain Martin and the rest of the mainstream media can't be honest about who has really caused the rise of extremism in Britain (England, actually) then there can be no way to begin to repair the social and political damage that's being done. It merely further compounds the ugly, dangerous dishonesty of Labour.

In their goal to demonise the Conservative party across swathes of Britain to ensure that large sections of the population share their blind, mindless hatred of all things Tory, they have used every propaganda tactic in the book, even to the point, if you recall, of turning Michael Howard into a Nazi-style anti-semitic caricature. By the end of the campaign, therefore, according to Labour propaganda, Howard was both a right wing extremist and a money-lending Jewish hate figure. As far as I am concerned, this was truly evil stuff and it had a terrible side-effect. Labour's lies, smears and Third Reich style approach to political propaganda gave permission to a section of society, mainly in its own heartlands, to hate. It made the rise of the BNP all-but inevitable.

So the origins of the rise of the BNP can be traced back to that general election campaign, the dirtiest and most dishonest on record. But all the dirt and dishonesty was coming from one direction: the Left. It's their core vote, whom they have subsequently thoroughly alienated by being so utterly useless in office, who are drifting into the arms of extremism and racial bigotry. Yet this is a key point that appears to escape all but the bloggers. The MSM seems to be happy to continue to peddle the Labour party's increasingly desperate message that the BNP, as a party of the 'far right' (it's not, it's a typically muddled, socialist/nationalist organisation), can somehow be associated with the Tory party. This is the ultimate smear and one where the deepest contradiction can be found. If this were the case, then why are the vast majority of misguided BNP supporters former Labour party voters? No adequate answer to this question has been forthcoming from the Left media as yet - it doesn't fit in with their dishonest narrative, you see.

The point, therefore, is that the blame for the rise of the BNP has nothing to do with the Tories, and Iain Martin and other independently minded, professional journalists should have the guts, or the sense, or the honesty - preferably all three - finally to acknowledge this.

What is certain, however, is that should they win the next general election, it will fall to a Conservative government to fix the problem, caused by Labour, of what is really the political dislocation and disaffection of fairly significant sections of Labour's core vote. How they go about that is beyond me, but they are going to have to try.

So there you have it, yet another dimension to the universal catastrophe that will be "Labour's legacy". And people still wonder why I am convinced that this is comfortably the worst government this country has ever had inflicted upon it.

Friends Like These

Sometimes, you read something that reinvigorates your natural faith in the idea of "people". This post, from one of my blogging chums, is one of those times. So I've done what I always do (wicked internet parasite that I am) and nicked it.

Read on...

How do you solve a problem like the BNP?

This post is little more than linkwhoring to this excellent post over at Coffeehouse by Fraser Nelson.

It explains a lot of the reasons why the mainstream parties are experiencing such difficulties dealing with Griffin and his party and the best ways to take them on. Certainly I think the left have been the biggest cause of the problem, shouting them down and screaming 'racist, racist!' has not been a successful tactic and has only led to their own natural supporters becoming disillusioned and switching to BNP. He also points out that for all the press coverage and handwringing by mainstream politicians they haven't been very succesful because deep down, Britain's the most comfortable multi-cultural country there is.

The issues that are causing people to vote for the BNP now isn't racism but immigration (and before anyone bitches it isn't the same thing). But anytime a politician mentions immigration they are automatically accused of playing the race card (unless it's a labour politician, there's nowt like double standards!). Michael Heseltine was shouted down on Question Time for suggesting that the people waiting to cross Calais to get here were 'economic migrants'. It's plainly obvious that the vast majority of them are. If they were purely seeking asylum then they could have done it in France or one of the multitude of other EU countries on the way. No, they try to come here because we are a soft touch, with free housing and handouts more genorous than they will get anywhere else. To suggest otherwise is complete bollocks. And this is what is the grist to the BNP's mill.

Fraser also queried who would be a good person to take Griffin to task on Question Time. I'd suggest the tory invite goes to John Redwood. He's a very straight talking politician who would deal with the immigration issue without trying to fudge it...and he would completely destroy the feasibility of any of the BNP's other so-called policies which are further to the left than Dennis Skinner (Expect maybe the EU, it's probably the only thing he'd agree with them on...though I'm sure his argument would be far more coherent.).

"Uncle Bob", as far as I'm concerned, is one of the very good guys.

(Sincere apologies to him for what he will no-doubt think is a rather lame moment of fake hero-worship. Soz, Bob ;)

Left, Right, Left, Right: HALT!

Curious thing. I dislike extremists intensely but very occasionally, and like an awful lot of other ordinary people no doubt, I'm tempted to agree with them. Only tempted, mark you. (For example, I'd prefer to see the ginger chipmunk Blears and her epic failure of a government kicked out of office through an immediate General Election rather than hounded out by the threat of arrest, pleasant though that sounds!) But if I were to contemplate voting for an extremist party and all I had to go on were their campaign posters, which would I choose I wonder?

This poster (right) from loony left rag, Socialist Worker seems to capture the underlying mood for national retribution if nothing else. Maybe that's what it's for. There is a difference, though, between the metaphorical currency of, say, a Guido Fawkes ('blood is spilt'; 'political beheadings', 'snouts in the trough' and so forth) and the call for summary imprisonment here, or the BNP invective below. While centre-right bloggers are trying to make a point with humour (and usually failing in my case), these guys actually mean it. So the resemblance the socialist worker poster bears to the BNP campaign, who have also gleefully jumped on the populist version of the anti-sleaze bandwagon, is startling - and not superficial, murderously loathe each other though they genuinely do and always have.

While there certainly are differences - the nationalist extremists' target appears to be the whole of mainstream politics and their main rivals, UKIP, whereas the socialist extremists, at least in their minds, are attacking Labour from the Left - there are distinct similarities,too.

Both appear to seek arbitrary punishment for those who have been found guilty in that old chestnut, the 'court of public opinion' (Harriet Harman should be ashamed of herself). Both in reality are exploiting an issue which has deeply offended the electorate to further their hazy, extremist agendas. Both seem to want to 'do away' with the 'old order' - rather than reform it - presumably in favour of some vague 'new' one, as yet undefined.

I know, I know, it's just a couple of posters, so there's not really that much that can be gleaned from them. But both are very recent and both you will see quite a lot of in the run-up to the Euro and local elections, the BNP 'piggies' one in northern Labour-held town centres and the socialist worker 'chipmunk' one outside student union buildings across the nation.

Above all, both are very similar because both 'movements', beneath all the hyperbole and the posturing, are too. That's worth bearing in mind if you're ever tempted to vote for an extremist party: you never know what it really stands for - or where you stand. Dead in the middle, usually. Like Poland.

PS: If you're interested and want to know more than you ever could reading my stuff, Donal Blaney wrote a great piece sort-of on this theme a few days ago.

BNP: Displacement Activity...

Returned from toil today to find that Dan Hannan has wondered to himself on his blog about whether the challenge to the mainstream parties from, as Hannan reminds us one Norman Tebbit describes as "Labour with racism," aka the BNP, can actually materialise.

He writes, lucidly:

While a tiny number of people might be attracted by the BNP's racism, and a handful more by its Left-wing populism, the party's main appeal was always likely to be as a stick with which to belabour Labour. Whenever I heard Harriet Harman or Tessa Jowell saying "Whatever else you do, please don't vote BNP", I winced. Some voters, I thought, might say to themselves, "Right then, if that's the thing you bastards are most frightened of, I'll do it".

While I thoroughly agree with this, it's the second article Hannan has penned which appears to fail to take into account the impact of the expenses scandal on voting intentions. Instead of considering the effect of the deepening sense of alienation felt by Britain's massive swell of housing estate, undereducated, welfare-dependent (all thanks to Labour) vote fodder (for Labour), he prefers to float off on some sort of merrie England reverie - conveniently conflating England with Britain - wistfully drawing dubiously favourable comparisons between the UK and some 1930s style, jackbooted Europa.

We don't get excited about uniforms and shiny boots and führerprinzip: we leave that sort of thing to foreigners. Above all, we understand that our country is defined by a civic, not an ethnic, sense of nationality.

This is simply not true (as the internal irony of this quotation itself suggests). Further, it's clear that Hannan is attempting, in vain I feel, to distinguish the Tory party from the BNP in a way that is actually unnecessary: by doing exactly what Labour does and demonising that which needs no demonising ('fuhrerprinzip' for heaven's sake!). Beyond saying that, on the evidence of history and the strength of their own words, it is clear that movements like the BNP are basically evil, any extra negative analysis of their moral turpitude is counter-productive. It's overkill.

And yet the Tories seem desperate to head off Labour's smear (viz Denis MacShane, Guardian, May 4th, for an example of this arch smearist's work and the smear itself 'in action') that they, ridiculously, are to blame for the rise of the far right. It's a particularly ugly smear because the intention is to cause people to associate - and thus apportion guilt by that association - Conservatives with the historical 'far right'. As Labour smears go, therefore, this one is especially filthy.

I do not think the smear will work, incidentally, simply because Labour's previous hate campaigns over the years on the housing estates demonising the Tories at every opportunity have been so successful. The Tories are simply not on anybody's radar any more in those areas (apart from as 'the evil Tories'). It's a straight fight between the BNP and Labour, which also speaks volumes about how hate campaigns tend to backfire.

But what annoys me most is that not only are Labour pissing in the wind on this issue, the Tories are now too. Labour are the ones who have played and are playing an incredibly dangerous game. I fear that now Shahid Malik has been forced to stand down from his role - and I think as a public servant who has been compromised by greed, this man has a case, probably criminal, to answer - the BNP agitprop will go into overdrive in that Labour-dominated 'heartland': Labour sleaze has thrown the nationalist socialists a lifeline.

Dewsbury is where this former minister, fired now for venality, is Labour MP and 'enjoys' a majority of around 4000. That makes it a marginal these days and it will be heavily targeted by the BNP - and that means trouble. The blame is so utterly Labour's in every way possible that for them to hold their heads above the parapet and even suggest there is any connection with Conservatism would be so outrageous it would merit a lawsuit!

So better Dan Hannan and Tim Montgomerie stop worrying about the Labour smears and propaganda regarding a headline grabbing fringe group Labour can't handle - and even though the smears stink.

Rather they must concentrate on how the Conservative Party can work harder and harder to convince the people on the estates that Labour have abused for so long and betrayed with their exploitation and money-grubbing that a Tory government will make their lives better. It's a big ask, but it's better than ducking the issue with displacement activities, which is frankly what the two have been doing today.

As for Mr Hannan: greatly admire him as I do, I feel he needs to venture beyond the Home Counties now and then before he tries to offer opinions on a subject about which he is seemingly informed more by his imagination than his extraordinary intellectual powers. Pity he hasn't already.