I gave up on the Euro elections about 1.30am and in some ways I'm glad I did as the sight of Nick Griffin winning in my home territory of the North West would have been pretty unbearable. Griffin went over the Pennines after failing to win in Keighley at the General Election. This time, he did it. The news is a terrible blow for al of us. But particularly those of us in the North of England who wake up with two fascists representing us in the Euro Parliament.
I'm going to be careful what I say because my gut instinct is to go into a bit of a tirade against those in my locality who said they could not "bring themselves" to vote Labour.
This morning I just ask them what voting for the Greens, or No2EU, or Arthur Scargill's Friends Of North Korea party has achieved other than to give the BNP a massive blast of oxygen - and the serious prospect now of winning seats at Westminster.But such ire would be misdirected.
Round here, the BNP's share of the vote was highest in former mining communities in Barnsley and Rotherham. Places where traditional working-class communities have felt disenfranchised and abandoned by Labour. We have to ask why and we have to do something about it. And the blame game isn't going to help.
I'm surprised in a way because when I was trying to stand as a PPC in Keighley a common view there with activists was that the BNP had been seen off in 2005 and that they would quietly wither away. Halifax, too, has seen the BNP's share of the vote dwindle at local election level. Now they are back - with a vengeance.
There is truly only one answer to this sickening result and that is for Labour to stop worrying about Middle England. It's now irrelevant. Last night it was crushed and came second to the Conservatives in its Welsh heartland. If Labour does not reconnect with its core vote, get out onto the estates , start re-connecting with the very people who have registered their anger by voting BNP then Labour is finished.
Monday, 8 June 2009
WAKING UP TO FASCISM
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13 comments:
I cannot understand this, we should have voted labour to stop the BNP, why.
The fact is people will vote for a party hoping that party will win, why the hell should people vote for Labour. I mean over the past few weeks you have slagged off Brown and in my mind rightly, but you then expect people to vote for them to stop the BNP, in fact this might wake up people, sadly not brown or New labour.
I agree with much of what you say, but disagree on one significant point.I dont agree that Middle England is now irrelevant.
No one sector of society will be enough to elect a Labour,or any socialist leaning,government. We, and by that I mean the Labour Party, must undoubtably re-engage with the people on the estates, or in the ex-mining communities.We must deal with the issues which are important in those communities.
We also need to keep on side the doctors,teachers,students (those who know me will be shocked at that!), the famous chattering classes, that are currently wasting their votes with the Greens, or the Lib-Dems, or the socialist alphabet parties, and by doing so letting in the likes of the BNP.
The Labour Party is leaking votes to the right and the left.
I dont much want to be attractive to the Right, but I do want the Left.
The Labour Party needs a strong Left, it needs a strong Union representation,it needs to relate to the working class and it still needs an intellectual,middle class,middle england presence.
The Labour Party needs to be an inclusive Party, not an exclusive one.
We cant afford to exclude anyone who has radical, left leaning views.
Or you could look at it the other way - had a few more thousand people temporarily deserted Labour and voted Green, then they would have taken the seat instead of the BNP.
Yes, Anon. is correct. In the Northwest Labour had plenty of votes to spare for its second seat and no chance of a third. The gap between the BNP and Greens was just less than 5,000 for the region's last seat.
I agree with anonymous. Why should we vote for someone we don't want in order to keep out someone worse?
I'm also a bit bothered by your previous posting in which you describe deserting Labour MPs as scum. Perhaps the party will have the decency to say in advance come the next election which of its candidates are tossers. Then we'll know how to cast our vote.
I should have added that the position was different in Yorkshire. Here Labour was closest to defeating the BNP.
'JB' has it about right, I think, but, alas for the Labour party, if our hostess has her way it will dwindle into just another semi-Marxist club providing a hobby (and a hobby-horse) for those with little else to fill their lives. In the meantime, the 'Brights' (to use that awful Dawkinsian expression - sorry) will move, once again, into the LibDems and try to form a proper Social Democrat party to oppose the Tories.
Interesting analysis. On the psephology stuff above - it is true that, in theory, a Green vote could have stopped Griffin if enough had done it (and they nearly did); in Yorkshire, it was a lack of votes for Labour that let Brons in. People are right - we didn't earn those votes - but that doesn't change the fact that it was the collapse in our vote (rather than any great enthusiasm for fascists) that brought us two BNP MEPs.
Remember that both in Yorkshire and the North-West the BNP vote FELL compared with 2004. This wasn't all about huge numbers supporting fascists. The story was voters deserting Labour, most of them choosing not to vote at all.
Yes, Duncan. It seems, having had rather more time to digest the figures that the BNP triumphed more because of the collapse in the Labour vote than any great enthusiasm for the BNP.
But the end result is the same.
Labour has to have a serious re-think and consider where it's gone wrong and how we recover.
Recriminations won't do anyone any good. I did not think the BNP would win either in Yorkshire of the North West. I was wrong
Its down to low turnout as much as anything - the BNP vote didn't increase greatly. But where it did were traditional white working class areas where they hadn't scored highly in the past, like Barnsley. On the whole people didn't switch to the Tories. They just didn't vote at all.
I did vote Labour in the end - almost because I'm not really into kicking people while they are down as much as anything else. But I came very close to voting Green and part of me still wishes I had.
I think its a question of both policy and Brown . Both need changing.
If the policies don't change Brown will face a challenge in the autumn.If the polls don't change that's true, too. But replacing one new labour leader with another won't change a thing......
On one level I agree. I think there are some policies which do need changing irrespective of who is leader. But I think we have to face a couple of facts. First - though I don't share it - there is a great deal of dislike for Brown as PM and leader. Second, there appears to be a desire for a Great Leader. I cannot understand this sort of thinking because I am not a sheep therefore prefer not to follow or be led. But it appears to be a public desire, and as such, the person has to be Good On Telly and charismatic in one way or another - either in a Blair/Cameron way, or a 'real person' like Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson.
I'm not good enough at maths to know, but I think your argument works for Y&H but not for the NW. In the NW, the Greens wouldn't have had to get that many more votes to beat the BNP to the last seat, but it would have taken a lot more to get another Labour MEP. (I'm glad to say I managed to persuade 2 people in Y&H to vote Labour who were tempted Green.)
The other, more fundamental problem, is that we keep on voting Labour to avoid worst alternatives, and Labour just keeps on getting worse and worse. Up until now, New Labour has taken working class votes for granted, playing to a mythical middle England. The massive desertion from Labour in precisely its post-industrial heartlands is probably the only thing that might make the party machine take stock. But even this probably won't.
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