The price of liberty is eternal voting. There is a school of thought which says that it doesn’t much matter if the EU elections in June only have a turnout — as predicted yesterday — of 18 per cent. As for the chore of voting in council by-elections, it is one which denizens of quiet rural places often feel free to skip.
We know that it matters really: that democracy is a jewel to be guarded with our very blood. But we have a council by-election here in a couple of days, and on a freezing, wet, dark Thursday evening in February a sluggish little voice in your ear whispers a different message. Who cares which brand of tiresome political wannabe gets to twin the local market town with somewhere depressing in Bavaria? Who cares what colour of council sends out the next lot of clumsy ditch-diggers to sever the phone lines of an entire village, as they did down our lane this weekend? Even local planning seems to matter less and less, given the tendency of central government to overrule local feeling over power stations, airport runways and housebuilding “targets”. Ignoring local elections is a national vice. It doesn’t feel like a particularly dangerous one. Extremist parties, after all, are not going to bother to conquer Market Blandings or Piddlington Parva.
Oh yes, they are. The ultra-right-wing, anti-immigration, protectionist and little-Englander British National Party is here, campaigning with vigour. It is a party associated more readily with racially volatile conurbations, such as Burnley and Oldham, where its supporters specialise in race hatred, violence, intimidation and the use of local poverty to stir up suspicion and envy. For all its patriotic rhetoric, in the cities the BNP shows an ugly and unmistakable face. It wants an end to immigration and asylum, return of the death penalty, and the diversion of all foreign aid money into a programme of sending people back to “their land of ethnic origin”. Explore further in its literature and you find that it favours total withdrawal from the EU, exclusion of foreign goods from British markets, heavily armed neutrality (with “the restoration of the old county regiments”) and hero status for Tony Martin and Robert Kilroy-Silk. It lays every ill at the feet of “political correctness” and enjoys nothing more than a sneer at “one-legged black lesbians”.
The BNP’s occasional successes in urban council elections are fuelled by two things in particular: older people’s fear and disgruntlement at the modern world and the growth of an angry, ill-educated young white underclass which enjoys a ruck. Many of the forces which fuel its support are aggravated by the mismanagement, interference in daily life and over-prim PC behaviour of successive mainstream governments; but none of that justifies a BNP vote. Nick Griffin’s party speaks the language of patriotic pride, but a vote for it is a vote for hatred, narrow-mindedness and violent fragmentation of communities.
However, it has lately got itself a new costume. The urban wolf has bought a shepherdess’s smock and bonnet, learnt a few folk-songs and settled into bed in the most rural of spots. Never mind Bradford, now it’s Yoxford (along with Darsham, Dunwich, Middleton and Westleton). Here in Suffolk, at this week’s by-election, the BNP is making an extraordinary push. It plans to do so whenever these small elections come up, and its attempt to identify with rural life will be even more apparent in the EU elections in June.
This is not a stupid move. In places like this, where local elections usually produce a tiny turnout, a bit of vigorous campaigning on countryside issues could quite easily fool enough voters to get you in. And I say “fool” without meaning to insult my neighbours. Many rural voters, having better things to do than read stuff in the papers about riots in distant cities and the criminal convictions of Mr Griffin and his deputy, Tony Lecomber, may not easily realise what the BNP is and what cruel ambitions it harbours. Our parish magazine, in guarded terms, has been concerned enough to warn churchgoers to read election leaflets with more than usual care.
It is instructive to study the suspiciously expensive material which the BNP puts out to rural voters. The Countrysider newspaper (“distributed free to those who respect Britain’s traditions, identity and freedom”) is not at first glance easily identifiable with the extreme Right. It draws you in with polemic news items which might come from any media that give space to rural life. There are stories on EU fishing limits, poultry trade agreements, the closing of an agricultural college, GM crops, the decline of village services, housing problems and the Prince of Wales’s support for British farmers.
It is only when you look more closely that you notice how many ills they lay at the door of people with duskier skins. House prices shooting up? Blame immigration. Environment under threat? “We should not be concreting over our pastures and wildlife havens to build housing developments for people fleeing our crime-ridden multi-racial cities.” Rural poverty? Cure it by ceasing to “provide for the needs of 500,000 asylum-seekers who have nothing to do with Britain”. Can’t get a job? Blame foreign farmworkers, and never mind that most such workers are here temporarily and simply because British labour won’t break its back in the fields for low wages.
New Labour is a particularly easy target for the synthetic contempt of a BNP ruralist, because it is easy (and not entirely inaccurate) to portray Tony Blair’s set as smooth urbanites with little feeling for rural Britain, who even on their holidays shun our countryside for Tuscany. This Government has, after all, caused a worryingly large cross-section of country people to take to the streets in protest at its inattention to their interests. They also fouled up badly over foot-and-mouth: media chatterers have moved on to Iraq and Hutton, but that crisis is not yet forgotten by those suffering from the high-handed, scientifically dubious measures taken against them.
New Labour is also bossily insensitive to the small realities of rural life. The new entertainment licensing laws — with which the BNP paper has a lot of fun — genuinely do affect convivial, live musical gatherings in country pubs more than the “urban pubs with their deafening jukebox or football supporters watching a game on a giant screen”. And no British government since Heath has shown the slightest sensitivity towards fishing: while other EU states easily negotiated exemptions from quotas for artisan beach-fishermen, Britain didn’t bother.
There is a ripe harvest to be reaped by a candidate who points out these things then pins the blame on a largely invisible dark-skinned enemy. Although every piece of election literature from our blond, public-school educated, Territorial-Army candidate says indignantly “I am not a Nazi”, there are troubling echoes of Germany in the 1930s. When every social problem is blamed on an identifiable group — Jews, immigrants — normal discontent evolves rapidly into extremist cheerleading. When you have a population which is conservative and quiet in its tastes, knows few people from other ethnic groups and innocently enjoys flying the Union Jack from the village flagpole, then the flag-bedecked, traditionalist, stiff-upper-lipped posturings and trappings of the BNP may not look quite as glaringly ridiculous as they do in the more bitterly experienced cities.
The wolf in his sprigged nightie smiles at the Suffolk rural voter this week. The voter may, incautiously, smile back. As far as the Suffolk Coastal District Council goes, the chief effect of a BNP victory would be embarrassment for the rest of us. But in June’s European Parliament elections, if the party gets enough votes across the country, the proportional representation rules could easily carry a BNP representative to Brussels. He or she will, no doubt, push popular rural buttons. It will not be immediately apparent that the BNP leader is Nick Griffin, longtime National Front man, campaigner for “an all-white Britain”, Holocaust denier, a joker who opens his speeches “I smoke more than an Auschwitz chimney”, and recipient in 1998 of a suspended sentence for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. Many who vote BNP out of sheer irritation will be horrified when the wolf shows his teeth.
But the BNP will have gained another shred of credibility, and — almost as bad — the sneering urbanites of new Labour will have another excuse to brand countryside campaigners as fascists. Neither is a good result. Only voters can prevent it.
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