Why didn’t anyone seem to worry? A candidate standing for a neo-Nazi party scooped up one fifth of the votes, easily beating the Tories and the Lib Dems and coming within an ace of a Le Pen-style run-off. The BNP’s success in the Stoke-on-Trent mayoral election should have prompted national debate. But by Sunday morning it had been forgotten, the nation finding its conversation taken over by Barrymore and Ulrika.

There are pressing reasons why the BNP’s success should concern us all, but there are also depressing reasons why it has not. Stoke is not typical of Britain, but it is hardly Marseilles sur Trent. Its ethnic minority population is just 4 per cent, around the UK average, but less than many other urban centres. Official unemployment also hovers around 4 per cent, higher than the national rate but significantly lower than in many other cities, such as Manchester or Sunderland. The far Right has traditionally relied on fears of a burgeoning ethnic minority population and significant social deprivation to garner votes. Given that Stoke is intrinsically no more propitious for the BNP, in either respect, than many other British cities, then the prospect exists of similar support being secured for the extreme Right across swaths of Britain.

That should be reason for anxiety, in any circumstances. But some of the principal reasons why the Stoke result did not reverberate are causes for concern in their own right. The main reason why attention soon wandered was the low turnout in all last week’s mayoral elections: apathetic voters engendered apathy in observers. So far, so what? seems to be the consensus. If voters want to use these mayoral ballots to vote for the “none of the above” candidate, then why worry? The business of the Queen’s Government goes on. Who gives a monkey’s what happens in Hartlepool?

But the results of these contests do matter. Why is it that the established parties are held in such low regard? Why should the most anti-political or anti-establishment candidates secure support from the most politically responsible citizens, those who are actually bothered to vote? Some in the political establishment argue that it is the nature of these contests that encourages eccentric voting, and eccentric victors. Mayors are little more than urban mascots, so electing a man in a monkey suit who has done that job already for the local football club is entirely logical. But such an attitude is patronising to the public, indeed typical of the closed cartel mindset of the political establishment. Voters were perfectly capable of discerning which of the independents running in each contest was best equipped to make a difference. Where an independent such as Ray Mallon has a proven record of taking public concerns seriously, he wins by a landslide.

Beyond mayoral contests, voters are willing to opt for any reasonable, or unreasonable, alternative whenever it is offered. At the last general election the independent, Dr Richard Taylor, triumphed in Wyre Forest and Martin Bell secured a remarkably high vote in sleaze-free Brentwood and Ongar. In Scotland, the former Militant Tommy Sheridan now polls better than the Tories in the urban Central belt and the independent Dennis Canavan romped home against allcomers in Falkirk. Allied to this trend is a growing pride among non-voters in positively abstaining. Research by the BBC indicates that among the massive 41 per cent who did not vote at the last election, a prime motivation was not apathy but rejection of the current political system.

Which is why those independents such as Ken Livingstone, Mallon or Canavan, who have been scorned by the political machine, do so well. Running against the machine has become more than just a populist feint, it has become the voters’ fastest-growing preference. It sustained John McCain’s run for the US presidency, it catapulted Pim Fortuyn’s party into the Dutch Government, and in the most cartelised political system in Western Europe, Austria, it allowed the far-right Freedom Party of Jörg Haider into power.

One does not have to look far for the reasons why outsiders are succeeding electorally. Establishment politicians are overwhelmingly drawn from a closed freemasonry of metropolitan apparat- chiks and, like the masons, their rituals are incomprehensible to outsiders. They decline to answer straight questions by seeking refuge in blame-shifting; they treat serious matters such as holding the Prime Minister to account like a bout of charades; and they continually talk down to voters in a self- regarding, antique fashion. It is all “I yield to no one” and “I must pay tribute” or “I say to you this”. Politicians collectively trash politics as a brand.

The tragedy of this process is that the populists it now favours are often disastrous for the voters who have been patronised out of politics. Fortuyn’s and Haider’s parties have paralysed their countries’ administration. And Ken Livingstone has used what power he has to paralyse London. He has rigged the traffic lights at red, made a permanent building site of the capital’s roads and caved in to the militant unions who stand in the way of a more efficient Tube.

Gridlock is not the only source of pollution produced by these populists. They also poison the air with the cheapest form of gesture politics, whether it is Haider legitimising Nazi employment policies and cuddling up to Saddam, or Ken championing the national socialists of Sinn Fein while delighting anti-Semites everywhere by denouncing the Prime Minister of Israel as a “war criminal”.

There are dangers in the failure of established politicians to develop an honest relationship of mutual respect with voters. We already have malevolent clowns such as Livingstone in office. It should not need a 19 per cent vote for the BNP in Stoke to alert the political classes to the problem of disconnection. The real problem, however, is that it has not.

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