The British National Party scored its most significant electoral victory to date last night, as it won a seat on the London Assembly.

The far-Right party secured enough London-wide votes to pass threshold of around the five per cent of votes needed for a seat on the authority, which holds the mayor accountable for his £11 billion budget.

The BNP mounted a significant campaign in its attempt to penetrate the capital and will chalk up a seat as a major victory and a sign of support from the electorate at large.

Simon Darby, the party’s deputy leader, said a seat on the London Assembly was “the icing on the cake”, and the BNP’s “equivalent of getting into the Premiership”.

Anti-facist and gay rights groups have called for protests in the capital in light of the win.

There was a glimpse of the divisions to come in scenes last night at City Hall as BNP supporters and protesters confronted each other in the aftermath of the result announcement.

The BNP can attribute its success to strong results in several areas, including more than 12 per cent of the vote in Havering and Redbridge, almost 10 per cent of the vote in City & East, and six per cent in Ealing & Hillingdon.

It ran in third place overall in Havering & Redbridge and placed fourth and fifth in several other constituencies.

However the party failed to live up to initial hype, as it had been expected to easily clear the threshold for a seat.

Outside London, the BNP had a mixed night, gaining ten seats overall and breaking new ground in some parts of the country but generally performing less well on councils where it has enjoyed past success.

The party won its first two seats in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and a further two on Derbyshire’s Amber Valley council, also picking up single victories in Thurrock, Essex, and Three Rivers, Hertfordshire.

It gained its first foothold in South Yorkshire, where the BNP contested five seats on Rotherham council and won two of them, ousting the sitting Labour mayor, Allan Jackson.

Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham, said the seats had fallen to a party that to could offer no solution to the town’s needs, “only hate and division”.

The BNP’s average share of the vote in the five Rotherham wards was 28.7 per cent, but it failed to make an anticipated breakthrough in neighbouring Barnsley, fielding 20 unsuccessful candidates whose average vote was 18.3 per cent. Six of them came in second.

In West Yorkshire, the party made no progress in Leeds, Bradford or Kirklees, where it lost the only seat it was defending and suffered a dip in support across most areas.

Calderdale elected one BNP candidate, in a ward where the party has done well in the past, and it picked up another seat across the border in Pendle, Lancashire. It also held the seat it was defending in Burnley.

The BNP’s biggest advance came in Stoke-on-Trent, with three victorious candidates bringing to nine the party’s representation on the troubled Labour-run council.

Its most damaging loss came in Epping Forest, where BNP councillors were unseated in two of the three seats where the party was seeking re-election.

In total, the BNP fielded 614 local election candidates, 585 in England and 29 in Wales, where it failed to make any impact.

Mr Darby claimed that a gain of 10 seats was “not a bad haul” but admitted that the BNP’s focus - and much of its resources - during the campaign had been targeted on London.

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