Silence is golden

The BNP's Martin Wingfield, editor of their paper Voice of Freedom, often remarks that there is currently a 'quiet revolution' to describe a shift in public support toward the BNP.

If the latest local election results are anything to go by, it's currently proceeding very quietly indeed.

For a second year in a row the BNP have been met with disappointment in many areas. They managed to gain 10 council seats across the country, mainly in areas where they have done well previously, such as Stoke, but failed to make breakthroughs in areas like Wrexham, Southend and Basildon.

These gains were less than the BNP were expecting. The figure being quoted in the media is that they were expecting to win 40 seats but this what the BNP's legal 'expert' and idiot Lee Barnes predicted, not the party itself which has avoided the mistake it made last year of wildly inaccurate predictions of the number of seats it would win.

The results are mixed, with some encouraging signs and some warnings for the future. They got a lot of strong set of second places in Thurrock and their vote showed no signs of being damaged by the supposed 'split' in the party last December.

Since there's only room for one fascist party in Britain, and the BNP have the media profile and name recognition in a lot of areas, it's been business as usual for Griffin's lot and an abrupt decline into obscurity for the 'Voice of (Spare) Change'.

That said, in a lot of areas where the BNP have previously been strong, such as Burnley, Sandwell and Dudley, their vote has declined three years in a row. They're not invincible.

The fact that their modest gains, coupled with defeat in several seats they were defending, have co-incided with the worst results for the Labour Party in 40 years is significant. With the Labour Party in a state of collapse across much of the country and having lost hundreds of council seats, the BNP should have done a lot better.

Since the BNP has tried to recreate itself almost as an external pressure group on the Labour Party, calling on people to vote BNP purely because it is a protest against the mainstream political parties and will result in the government giving local areas more funding, it is important they have failed to capitalise on this.

In London the results have been mixed as well. While it is a step forward for them that Richard Barnbrook won a seat on the Greater London Assembly it was a close run thing, with the BNP winning the seat by 0.3% of the vote when they had expected to win two or three assembly seats. This is an increase of 0.6% on their previous result, not a lot to show for four years campaigning which included the victories in Barking and Dagenham.

Furthermore, their vote in their share of the vote in the Mayoral vote actually decreased during the same period, from 3% to 2.8%.

What was surprising in London was the strong showing of the near moribund National Front who won thousands of votes in the constituencies they were standing in, despite being a party of unreconstructed neo-Nazis. This is the complete opposite of the numbers they've been able to put out on the streets recently, with 17 showing up for a march in South London a couple of weeks ago, so the NF have put in zero effort to achieve this result.

In Cumbria, the results of the local elections were less ambiguous, the BNP performance was disappointing, well it was encouraging for us.

I've stuck up a full analysis of the local results on the Maryport Against Racism site so there's no need to repeat that here, except to say that results must have been very disappointing to an organisation that promised they were going to win council seats this time round.

In Carlisle, a huge BNP campaign involving national mobilisations and lots of news coverage has achieved little noticeable result with the BNP vote being roughly the same as last year, even dropping in some wards.

The BNP branch in Barrow is older than the one in Carlisle but had been noticeably less successful.

I would attribute this to the presence of the Socialist People's Party, a group which originated when four Labour councillors were kicked out for opposing cuts in housing benefits in the mid-1990's. The BNP stood against them this year having long focused on attacking the group, they tried to claim that one of their councillors was illegally holding office because he was born in Iran, and were humiliated at the result as the socialists won all three seats in the ward.

In contrast, after a promising start the socialist left in Carlisle has largely collapsed. In 2000 the Socialist Party stood in their first election in the city and got an impressive 24.5% of the vote, 305 votes. Since the group collapsed in Carlisle for a variety of reasons shortly afterwards there has been nothing since. Instead, the BNP have moved in to fill the vacuum left by rising hostility to mainstream politics.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the rise of the BNP is punishment for the continued failures of the left.

While last year's results were a disaster and this year's results a disappointment it remains the case that the BNP can win respectable results across the country.

I said at this time last year, there's no need to be complacent. We've got the European elections coming up next year and they're contested on proportional representation with 5% of the vote in massive constituencies needed to win a seat in the European Parliament.

In 2004 Nick Griffin missed out on a seat for the Northwest constituency primarily because their vote in Cumbria was so much lower than elsewhere. They won't make the same mistake again and will push hard to get the vote out in Cumbria.

When it comes to anti-fascism, there are no prizes for coming second.