@Brett, Agree with that too except I’m not sure if giving them more air time will see their novelty wear off and peter out as a political force. If the mainstream parties fail to address the real social and economic problems that the BNP have capitalized on, I can only see them getting more popular unless the mainstream actually co-opt some of their policies.

If there are attempts to somehow ‘muzzle’ them then this can end up working in their favour by actually increasing their popularity. I tend to think that, given time and enough media air space, they will eventually peter out as a political force. This is what happened with Pauline Hansen a decade ago in Australia. She pedalled a similar brand of muck as the BNP leader.

I just think that the novelty factor of a party like the BNP should wear off after a they have made their impact. They seem to be at the beginning of that impact at the moment and it could do a plenty of social damage and last for some years.

My genuine concern is that the BNP could soon take the place of the Lib-Dems as the third biggest party in the UK. The Lib-Dems have continued to be completely uninspiring since Charles Kennedy finished as their leader and are likely to start to lose their vote share sharply.

The best way to deal with the BNP is for people outside party politics to debate their policies, because their policies are rubbish. Freedom of speech (which is only somewhat ‘free’ in the UK) can work for the BNP but sane people have to make it work against them.

Brett Hetherington

By the way a pint would be nice if the government hadn’t manage to close down all the decent boozers through the smoking ban. I’ve got a few things to say about that. Only joking.

@”Damning the state is dangerous” – Three things on that. One is that dissent of any powerful institution is, and always has been, necessary to achieve progress. Preferably dissent with action.

Two is that you seem to have the impression that I’m against all forms of government. I’m not because, unlike a corporation, it’s the one powerful institution we’ve got that can be democratically reformed. That is, if our democracy was functioning correctly but it’s not due to the influence of big business. What I’m against is the huge influence of private power that now controls much of the government and the politicians that have embraced that. That said, I’m not in favor of building up an all powerful state – quite the contrary.

Thirdly, the state is a huge apparatus and you and Tom are both right that tarring all departments of it with the same brush is unfair. I didn’t mean to imply that and of course, working for a government development agency is probably doing more good than working for Esso or Shell. What I meant was that working for the government or corporate world isn’t much different in the upper echelons of those organizations. Nowhere is this more crudely illustrated than in the USA where it seems there is a revolving door between the boardroom of companies such as Goldman Sachs and the White House.

“@When was the last time you publicly campaigned on an issue or wrote to your MP.” I’ve afraid I’ve never done either although not living in the UK, I obviously don’t have an MP at the moment. The most I’ve ever done is write articles about specific environmental, social and political issues some of which can be found on this website. And of course, try and highlight certain issues and encourage debate with this blog. It’s a pretty lame effort to say the least and not enough and I’ll be the first to admit that. I agree that a person should be judged on their actions not their words and there’s a lot of bloggers out there that just moan. However, I’d like to think that this blog doesn’t fall into that category and tries to encourage more constructive moaning If it helps create a debate that makes both reader and writer think a little bit more about an issue, that’s surely no bad thing. Please don’t stop reading this blog anyway as it may go out of business if so. Good luck with the house hunt by the way.

@Tom: “The BNP claimed to oppose the Iraq war because they think it’ll win them a few votes. Don’t confuse their opportunism with some sort of ‘coming together’ of the left and right, because that is not happening.” I’m not sure where I came across as confused on this point when I said, “In the case of Griffin, he was clearly using Iraq to score political points because later in show, he supported Israel’s right to destroy Palestinians!”. Just to reiterate again, I’m in total agreement that Griffin was an opportunist on this. I do think that other sections of the more moderate left and right have come together on certain points though. The environment is one example in the USA where politicians on the left and even on the right were aghast at Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto protocol.

@”Thatcher would have gone much further than Blair if she thought she could get away with it. Her social policy was far more divisive and rightist than Blair’s was (whatever you think of him, this is undeniably a fact).” We can only theorize about the first point but the differences between his and her economic policy were marginal. If Blair thought Thatcher had gone too far to the right, why didn’t he roll-back a lot of the damage she’d done? He embraced the foundations of Thatcherism. John Kampfner summed it up very nicely in The Telegraph:

“Blair’s programme for the 1997 election confirmed all Mrs Thatcher’s free-market reforms of a deregulated, non-planned, largely privatised economy with a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and local authorities, while publicly disowning Left-wing shibboleths such as redistribution….Blair and Brown let it be known that Labour had become “the party of business”. They had dumped “tax and spend” policies forever. They were seemingly all Thatcherites now.

Blair trimmed back some of her employment legislation, but always by stealth. He softened some of her economic changes, with more measures to encourage the unemployed into work, and to provide more help for those in need. Perhaps most importantly in this regard, he introduced the minimum wage, in the teeth of initial Tory and business opposition.

Yet all the way through, he never once challenged the basic tenets of Thatcherism – private ownership was preferable to the state, the unions should be kept in check and profits were good.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/themargaretthatcheryears/1895878/Margaret-Thatcher-inspiration-to-New-Labour.html

Labour therefore spent little time “sorting out a country that had been left on its knees by the selfish greed-is-good Tories” as you say. On the contrary, they welcomed it with open arms.

The difference between a Cameron Conservative government and Brown Labour one are so marginal they’re barely worth debating. It’s big business that runs the show now more than ever which is why whoever is in power is largely irrelevant. This is the most pressing issue facing democracy rather than which party is in charge. “Politics is the shadow cast over society by big business” as John Dewey famously said.