Labour & UKIP Voters Turn to the BNP in Kent By-Election

Friday, February 20, 2009

Labour & UKIP Voters Turn to the BNP in Kent By-Election

Iain Dale 10:51 AM

Swanley St Mary’s, Sevenoaks District Council
BNP - 41% (+41)
Lab - 34% (-21)
Con - 25% (-)

BNP gain from Lab

(UKIP did not stand, having previously secured 20%)

I hesitated to even write about this, but for the BNP to secure a seat in a local council by-election in Kent is deeply worrying. I drive past Swanley each time I drive to London - it's just off the M25 at the M20 junction. I know nothing about the local politics, but it's not exactly an area I would have put in my Top Ten BNP winnable seats.

One interesting thing is that it's quite clear from the statistics that the whole BNP vote came from UKIP and the Labour Party. It used to be the case that the Liberals gained from the "plague on all your houses" vote. If the BNP manages to get itself into that position for the Euro elections, we should all be very worried. In the last Euro elections, UKIP managed to do that. Will they this time? I have my doubts.

UPDATE: Having thought about this a little more, it's clear that in areas like this the BNP is managing to portray itself as the only party on the side of local residents. The three main parties are failing. In my interview with David Cameron I asked him about how best to take on the BNP...

I think the first thing to do is recognise that it is an excrescence rather than a party. Don't ever run towards it, but the way to defeat it is to campaign actively on the ground. Pavement politics. People turn to extreme parties if they think they have been forgotten by the mainstream parties. That doesn't mean running towards issues they are campaigning on, it means running towards the people that they are talking to and showing you are listening to their concerns, taking up their issues and working for them. You have to show that no part of the country, no part of your constituency, no ward, that no housing estate is forgotten. That's the key thing. Eric Pickles is an expert on this and has helped teach me this lesson.

Well the local Conservative Party, and indeed the national Conservative Party, has failed to do that here. I'm having a coffee with Eric Pickles next week. I'm going to ask him what the Party intends to do about areas like Swanley and take them back from the far left extremists of the BNP.

UPDATE: In the comments, Labour apologist David Boothroyd writes...

Furthermore, parties do not own the voters. There is no sense in which, if a previously Labour voter decides to vote BNP, the Labour Party is to blame for the BNP gaining a vote. That's a ludicrous way of looking at politics and deserves to be thoroughly ridiculed.

It's that complacent attitude which is helping the BNP gain votes. Of course no party "owns" voters, but Labour has traditionally appeared to think it did indeed "own" the white working classes. It also did bugger all for them. It's no coincidence that Labour controls the councils on virtually every poverty stricken council estate in the country. Perhaps if they did something about them, voters who lived on them might not be turning towards the BNP.