Over the last two decades, extreme right parties in many West European countries
have made electoral inroads that were once unthinkable. Perhaps most notably, extremist
parties have served in governments in Italy and Austria, and Jean Marie Le Pen, the
leader of the French National Front, the archetype of the new European far right, finished
in second place in France’s 2002 presidential election. While an ideologically
heterogeneous group, these new extreme right parties share exclusionist visions of
national citizenship and hostility to economic migrants, particularly toward those from
Islamic societies. The mass appeal of these parties has grown at a time when the
traditional sovereignty of the nation-state has been threatened by an expanding European
Union, the reliance on foreign labor has visibly transformed relatively homogenous
populations, and unemployment rates have remained persistently high.
Until recently, however, Britain has seemed impervious to the continental trend.
Just as fascism never gained the same currency in Britain that it did in much of Europe,
the major movements of the British extreme right, the National Front (NF) in the 1970s
and the British National Party (BNP) currently, have had no success in electoral politics
at the national level. Nonetheless, the BNP has emerged as an increasingly viable force
in local elections in many parts of England in recent years, even winning seats on a few
local councils. While slight compared to that of their ideological counterparts on the
continent, this newfound electoral success has attracted considerable attention in the
national press and in the leadership ranks of the major political parties. It has at least
raised the possibility that the BNP’s xenophobic message is gaining popular legitimacy.
This paper is concerned with the BNP’s electoral success as an indicator of local
hostility to the non-white population groups in England. The party primarily has sought
to appeal to whites living in deprived urban areas in England who feel abandoned by the
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Convention