Labour waking up to BNP threat

Recent developments suggest that the Labour Party is starting to realise the terrible truth

about the BNP – that the interlopers represent a threat to its very existence as a party of

government. But its response shows that it still hasn’t fully grasped the situation. If

Labour can only move within the parameters of the neoliberal consensus it has helped to

build then it will be unable to halt its own decline.

According to Communities and Local Government Minister John Denham’s statement

last week BBC , ‘Labour battles the BNP on class and race’ , the government is

attempting to ‘re-open lines of communication with a group of people that would once

have been seen as its core constituency – the “white working class”.’

In something of a volte-face, Denham has said that being black or Asian in the UK no

longer means you will be automatically disadvantaged – and that the needs of white

working class communities must also be addressed.

‘If the cause of disadvantage is social class, we will promote opportunity. And if the

cause is a combination of racism and social class we will tackle both together.’

As part of these new measures the government has launched a £12m fund to fight ‘far

right extremism’ in 130 deprived areas around the country.

Denham claims the new measures aren’t just about combating the BNP: ‘We would be

doing what I am doing today if the BNP didn’t exist.’

Observers will draw their own conclusions but in one way he’s right. The communities

fund is not just aimed at the BNP. The IWCA – and presumably any credible party

attempting to organise in working class areas – is also in the government’s sights.

Blackbird Leys in Oxford, an area represented by IWCA councillors for the last 8 years,

is one of the targeted areas set to receive £50,000 of special funding to counter ‘political

extremism and ‘those who would divide our communities’ (Oxford Mail , ‘Leys could be

vulnerable to political extremism, reckons Government’).

When you consider that Blackbird Leys is a well-integrated estate with few racial

tensions, the communities fund starts to look more and more like a blatant party-

political move. A move designed to quash opposition to New Labour in areas selected

not necessarily because they are vulnerable to ‘political extremism’ but where Labour is

vulnerable.

But will it work? The government’s move away from the dogmatic insistence that social

problems should be looked at through the lens of race rather than class is a welcome

one. This is the beginning of the process by which the government could start to address

the concerns of working class voters who feel they have been abandoned and ignored by

Labour.

But what will ultimately make up the minds of working class voters is not rhetoric but

what actually happens on the ground. The government’s latest measures repeat the

mistakes of its previous multicultural approach. Funding may no longer be targeted

purely on racial grounds but it will still be targeted, quite narrowly it seems.

Set against the burden on taxpayers that will be required to pay for the costs of the

recession – the bank bailouts, quantitative easing and unemployment benefit – targeted

funding can only be a drop in the ocean.

In any case the government should be aware, from research it commissioned, that ‘area-

based funding doesn’t reduce inequality. A paper released by John Denham’s

department concludes that there has been little change in the relative levels of economic

deprivation in the 39 New Deal for Communities areas (which received a total of £2

billion in targeted funding) or comparator areas (Tracking economic deprivation in New

Deal for Communities areas , Kate Wilkinson and Michael Noble, Social Disadvantage

Research Centre, University of Oxford, Department for Communities and Local

Government, January 2010).

A simple calculation, made by the IWCA well over a decade ago, shows that if Labour

loses its working class ‘core’ vote then the middle class voters it has picked up since

Blair became leader in 1994 (in the unlikely event it can hold onto them) will not be

sufficient to keep the party in power.

It’s the corollary of Blair and Brown’s triangulation strategy, borrowed from Clinton’s

Democrats in the US. The thinking went that if the party tacked to the right then its core

voters would have nowhere else to go. However, if working class voters find

somewhere else to go then the strategy becomes untenable and Labour could become

unelectable.

Up till now there’s little evidence that Labour has taken the BNP threat seriously. Apart

from a few isolated voices in the party it seems that, instead, the rise of the far right has

been seen as an excuse to motivate activists and voters alike to keep on supporting

Labour.

The measures announced last week suggest that, with a Tory victory looming, this

thinking is changing. Labour is really waking up to the fact that the BNP could become

a serious competitor for working class votes and, as a result, Labour can no longer

automatically rely on these votes.

However, the party has yet to realise that a neoliberal economic stance and a pro-

working class political stance are mutually exclusive. The only way that Labour can try

to maintain both is by being inconsistent – something voters won’t reward them for in

the long run.

The essence of New Labour is neoliberal and its new policies are too little, too late and

are only a sop to a constituency that it takes for granted almost as matter if principle.

For a real alternative to the neoliberal politics of New Labour and Conservatives alike,

the working class will need to look elsewhere, and we don’t mean to the BNP.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 January 2010 at 3:22 pm and is filed under News.

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3 Responses to “Labour waking up to BNP threat”

1. Robert Says:

25 January 2010 at 7:19 pm

New labour has become a party of control, Hitler would have been proud of it, it

says now it did not state no national flags should be flown but oh yes it did, it

even stated Christmas should be called winter festival, that year in my Town the

shops did not put up Christmas decorations, our Christmas tree had no lights in

the Town center.

Over the last few years Immigrants have poured into my area, they cannot all be

coming here because of persecution, so why. Roumour has it social engineering,

if thats correct then sadly labour will soon go out of power for a life time or

more.

This country I live in is changing and not for the better, Sharia courts are now

set to become legal, we will soon have people calling Muslim to prayers in my

area, you cannot ring the church bells it was stopped by the council but it will be

OK to call to prayer.

people are angry that people who came here to supposed to have better life are

now trying to change this country into where they came from.

I’m basic working class, I have spent a long time in the Labour party, sadly new

labour is not for me, sadly nor is the BNP, but I have to vote for somebody, so i

might as well vote BNP

2. Paul B Says:

26 January 2010 at 9:13 pm

“This is the beginning of the process by which the government could start to

address the concerns of working class voters who feel they have been abandoned

and ignored by Labour” or it could just be a late and desperate attempt to shore

up the core vote before the election.

This feels like New Labour holding its nose and making a late attempt to address

the class it not so secretly despises. Any intervention that had any merit or

deserved to be treated seriously would apologise for creating atomised working

class communities over the last few decades, and the deliberate New Labour

approach of racialising resources and setting different communities within our

class at each others throats.

They might also have something to say about the despair, poverty, fear of crime

and lack of an escape route that they have smuggly presided over for 12 years.

Something brilliantly exposed by the report quoted in the IWCA article.

And Robert, you might want to have a look at the IWCA politics and approach

before you vote BNP. There is a progressive working class alternative if you

want it and you are looking at it.

3. Colin C Says:

26 January 2010 at 10:28 pm

Well Robert, I’m basic working class, and while I’ve never been in the Labour

Party, the BNP aren’t for me either.

The point of the article is that New Labour has based it’s entire programme since

1997 on neo-liberal politics that are aimed at attacking the working class. They

believed that a certain level of working class voter could always be counted on

for support as it had nowhere else to go. At the same time, just like the BNP

they’ve approached most issues through the viewpoint of race, albeit from

different ends of the spectrum.

Only now is it beginning to dawn on them that the BNP pose a real threat to

their vote in working class communities. Of course, it is too late by far for

labour as their only available paradigm is that of neo-liberalism.

Rather than voting BNP, read back through the IWCA’ analysis of Labour and

the BNP to where a real alternative might position itself.