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news
 27th July 2007
Analysis of the 3rd May 2007 Elections
The May 3 elections confirmed the ongoing growth of the British National Party (BNP) over the past seven years.
In England it consolidated its presence in local councils, adding one net seat. It entered this election with 49 seats.
After the elections it held a total of 50 seats across 18 councils (one BNP councillor Mark Leat has subsequently resigned from the BNP and become an independent, leaving the BNP with 49 councillors). It also made inroads into new areas. This year its advance in the local council elections was at a slower rate than last year; its vote fell by an average of 3.5% in the wards it also contested in 2006. In the Welsh Assembly elections the BNP vote increased ten fold; it polled just short of gaining a regional seat on the Assembly, missing gaining a seat by 0.6% of the electorate (less than 3000 votes).
In the local council elections in England and Scotland the BNP polled 292,911 votes, (a 97-fold increase since 2000) having fielded 744 candidates — double the number it stood last year. This reflects its growing apparatus and activist base, which is spreading geographically, enabling it to mobilise significant new voter bases. The total vote and number of seats contested are both record highs for a fascist organisation in local elections. The BNP expanded its electoral support into the new council areas in which it stood and also achieved significant new votes across regional areas — most notably in Wales where it stood in two of the five regions for the first time, polling over 5% of the vote. It stood full slates for the first time in the regional list sections for the Scottish and Welsh devolved government elections.
This year’s reduced pace of BNP advance needs to be understood in the context of the different tone to the pre-election political climate. The extent to which the BNP’s racist messages are echoed and reinforced in the media impacts on its vote. Also the degree to which it gains uncritical platforms in the media affects whether it is perceived as a legitimate political party. Both of these aspects of the political climate were less advantageous to the BNP this year compared with last year. Then, the month preceding the election saw a racist frenzy of daily headlines calling for the deportation of foreign national prisoners who had completed sentences, which was a gift to the BNP. This year, the racist tabloid campaigns were not as central to the election. The fascist organisation also received less sympathetic promotion by the media.
The 2007 results confirm that the most effective strategy to date for reversing the BNP’s advance has been the one deployed in Oldham, which has seen the BNP’s most dramatic reverse over the same period it has been growing around the rest of the country. The strategy used in Oldham challenged the BNP’s racism head on, building a broad coalition to mobilise the anti-fascist vote.
Next year the BNP will target the London Assembly with the aim of taking a seat, as well as targeting the local elections in England and Wales. In 2009 it will contest the European parliamentary elections. Broad based campaigning using the most effective strategy must be expanded to meet these challenges. Europe demonstrates that once fascist parties break onto the national stage, it is difficult to reverse this. Therefore the priority is to stop such an advance in the first place.
Click here to download the election analysis paper in full.
Click here to download the large print version.
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