| Challenging Extremism: What's fuelling the rise of the far right? |
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Fabian New Year Conference 2010 Saturday 16th January, 2pm-3.30pm “The BNP is not simply a reincarnation of the 1970s National Front,” argued University of Manchester lecturer Dr. Matthew Goodwin at the “Challenging Extremism” panel discussion at the Fabian New Year Conference. The panel discussed what was fuelling increased support for far right parties, whether that was the fault of mainstream political parties and how we can most effectively campaign against the BNP.“When we look at its voters; BNP voters are older, they’re more likely to be in the north and they’re more dissatisfied than National Front voters in the 1970s were with the political system,” explained Goodwin. “The implication of that is that it’s going to be much more difficult to bring them back into fold of mainstream politics.” However, Rushanara Ali, Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow disagreed. She believed that a political re-engagement with BNP voters was still possible, but that it had to be broached at grassroots level. “People feel powerless, people who come from white working class backgrounds, who have sometimes ended up going further right, do feel that their voices are not heard, that the political system and the political parties do not engage them in the way that they have traditionally done so and they have not been able to bring in a generation of people of working class background into national and local politics in the way that the Labour Party used to, for instance, through the trade union movements. So we need to find ways of spotting talent and bringing members of those communities into the mainstream political process,” she said. Ali explained that she had developed a project to build leadership skills among a generation of young people by allowing them access to the political world, giving them support and nurturing their desire for political representation for the working classes. “I think we need to do a mix of practical work by empowering a younger generation of people to take on those problems and address them,” explained Ali, “And also to take on positions of power in national politics so they don’t feel that politics is now the bastion of the middle classes.” Mark Rusling, author of the Young Fabians’ “Stopping the Far Right” pamphlet, warned that a focus on the BNP through the prism of white working class demographics was offensive. “I think this idea of a ‘core vote’ strategy is actually deeply offensive to people from the working class, and the idea that we should just view the white working class through the lens of the BNP is massively offensive,” he argued. He warned that housing was the key area in which the BNP had been able to manipulate current class divisions, by blaming a lack of affordable council housing for white working class families on immigrants. Finally, Sam Tarry, campaigner for Hope Not Hate, commented that the sustained support for the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham over seven years discredited notions that the BNP represented a ‘protest vote’ from people disillusioned with the main political parties. His suggestion for combating the far right was to use what he termed a “community organising model” in order to make anti-BNP campaigns relevant to local people. “One of the things we've learned is that political parties are not the best people to convey messages about what having a BNP councillor actually means for you. It's about breaking it down to the lowest level, so that the people that pass on those messages are trusted people within those communities. The minute a politician rocks up and starts preaching about the dangers of the BNP, that has far less efficacy than someone who's trusted by people in that community to pass on that message,” he concluded. Listen to the podcast here. |
