I'm going to type out this editorial piece from today's (23/04/2002) Glasgow Herald - but I think it is a very important piece to read and understand. I am, to be frank, quite worried about the rise of the BNP - they got 16% of the vote in Burnley in the General Elections.

Imagine that - a BNP member........

It is dangerous to ignore the attractions of the BNP

Melanie Reid

In nine days, amid the grimy, boarded up streets of Burnley and Oldham, where the Pennine wind flays stray dogs and neglected children alike, the people will go to the polls to vote. At least, a few of them will. The few who see any point in getting out of bed; the few who aren't completely cynical; the few who don't yet feel totally alienated by the system. The big question, of course, in the wake of the extraordinary vote for the far-right Le Pen in France, is how many will vote for the British National Party.

The English local council elections on May 2 will be a litmus test to see if Britain will follow Europe in a shift to the right. In the depressed streets of Burnley, where 13 BNP candidates are standing, there will be none of the Gallic glamour and passion of Le Pen's campaign, and certainly no thunderbolts; but there could well be a stark warning about the failure of multicultural policies, and about the threat of a disenfranchised underclass. We ignore it at our peril.

Right-wing extremism is growing in politics, inextricably linked - as it is all over the world - to isolation, poverty, and disenchantment. Wherever people feel deserted by their governments, they are vulnerable to darker, crankier, more dangerous currents.

In the North of England old social structures, just like the bricks and mortar of the mills, are gone forever, or remain only as crumbling relics. What was a traditional working-class Labour stronghold, held together by work and a shared identity - the kind of community romanticised and totemicised by Coronation Street - is now fragmented, powerless, jobless, abandoned and embittered.

How easy it is, in these circumstances, to resent the incomers, the Asian immigrants who seem to receive positive discrimination, who have taken over white homes, jobs, and the mantle of prosperity.

No wonder, if you're poor, white, uneducated, and chronically disaffected, it doesn't seem fair. It isn't fair, and few but the BNP dare express how unfair. As David Blunkett, the home secretary, bluntly put it, this is a world where operates "a kind of reverse racism that if you're white and middle class you can't say or do anything that might upset someone who's black and Asian".

The happy ideal of multiculturalism is easy when you are a well-off liberal, able to afford to live where you want, choose your neighbours, and make the right kind of mouth music at dinner parties. The affluent don't know what it is like to feel threatened and powerless; don't understand what it means to see immigrants get preferential treatment to lift them out of poverty.

For the working-class whites marooned in the slums of Burnley and Oldham, this is daily reality. How easy it is to feel that New Labour, with its douce middle-class face and its politically correct semantics, has no relevance any more. What does Tony Blair know of the working man? How easy it is, instead, to be seduced by the friendly men in suits from the BNP, who come to the door and speak the right language; who talk not of racial hatred or repatriation, but old-style community building, or giving you your pride back.

"Vote British National Party - People Like You" say the bright posters presently plastered in windows along the residential streets of Burnley - posters that far outnumber ones for the Labour Party. It is a psychologically clever message: not about white supremacy, but about the preservation of white cultural identity. The BNP offers a new form of belonging, a place of common identity for isolated, deprived, angry people. Come and join us, we're like you. We'll be here for you when everyone else has forgotten you.

The black magazine, Untold, carries an article this month by Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, offending many who think far-right politicians should be starved of publicity. The magazine, however, commented: "In many ways the BNP's populist argument, with its policies of nostalgia for non-alienating cultural practices, is essentially inwards, defensive and isolationist, but raises themes which are subtly beginning to infiltrate the broader national discussion."

Thus we should acknowledge the BNP's skills. Griffin is a Cambridge-educated, media-savvy man who is leading his political campaign from the grass roots, building on the colour prejudices which exist below the skin of many people, carefully playing on Britain's identity crisis. His party's power may be limited in geographical reach, but May 2 will tell us whether it has been punching its weight. Even his opponents believe his support is above 20%. In the general election, he polled 16% and came third.

Is he playing a shrewd game, concealing his neo-Nazi links? You bet. Shouldn't Labour be able to rescue "their" electorate from such evil? Of course. Griffin is, however, more than equal at spinning. Last year Panorama showed a tape of him telling a Ku Klux Klan rally in Texas: "The BNP isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them, and that means basically to use saleable words, as I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them."

Whatever happens in Oldham and Burnley on election night, the BNP will not go away. The rise of the far right is a European trend. We may face BNP candidates standing in elections in Scotland next year. Perhaps less through good planning than good luck, this country has not had race problems on the English scale. The natives of Sighthill, Glasgow, forced to share their home with many asylum seekers, have on the whole behaved with a very Scottish mixture of stoicism, apathy, and fairness.

Long term, the only way to counter the far right is by building common ground. The Cantle report into last summer's race riots in Northern England recommended that immigrants should take an oath of allegiance or citizenship and make a commitment to learning English. But to swear citizenship you must first define it. How, with devolved government in Scotland and Wales, can there ever be a common shared ideal? How to force young, white working-class males, who feel abandoned by everything and everyone, to attend the citizenship classes they need just as much as ethnic minorities?

Ted Cantle was shocked by the polarisation he found between white and immigrant communities. He said communities existed on the basis of parallel lives, never touching or overlapping. His report insisted that multiculturalism, developed as a way of helping ethnic minorities feel at home, had increased polarisation by dividing communities.

The Labour government has so far failed to tackle this; to build a new sense of Britishness to keep out the far right. There is a vacuum, which dark forces want to fill. Britain's old sense of national identity has been weakened and confused, not just by multiculturalism, but by the decline of church and state and family, and the growth of self-doubt. Old certainties have gone; nothing has taken their place.

The first thing to address is the very real attraction of the BNP. Cosy liberals who really don't like to think about a nasty thing like neo-Nazism, or admit it exists on their planet, should take their blinkers off. Political correctness, positive discrimination, and failure to acknowledge reverse racism are all helpful weapons for the BNP: a stifling curtain of tweeness and denial.

What will work is honesty, fairness, and a desire to make fine words like "social inclusion" really mean something; and work for all members of the community, black or white. Then there are those concepts of freedom, security, identity, and democracy. But we have, of course, heard those somewhere before. . .