The aftermath of last week's European Election campaign in the UK is dominated by one story - the two seats won by the BNP in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber regions.
What has followed the announcement of the results on Sunday is a huge outpouring of media comment, mostly reactive panic. The headline message being given out is that the BNP are growing in organisation, sophistication and support.
However, is this maelstrom potentially doing more harm than good? The BNP have never had so much publicity, and for a small party with a virtually non-existant marketing budget the idea that any news is good news must surely hold some credence. To my mind the danger is that by inviting BNP representatives on to TV news or the Today programme is that gives them not only a chance to raise their profile, not only that it gives them 5 minutes to atempt to explain and justify their hatred to potential converts but that it gives them the airs of a normal acceptable political party.
I'm sure that the news editors are well meaning in their attempts to shine a light on the BNP's true nature but unfortunately there also seems to be an aspect of masochism involved too. After all, how fun is it for news interviewers at al superior and as moral authority, to bring the BNP on like pigs to the slaughter, to run rings around them and mock them as ignorant fools. I'll answer that, it's pretty fun. The only trouble is that the interviewers are so keen to destroy the BNP's credibility that they pounce on Andrew Brons or Nick Griffin with question 2 before they're barely 4 words into answering question 1. It sometimes feels like children taunting the slow-witted in the playground and it frustrates me, because I'm convinced that if only the interviewer was to let the BNP member continue to talk they'd soon end up tying themselves in knots and jumping straight through the huge holes in their arguments.
The key concern of the political mainstream is whether this result means that the BNP are any more of a political force now than they have been in the past. A quick look at the statistics and we see a slightly more positive story to the one which has dominated the news and one which has been obscured by some of the more dramatic press coverage. Yes, the BNP won two new seats but the data suggests that rather than being the result of a huge increase in support for the party their achievements have very little connection to their own efforts. Their overall vote total increased by 1.4% (up from 4.9% in the 2005 elections) but their share of the vote in the two regions in which they won parliamentary seats actually fell. With Labour polling 6.8% of the total vote lower than in 2005 and with voter turnout at a terribly low 34% (reports suggest that many of Labour's heartland simply failed to vote) it appears that these two aspects were far greater causes of the far-rights gain of the two seats. Their percentage take of the total vote and therfore the number of seats won increased not because they attracted a large number of new followers but because their number of supporters who turned out to vote remained much the same but those of other parties was lower then last time. Things in the UK then, for now are not as depressing as they are in the Netherlands where Geert Wilders' (banned from entering the UK) Freedom Party achieved second place in the European elections with 17% of the total Dutch vote.
Certainly we must remain vigilant and not dismiss the threat posed by the BNP but we must also avoid hyperbole and sensationalism. One hopes that the BNP remains a small and essentially impotent political organisation. We need to avoid complacency and for there to be careful, considered measures taken to address the concerns of those who voted for them. However, trying to avoid overplaying their significance, giving them a greater position in the news-cycle then their size merits and not treating them as a party comparable to those of the mainstream would be a good starting point.
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