Fighting the BNP means exposing, organising and donating

By David Lammy

Here’s a scary statistic: the BNP’s website gets more traffic than any other political website in the UK. In fact, it attracts more than half of all internet traffic to political party sites, according to the online monitoring firm Hitwise. Last year the BNP’s website had more than seven times as many visitors as the Labour Party, and three times more than the Conservatives.

This is deeply worrying. The idea that people merely use the site as a ‘news alternative’ is nonsense: the BNP is a fascist organisation, and its ‘alternative’ news is based on racist myths and scaremongering designed to whip up hatred.

Ahead of last year’s London elections, I argued in the Mirror – along with many others – that letting the BNP win seat on the Greater London Assembly would be a travesty. There are no neo-fascists on the councils or assemblies of New York, Paris or Berlin. Richard Barnbrook is hopelessly ineffective on the GLA, and serves only to give petty racism a publicly-funded platform.

Now the BNP is fielding candidates across the country in the European elections in June, and, as Jon Cruddas and Nick Lowles have argued, a combination of economic uncertainty and the collapse of UKIP mean that there is a real danger that the party could make an even more troubling breakthrough: claiming to represent us in Europe. A foot through the door in Brussels would give the BNP a financial boost and publicly-funded staff. It would also allow them the opportunity to join with some deeply unwholesome allies – Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini for example – or worse, become an established force within the European Parliament like Le Pen’s Front National in France.

But here’s something heartening. The left’s progressive forces are using the internet in a smarter way to fight back against the BNP. Searchlight’s Hope Not Hate campaign has teamed up with Blue State Digital to use the same online tools which helped to empower the movement that brought Barack Obama to power – not to spread fear like the BNP, but to build a vibrant, grass-roots, bottom-up coalition against racism.

Hope Not Hate is bringing together trade unionists from the different unions and professions – those who have been fighting fascism for decades – and allowing them to share stories and information about local BNP activity. It is using the internet to recruit active volunteers according to their skills and experience, and giving them the tools to recruit others. It is raising funds from small, individual donations like never before. Its email contacts have almost doubled in the last few weeks; in one day last week, some three and a half thousand new activists signed up. And it is using new media to expose the BNP for what they are – racists, fascists and fear mongers.

All this costs money. It’s not enough for us all to passively oppose the BNP: we all need to invest our time, and our money, in keeping the BNP out. I’ve just donated £15 – and I hope every LabourList reader will as well.

And as I have already argued on LabourList, the left is now beginning to see and use the internet not as an end in itself, but as a means to reaching our goals. Online campaigning allows us to galvanise and organise our most committed activists so they can reach out to and build their own networks. Keeping the BNP out of our politics requires a massive campaign to organise, inform and mobilise the huge anti-BNP vote we know is out there. London was too complacent last May. But now we’ve seen what our new tools can achieve. This is a tolerant, progressive country – let’s use every means we can to keep it that way.