Anti-politics is rife – and the BNP is lurking

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

In the political equivalent of the Generation Game conveyor belt the media has been feasting on itemised breakdown of MPs’ expenses. A flat screen TV. A Kit-Kat. An elephant lamp. A packet of Tampax. An Aga cooker. A hanging basket. A lemon. A £300,000 profit on a flat sale. Now, how many do you remember? You can almost hear Bruce Forsyth or Larry Grayson – though Jim Davidson’s voice seems to have been erased from my mind for some reason – and a whooping audience rattle off the luxurious items.Great material for satire but beyond that, there is something about this that really agitates voters. The bigger hit will be Labour’s to bear. There is still kind of an assumption that Tories are on the make but Labour was supposed to be new. It was supposed to be different – the People’s Party. Labour has more seats and it is incumbents who will find the going tougher.

The message I’ve heard on the doorstep – and it is most definitely being raised – is that people know that it’s all parties but it leaves them with a sense of deep disappointment. Recent polling data backs this up. Nobody has shouted at me, called me corrupt, they’ve just looked at me like a parent who wants to be angry that you’ve been bunking off school but what’s the point? They are sad that you’ve done something that you know is not right. And you do know.

Just by way of experiment, I thought that I’d try out the ‘within the rules’ line. That very quickly shifted the response from disappointment to anger. It was a line I only tried once for experimental purposes. There is no point blaming the media for this. That will elicit even less sympathy.

Actually, when facing voters directly the best thing is to hold up your hands, take it on the chin but equally make the point that despite their frustration there is a consequence to the ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality. The apologies on Monday from both main party leaders begin to turn things but only slowly. It is not enough to unpick a wave of anti-political feeling – one that is likely to shift support to fringe, non-mainstream parties, or dissuade people from voting. It could have a disastrous outcome. The issue here is not the fate of any one party. It is the possibility that the BNP win a seat in the European Parliament on June 4th.

There are many people who are concerned about immigration. The Labour Party has to be robust in talking through immigration as an issue. When there is time to talk through the issues and emphasise that migrants make an enormous contribution – to public services, British life, the economy, and to the exchequer – most people take the arguments on board. Why? Because actually the immigration debate, it would seem, is not about a sudden surge in racial resentment. It is in large part about competition for scarce resources – exacerbated in difficult economic times.

Many people I have met have articulated their support for the Gurkhas. At first, the thought crossed my mind that the issue may transform attitudes to migrants. Instead, it is clear that there is a distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ migrants, i.e. those who they consider are ‘not making a contribution’, in the minds of many people. The Gurkhas fall in the first category in this analysis.

Tied into this is the notion of ‘fair play’ which bears a striking resemblance to the press and neo-liberal fuelled focus on ‘dole scroungers’ in the 1980s. There is just no getting away from the fact that many people believe that there are those who are ‘deserving’ and those who are not – rightly or wrongly. With painstaking effort the ‘deserving’ category can be widened in people’s minds but the dichotomy is never quite expunged.

Strangely and reassuringly, this notion of ‘fair play’ can be aimed straight at the BNP’s temple. When told that the BNP do not believe that you can be black or Asian and British people are appalled. The Gurkhas are Asian after all. No matter how concerned about immigration someone is, it seems that this vile and callous BNP racial purism is offensive to people’s experience and their notions of ‘fair play.’ Very quickly, the BNP comes to be seen as anti-British.

Others who would be unlikely to vote BNP just do not realise the threat that the BNP poses. Economic insecurity, an anti-political mood, and BNP propagation combine to swell the threat. When most people realise this, and they understand that this is not a case of crying wolf, their shorter term concerns or any anti-political mood are put to one side.

The problem is that all this takes enormous time, skill, and effort to communicate. People’s concerns have to be listened to. They have to be talked to in a way that sensitively and carefully shifts any perceptions they have that aren’t supported by the evidence. The reality of the BNP, whatever its soft campaigning focus may say, then needs to be explained in honest but dispassionate terms. The BBC’s naivety doesn’t help in these discussions. One news report yesterday described the BNP as a party committed to ‘ending immigration and taking Britain out of the EU’; an intriguing use of euphemism falling way short of the BBC’s remit to serve the entire British public. Presumably, the Ku Klux Klan was merely a ‘Christian group committed to the values of the American Deep South’?

This anti-political mood can’t be allowed to turn into a politics of hatred and division like weeds poking up between paving slabs as the storm subsides. The consequence of losing this political Generation Game is not going home empty handed; it’s finding peddlers of hate tearing communities apart. Party activists, trade unionists, community groups, church, mosque, synagogue and temple goers all have a job to do over the next few weeks. Let’s get to it.