Why the BNP thrives

The racist British National Party is doing better than it has in ages. If you write that off merely to racism among a certain segment of the UK population, you'll make a mistake. A committed Tory voter I talked politics with this summer while in England despaired that the mainstream parties had become so compromised by political correctness that it fell to the BNP to defend commonsense English traditions, such as Christmas celebrations. Understand, this voter wasn't expressing sympathy for the BNP, but rather saying, in anger and frustration, how did the responsible political parties create a space for these people to thrive?

When I was in England this summer, the BNP won two seats in the European Parliament, setting off a round of head-slapping and garment-rending in the newspapers. Interestingly, polls showed that the BNP took most of its support not from disaffected Conservatives, but from angry Labour voters. Writing in the Telegraph, James Forsyth dissects the problem all the mainstream British parties have with BNP leader Nick Griffin, who caused a collective coronary among the chattering classes by appearing on the BBC's Question Time the other night. Here's Forsyth:

The agonising of the parties over who to put up against Griffin suggests that they know they have trouble reaching his target audience: the people forgotten by all three main parties; the people for whom a globalised knowledge economy is a threat, not an opportunity. There are too few MPs like Jon Cruddas, politicians who understand these people and their concerns. If more of the politico-media elite had listened when Cruddas warned years ago of the growing sense of alienation among sections of the old white working class then we might not be in this situation now.

More:

The Government's inability to explain itself on immigration was apparent when Jack Straw was asked about the subject. His answer was so convoluted that he himself appeared to lose the thread half-way through. It is tempting to say, as a member of the audience did, that the rise of the BNP is a direct result of Labour's immigration policy. Certainly, the spikes in immigration have strained services and depressed wages. But immigration alone is not the issue that is driving support for the BNP. Those in the frontline of the political fight against it on both the Left and the Right say that identity is as important as immigration, if not more so. The sense that communities are changing beyond recognition, that no one is standing up for what Griffin calls "the indigenous people", is what really offers the BNP an opening.

Sitting in affluent London - one of the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith cities in the world - it is tempting to dismiss these concerns as small-minded. But to do so would be to play right into Griffin's hands. Immigration without integration is unsustainable and a recipe for the balkanisation of society. There is nothing racist about believing that immigrants should learn English, that everyone who has a vote should know how that right was won, and that sealed ghettoes are unhealthy. But identity politics and multi-culturalism have so distorted our thinking that the Government is, as Andrew Gilligan reveals in this newspaper today, handing out grants to an organisation run by members of Hizb ut Tahrir, a group that wants to replace our parliamentary democracy with a theocratic dictatorship.

Follow that link. The British government gave over 100,000 pounds of British taxpayer dollars to a group of revolutionary Islamist radicals for the sake of educating their British children. Good grief. And people wonder why angry Britons consider voting for the BNP. As Forsyth concludes:

The Griffin-led BNP won't become a serious political player. Griffin is too unattractive and his extremist statements too well documented for him to successfully reinvent himself. But if the political parties continue to forget or write off sections of the electorate then someone else, more plausible and with less baggage, will come along and seriously advance the BNP's vile agenda.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that there's a danger in romanticizing the put-upon lower classes, who likely face the temptation to blame their own self-caused degradation on minorities. Theodore Dalrymple, the British physician and social critic, traces the society-wide decline in British values in this essay. Excerpt:

Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm. The same belief seems universal among those who spend hours at soccer games screaming abuse and making threatening gestures (whose meaning many would put into practice, were those events not policed in military fashion).

Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Further, once self-control becomes neither second nature nor a desired goal, but rather a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink. The little town where I now live when in England transforms by night. By day, it is delightful; I live in a Queen Anne house that abuts a charming Elizabethan cottage near church grounds that look as if they materialized from an Anthony Trollope novel. By night, however, the average age of the person on the street drops from 60 to 20, with few older people venturing out. Charm and delight vanish. Not long ago, the neighborhood awoke to the sound of a young man nearly kicked to death by other young men, all of whom had spilled forth from a pub at 2 am. The driver of a local car service, who does only prearranged pickups, tells me that it is now normal (in the statistical sense) for young women to emerge from the bars and try to entice him to drive them home by baring their breasts, even pushing them against his windows if for some reason he has to stop in town.

I laughed when hearing this, but in essence it is not funny. The driver was talking not about an isolated transgressor of customs but about a whole manner of cultural comportment. By no means coincidentally, the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call "a good time." They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence. In one Greek resort, 12 young British women were arrested recently after indulging in "an outdoor oral sex competition."

Serious question: do the native working and lower middle classes in Spain, France, Italy and Germany exhibit the same kind of degrading behavior? One never hears about this kind of thing in those countries. Is that simply a fact of lack of reportage in the English-language press, or are those countries' societies different?

UPDATE: There has been a jaw-dropping revelation by a former Labour adviser. Excerpt:

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.

Thank Tony Blair for the rise of the BNP?