More racist than thou: Tory quits to stand for BNP

Article published: Sunday, May 2nd 2010

However much David Cameron tries to outdo the other two leaders on the telly – proudly proclaiming that he’s the one  to kick out the most ‘illegals’ – it seems he’s just never going to be racist enough for some Tories. Andy Lockhart reflects on mainstream parties’ complicity in the rise of the far-right.

Sheila Spink recently left the Conservatives to join the British National Party, and is standing in the national election on May 6 in Bolton South East. She’s also canvassing to become a councillor in Stockport, a ward just down the road from where her husband, Conservative candidate Alex Raisbeck, is also hoping to win a seat.

“I don’t think they will do what is necessary to be done in this country. I don’t think they are tackling the big problem,” Spink said as she announced her decision. “The Tories are not up to the job, particularly on immigration. There’s no mention of immigration at all and they are just not dealing with that problem.”

The Conservatives are a little embarrassed about this. It’s too late for them to unilaterally recall Mr Raisbeck from his candidacy. He has also been campaigning for the Party’s Stockport parliamentary hopeful Stephen Holland. One Tory insider told the Manchester Evening News: “We are going to get slaughtered about this. We never realised she’d joined the BNP. He’s [Raisbeck] got some explaining to do…It’s come as a total and utter shock.”

Perhaps Raisbeck didn’t get the memo about the Tories being all fluffy and nice these days, personified in Cameron’s cringing “I was talking to a poor/black/Asian/gay/woman/disabled person/scary garment of clothing the other day…” anactodes, and that they’re not really keen on being associated with the far right.

His wife of 20-odd years thinks it’s “no big deal”. Maybe he feels the same. “There’s absolutely no animosity. It’s two professional adults. We are both in our 60s,” she added.

The BNP has welcomed her defection with open arms. At the party’s last meeting in Bolton, foreign affairs spokesman Arthur Kemp claimed it showed how the other parties are coming undone as people realise they’re never going to admit that Britain is being “colonised”.

“The BNP’s message of hope is being heard far and wide, and we welcome people like Mrs Spink who have seen through the Tory’s web of deceit and have come over to the only party which can save Britain from the Third World tsunami,” Kemp said.

It must be confusing for members of the Conservative Party. On the one hand they’ve got to get behind awesome cosmopolitan Dave who’s going to deliver them from Labour; on the other, their party has to carry on hyping up so-called ‘Broken Britain’, bursting with yobs and foreigners, so they don’t alienate their traditional nutty supporters and the omnipresent anti-immigration lobby.

Over the years the Tories have flirted constantly with the far right, as Daily Mail-reading patio falangists teased them with their tantalising votes. In the 1970s, the National Front emerged during similar bouts of scaremongering about immigration during another economic crisis. Thatcher’s win in 1979 had a lot to do with regaining that vote and pandering to a openly racist minority, terrified of people ‘colonising’ Britain – `flooding in´from former British colonies like Kenya, Uganda and Pakistan.

In more recent years, the Conservative Party has been shedding members and voters to both the UK Independence Party and BNP. Labour also lost many voters to the BNP following deindustrialisation in the 1980s. During the last 13 years of New Labour rule these policies were continued and inequality has unceasingly grown. As a result, major parts of the party’s traditional base felt the white working class had been abandoned.

All the parties have been equally complicit in the rise of the far right, gratefully indulging in the media’s scapegoating of migrants for the problems experienced across the country. Mainstream politicians continually ramp up the fear of immigration and then seem miffed when people start supporting the BNP, when in reality Griffin and his cohorts are the only ones who are vaguely honest about their position, whatever middle-class liberals think about it.

Then along comes the bizarre situation where Gordon Brown is reprimanded across the political spectrum for calling some woman a bigot. Obviously he didn’t see the border-controlling irony in what he said, but she was being pretty xenophobic if not outright racist. But claiming to be listening to and perpetuating ‘legitimate’ voter concern about immigration – basically because it’s the easiest thing for politicians to do – and then looking down your nose at them is never going to play out too well.

“Bigotgate” and Spink´s defection are unlikely to be the wake-up calls that the parties need. Bereft of ideas and unable to confront the real issues that the far right has been able to exploit – like a severe affordable housing crisis and a lack of opportunities for old working class communities – their only pathetic response is to try and blackmail voters with a cry of: “Don’t vote for them, they’re racists!”

Of course, confronting the real problems would mean acknowledging the real causes – the policies they’ve been pedling and the dynamics of the global economy. It would also mean admitting there’s very little they can, or are willing to do to address these causes. It would mean being prepared to give up some of their power and admitting that, really, they’re all little more than a bunch of glorified accountants. Much easier to perpetuate myths and avoid difficult questions.

Then they wonder why their members defect to the BNP.

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