Tuesday 27 October 2009

How hatred really built the BNP

Much has been written lately about the BNP and the politics of hate. Yet I have always seen hatred as rather a speciality of the Labour Party.

They hate the ancient institutions of this country, which is why we have abortions like the “reformed” House of Lords and the swish new Supreme Court, which sprang into life on a whim of Tony Blair’s without even being fleshed out on the traditional fag packet.

They hate the people of the countryside and their ways, hence the crushing burden of bureaucracy on farmers and the huge waste of time to create an unworkable Hunting Act.

They hate “toffs” like David Cameron and George Osborne, but they also hate their own natural supporters getting above themselves. So they snapped the principal ladder by which working class children of my generation achieved social mobility: the grammar schools.

In fact, these days they do not seem to like the British proletariat at all. One of the striking things about Chris Mullin’s diaries, which I praised a few weeks ago, was just how much he seemed to prefer dealing with distressed asylum seekers (polite, educated and grateful) to the mass of his constituents (usually none of the above).

It should come as no surprise, then, to discover from weekend press reports that the floodgates of mass immigration were deliberately opened by Tony Blair and Jack Straw in 2000 to achieve a fundamental and irreversible shift in the make-up of the British population, for their own electoral advantage. The calculation apparently being that industrious and appreciative immigrants were more likely to support Labour than the idle and benefit-addicted denizens of the nation’s council estates.

The true brilliance of the wheeze was this: if anyone dared to suggest that this headlong rush to “multi-culturalism” was a questionable idea, they could be branded as a “racist”, the one thing that instantly puts any politician beyond the pale.

In economic matters, Mrs Thatcher wrenched the centre ground of politics to the right, so that the major parties have spent the last two decades trying to outdo each other with ever more radical schemes of privatisation and in their willingness to pander to the super-rich.

But on social and cultural matters, the entrenched consensus means that anyone who dares to speak up for traditional British (and particularly Christian) values will be shouted down as a bigot.

The new religion of man-made climate change is fast becoming another belief that cannot be challenged, so that anyone who loves the countryside and does not wish to see it industrialised with essentially useless windmills can be presented as wicked and self-centred, prepared to sacrifice the poor people of the Maldives and Bangladesh to protect their own “chocolate box” views.

Add to the mix the European Union, which now makes most of our important decisions for us, and which no mainstream political party dares to oppose effectively, and you end up with a system in which it is hard to put a cigarette paper between the serious contenders for office on most matters of policy, and in which the elite’s values have come seriously adrift from those of the mass of the people.

Most of whom, I would hazard a guess, still take some pride in their country, think it better on the whole than most of the others in the world, and quite liked it the way it was before their leaders decided to give away their sovereignty and completely change the character of their homeland without consulting them.

The predictable backlash, in these circumstances, is extremism of the type represented by the BNP. It is worth remembering that the key to their rise is not the peculiar political genius of Nick Griffin and his colleagues, but the fact that our existing leaders give the impression of, if not actually hating us, at least disliking us quite intensely.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

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