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.

Celebrating one honest man in politics

Some years ago, on a train from Newcastle to Leeds, I found myself sitting across the gangway from then Health Secretary Alan Milburn and his officials, who were working on their plans to drag the NHS kicking and screaming into whichever century we were in at the time.

Their discussions were subject to occasional irreverent interjections from a balding, posh bloke in the seat behind me. He and the Secretary of State were clearly acquainted with each other, and I deduced that he was another Parliamentarian. The thing that puzzled me for the rest of the day was that I was completely sure there were no Tory MPs in the North East called Chris.

In London the next morning I shared the mystery with a friend much more engaged in the political process than I have ever been. He mused for a few seconds, then said “That will have been Chris Mullin”. And he was right.

I have to confess that I never gave Mr Mullin another thought until I picked up, for bank holiday reading, his published diaries, A View From the Foothills. What a marvellous book they make.

Candid, entertaining and wonderfully self-deprecating, they describe long hours of toil to achieve little of any value as “the Minister of Folding Deckchairs” within John Prescott’s mega-department, which Mr Mullin likens to “the court of Boris Yeltsin”. I have by no means finished the book, but so far our hero’s principal triumphs have been imposing a speed limit on Lake Windermere and making a small advance in the battle against the leylandii hedge.

He is proud of what Labour has done for his constituents in Sunderland South, but frustrated by their widespread failure to recognise this. Chiefly owing to what he memorably characterises as “Chronic Whinger Syndrome”.

I am not a supporter of the Labour Party, so it naturally gave me particular pleasure to read one of their own MPs describing the Millennium Dome as “a symbol of all that is wrong with New Labour: shallow, over-hyped, naff”. And the “useless” official draft of one of his own speeches as “Full of New Labour claptrap about strategies, visions, challenges and opportunities, which I was expected to stand and chant like a Mormon missionary.”

Like all honest political diarists of every party, Mr Mullin is prepared to acknowledge (at least in private) the issues on which the other side is right, and reveals the petty jealousies, selfish interests and inevitable compromises that lie behind all official decision making. How one longs to read an equally frank insider’s account of what really happened in the case of the Lockerbie bomber.

In its exhaustive coverage of MPs’ expenses, the Daily Telegraph could find no stickier dirt on Mr Mullin than the fact that he claims at his London flat for licensing a 30-year-old black-and-white TV, because he cannot bear the waste of throwing away something that still works. I am with him on that, as in his yearning for “a simple life. One where we take pleasure from our immediate surroundings. Produce only what we need. Eat what we grow. Travel slowly. And value friendship.”

Indeed, apart from a certain bias against farmers and foxhunters (of whom I imagine there are few in Sunderland South) I have found little so far on which I am not in wholehearted sympathy with Mr Mullin. Which makes it all the sadder that he has decided to retire at the next election. Parliament needs more openness and honesty by people who are prepared to speak their own minds rather than succumb to the control freakery of party spin machines, endlessly terrified of being skewered for a “gaffe”.

The electors of Sunderland South should cherish Mr Mullin while they can, and anyone who takes the slightest interest in current affairs should enjoy his addictively readable book.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.