Into the Political Mainstream? The 2001 General Election and After

Abstract

With an average vote of 17.3 per cent across the seats contested, and some 13 council seats won, the local elections of May 2003 brought the British National Party a level of electoral success hitherto unknown on Britain’s far right. During the 1930s Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had managed to win just one council seat, whilst in the 1970s Britain’s largest postwar fascist organisation, the National Front, had failed to secure election to any office.1 On 2 May 2003, almost a decade after its solitary win in Millwall, the British National Party could lay claim to no fewer than 16 councillors. It had now outperformed all its predecessors by far. The jewel in the crown was the East Lancashire town of Burnley where it had come second to Labour and formed the official opposition. As the Lancashire Evening Telegraph’s headline writer put it, with right-extremists holding a grand total of eight seats in the town, Burnley had become the ‘BNP CAPITAL OF BRITAIN’.2 But such attention-grabbing headlines can be deceptive. Of all the seats that were up for election in May 2003, the BNP only managed to win one-tenth of 1 per cent. Nonetheless, even if its influence proved local rather than national, the electoral ground that it had captured was undoubtedly significant. As a result, the party found itself tantalisingly close to a national electoral breakthrough — an opportunity that it expected to seize in 2004 when, at the same time as elections to the European Parliament and the London mayoral elections, entire councils would be up for election in a raft of metropolitan districts across the country.3 KeywordsLocal ElectionPositive DiscriminationAverage VoteNational FrontRacist ResentmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.