The Banal National Party: the routine nature of legitimacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the far right in Britain, under the auspices of the British National Party (BNP), has made noteworthy electoral gains. Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, the party has placed great emphasis on modernization. The concentration of BNP electoral gains within specific areas such as Burnley, Barking and Dagenham, Epping Forest, and Stoke-on-Trent has meant that academic enquiries into the party's activities have a more localized emphasis. As well as examining the ideological shifts within the BNP, an emergent body of literature has sought to focus on the means by which the party has been able to assume greater levels of legitimacy within particular locales. This focus on the party apparatus has yielded some interesting insights into the way in which the BNP has sought to embed itself within particular communities. Great stock has been placed on traditional forms of community-based politics. By tapping into everyday concerns and by selecting local residents as candidates, it appears that the BNP has been able to deflect charges of racism and extremism. Drawing on qualitative interviews with BNP voters and ex-candidates in Burnley, Rhodes suggests that it is the banality of the party, its discourses and its candidates at a local level that has enabled the BNP to acquire a degree of ‘respectability’. The party and its supporters have seemingly been able to exploit traditional conceptions of racism and nationalism as something out of the ordinary or ‘other’. There appears to have been a recognition that it is everyday articulations and representations of white racism that seem able to escape the label of extremism, appearing as more ‘legitimate’ forms of expression. Similarly, the way in which BNP voters, as well as the party itself, have been able to locate powerful tales of identity and entitlement within routine narratives will be explored in relation to the reconfiguration of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the contemporary period.