Beorn
05-26-2009, 01:19 AM
Angry voters seek solutions beyond the fringe parties
Municipal incompetence rises from Stoke-on-Trent like smoke from burning tyres. A lifeless hinterland of vacant lots and random pay-and-displays leads you to the inevitable shopping centre featuring a disconsolate Debenhams. Stoke was stripped of its industries - coal, steel, pottery - but, in truth, this is a political as much as an economic dump.
A Labour council monopoly in 1997 was steadily eroded until an absurd coalition of all the main parties faced a motley crew of independents and the British National party. Two directly elected mayors have tried to sort this out, but now they are going back to a council leader. The last mayor, Mark Meredith, was arrested earlier this year as part of a police inquiry in alleged corruption.
Albert “Alby” Walker has an office draped with flags, pictures of Churchill and Enoch Powell and one of Tony Blair as Hitler. He’s BNP and a popular candidate for council leader. There are 60 council seats in Stoke and the BNP has nine of them, the party’s best showing after Barking and Dagenham in Essex.
Walker is also No 2 on the party list for the West Midlands in the forthcoming European elections - his wife Ellie is No 5 - and prospective parliamentary candidate. A big player in a small party, he sees the present Duck Island Meltdown in Westminster as a gift for his party.
“We speak for the silent majority. People now want to get involved. This is when the corner will be turned. People will realise it’s not bad to be BNP. We will become a massive organisation.”
He thinks the party will have at least three, possibly eight, MEPs after June 4. He’s antiimmigration, of course, but he’s also angry about the loss of local industry and jobs.
Unemployment, immigration and little piggy MPs with their snouts in the trough - be afraid, Brown, Cameron and Clegg, be very afraid.
Small parties such as the BNP are on the rise. In 1998 they took 7% of the vote in local elections; last year that figure had risen to 15%. Recent opinion polls suggest they will receive about 40% of votes in the European elections next month. Old tribal loyalties are melting away to be replaced by new, more disturbing ones.
There are no local elections in Stoke this time but there are in neighbouring Newcastle-under-Lyme where Staffordshire county council is up for reelection.
Newcastle is also going down the small party road with four UKIP councillors. It’s nicer than Stoke but the place is in a bad way for all the same reasons. They’ve even got their own mini-Duck Island. Local UKIP chairman David Nixon tells me of inflated councillor allowance claims.
Meltdown is also good for UKIP. “People are so absolutely brassed off with the three main parties,” Nixon says.
The market is closing up and hard rain falls on the shoppers. Brynley McDonald, 63, sells DVDs from his stall. He has always voted Labour, but not this time.
“They’ve no control over anything – like immigration, it’s just chaos,” he says. “I’m thinking about BNP. We look after everybody who comes in and we treat our own like crap.”
Two unemployed men in their fifties are both considering BNP. One was a builder: immigrants take builders’ jobs. His mate, Paul Brooksbank, worked on the railways until five years ago. He hates what has happened to the industry.
“People don’t work for the love of the job any more, the love of the railways.”
It is another big theme: the collapse of ethos. That, after all is what has happened at Westminster where, to quote Flaubert, there are people who would pay to be bought.
Outside the Golden Lion, the lunchtime smokers and drinkers all want to have their say. Awful, embittered stories of NHS and welfare persecution tumble out. Mention expenses and half of them cry: “Snouts in the trough!”
Noreen Stanley, a cleaner, says MPs should get £7 an hour. Here, too, some are veering towards the BNP, though Noreen and her husband Leon say they will stick with Labour out of habit, but “they’re all the same”.
In Wiltshire, where UKIP is strong and visible, the same themes stalk the leafier lanes. In the small and perfectly formed village of Fittleton, three UKIPers in their sixties say the expenses scandal is not that big a shock. It proves what they already knew: the political classes have betrayed the people. For them the democratic dementia in London is the correlative of the democratic deficit in Brussels. Tactically it’s great news.
“Gary Player,” says golfing UKIPer Alan Wood, “said the harder you work, the luckier you will be. That’s what’s happened to us with this expenses thing.”
The three of them all speak of a better Britain in the immediate postwar period when public service meant public service. Again it’s that loss of ethos.
Nearby Devizes is a “Georgian market town” - a phrase on which converge all the aspirations of middle England – and here is UKIP European candidate Gawain Towler, an energetic talkative man with the air of a Georgian buck.
“All the main parties are saying is ‘Vote for me, we can’t do anything’,” he says. “Eighty per cent of our laws are made in Brussels.”
Like the men at Fittleton, he sees expenses as just further evidence of the betrayals of the political classes. He combines this with a more cerebral emphasis on libertarianism - British “liberties” as opposed to European “rights” - and nationhood.
“I just don’t want to be governed by people I don’t regard as ‘we’.”
UKIP is no BNP but the basis of its appeal - nationhood, immigration, disgust with mainstream politicians - is similar.
Nobody mentions the BNP in Wiltshire. But they do mention the Greens, another minor party that could boom this time round. Nationally, they took 20% of the Euro vote in 1989 when popular discontent with Margaret Thatcher was peaking. But Westminster is the issue this time, not the end of the world.
Michael Ancram, the Tory MP for Devizes, commands respect, despite his claims for his swimming-pool boiler, cleaning and gardening. The feeling here is not fury but mild regret, a sense of something lost.
Jonathan Cook, a retiree, revisits the familiar theme of the communal paradise of Britain after the war and says he might vote UKIP in the European but will probably return to the Tories for the general election. “It is all,” he says, “very disappointing.”
Diana Slater, 71, is telling me she regards UKIP as “a bit young and dangerous”, when Towler suddenly reappears. I engineer a street debate in which it becomes clear that the more abstract aspects of Towler’s UKIPery are getting in the way. Diana looks puzzled.
Towler is getting nowhere. Slater and her husband Charles will vote for the Guardians, a local party standing on the single issue of preserving Devizes, at the locals, and the Tories at the general. This is, after all, a Georgian market town, an issue that transcends all others.
Even if more politely expressed, the unease nevertheless runs as deep here as it does in Newcastle. Britain is worse than it was when united in the aftermath of war. The Duck Island Meltdown is just one more way in which an intelligible, kind, civilised, neighbourly, ethical, modest nation has lost to be replaced by . . . what?
A sense of loss and political failure is hardening in the people’s minds into something more forbidding than mere regret. “I don’t think it’s a revolution,” says Nixon. “It’s an awakening.”
The people are asking questions that they now know cannot be answered in Brussels or Westminster. The questions may be specific - about immigration, MPs’ expenses, public services - but they are all one question really: who are we?
If they find no answer, then the future is Stoke-on-Trent, a purposeless, ill-governed dump.
Source (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6350480.ece)
40%!!, and that is one unreliable opinion poll.
I can only hope the current we are swimming in at present, with the likes of MP expenses, the 500 in Luton openly displaying their distrust at the Muslims and their attitudes, amongst many others, will convert into a good result for the BNP.
I was reading an article earlier about the rise of the far-right in the rest of Europe and how the numerous parties are also being predicted a "worringly" increase in support.
I really do for the first time since supporting the BNP, feel an actual belief they will achieve something.
Municipal incompetence rises from Stoke-on-Trent like smoke from burning tyres. A lifeless hinterland of vacant lots and random pay-and-displays leads you to the inevitable shopping centre featuring a disconsolate Debenhams. Stoke was stripped of its industries - coal, steel, pottery - but, in truth, this is a political as much as an economic dump.
A Labour council monopoly in 1997 was steadily eroded until an absurd coalition of all the main parties faced a motley crew of independents and the British National party. Two directly elected mayors have tried to sort this out, but now they are going back to a council leader. The last mayor, Mark Meredith, was arrested earlier this year as part of a police inquiry in alleged corruption.
Albert “Alby” Walker has an office draped with flags, pictures of Churchill and Enoch Powell and one of Tony Blair as Hitler. He’s BNP and a popular candidate for council leader. There are 60 council seats in Stoke and the BNP has nine of them, the party’s best showing after Barking and Dagenham in Essex.
Walker is also No 2 on the party list for the West Midlands in the forthcoming European elections - his wife Ellie is No 5 - and prospective parliamentary candidate. A big player in a small party, he sees the present Duck Island Meltdown in Westminster as a gift for his party.
“We speak for the silent majority. People now want to get involved. This is when the corner will be turned. People will realise it’s not bad to be BNP. We will become a massive organisation.”
He thinks the party will have at least three, possibly eight, MEPs after June 4. He’s antiimmigration, of course, but he’s also angry about the loss of local industry and jobs.
Unemployment, immigration and little piggy MPs with their snouts in the trough - be afraid, Brown, Cameron and Clegg, be very afraid.
Small parties such as the BNP are on the rise. In 1998 they took 7% of the vote in local elections; last year that figure had risen to 15%. Recent opinion polls suggest they will receive about 40% of votes in the European elections next month. Old tribal loyalties are melting away to be replaced by new, more disturbing ones.
There are no local elections in Stoke this time but there are in neighbouring Newcastle-under-Lyme where Staffordshire county council is up for reelection.
Newcastle is also going down the small party road with four UKIP councillors. It’s nicer than Stoke but the place is in a bad way for all the same reasons. They’ve even got their own mini-Duck Island. Local UKIP chairman David Nixon tells me of inflated councillor allowance claims.
Meltdown is also good for UKIP. “People are so absolutely brassed off with the three main parties,” Nixon says.
The market is closing up and hard rain falls on the shoppers. Brynley McDonald, 63, sells DVDs from his stall. He has always voted Labour, but not this time.
“They’ve no control over anything – like immigration, it’s just chaos,” he says. “I’m thinking about BNP. We look after everybody who comes in and we treat our own like crap.”
Two unemployed men in their fifties are both considering BNP. One was a builder: immigrants take builders’ jobs. His mate, Paul Brooksbank, worked on the railways until five years ago. He hates what has happened to the industry.
“People don’t work for the love of the job any more, the love of the railways.”
It is another big theme: the collapse of ethos. That, after all is what has happened at Westminster where, to quote Flaubert, there are people who would pay to be bought.
Outside the Golden Lion, the lunchtime smokers and drinkers all want to have their say. Awful, embittered stories of NHS and welfare persecution tumble out. Mention expenses and half of them cry: “Snouts in the trough!”
Noreen Stanley, a cleaner, says MPs should get £7 an hour. Here, too, some are veering towards the BNP, though Noreen and her husband Leon say they will stick with Labour out of habit, but “they’re all the same”.
In Wiltshire, where UKIP is strong and visible, the same themes stalk the leafier lanes. In the small and perfectly formed village of Fittleton, three UKIPers in their sixties say the expenses scandal is not that big a shock. It proves what they already knew: the political classes have betrayed the people. For them the democratic dementia in London is the correlative of the democratic deficit in Brussels. Tactically it’s great news.
“Gary Player,” says golfing UKIPer Alan Wood, “said the harder you work, the luckier you will be. That’s what’s happened to us with this expenses thing.”
The three of them all speak of a better Britain in the immediate postwar period when public service meant public service. Again it’s that loss of ethos.
Nearby Devizes is a “Georgian market town” - a phrase on which converge all the aspirations of middle England – and here is UKIP European candidate Gawain Towler, an energetic talkative man with the air of a Georgian buck.
“All the main parties are saying is ‘Vote for me, we can’t do anything’,” he says. “Eighty per cent of our laws are made in Brussels.”
Like the men at Fittleton, he sees expenses as just further evidence of the betrayals of the political classes. He combines this with a more cerebral emphasis on libertarianism - British “liberties” as opposed to European “rights” - and nationhood.
“I just don’t want to be governed by people I don’t regard as ‘we’.”
UKIP is no BNP but the basis of its appeal - nationhood, immigration, disgust with mainstream politicians - is similar.
Nobody mentions the BNP in Wiltshire. But they do mention the Greens, another minor party that could boom this time round. Nationally, they took 20% of the Euro vote in 1989 when popular discontent with Margaret Thatcher was peaking. But Westminster is the issue this time, not the end of the world.
Michael Ancram, the Tory MP for Devizes, commands respect, despite his claims for his swimming-pool boiler, cleaning and gardening. The feeling here is not fury but mild regret, a sense of something lost.
Jonathan Cook, a retiree, revisits the familiar theme of the communal paradise of Britain after the war and says he might vote UKIP in the European but will probably return to the Tories for the general election. “It is all,” he says, “very disappointing.”
Diana Slater, 71, is telling me she regards UKIP as “a bit young and dangerous”, when Towler suddenly reappears. I engineer a street debate in which it becomes clear that the more abstract aspects of Towler’s UKIPery are getting in the way. Diana looks puzzled.
Towler is getting nowhere. Slater and her husband Charles will vote for the Guardians, a local party standing on the single issue of preserving Devizes, at the locals, and the Tories at the general. This is, after all, a Georgian market town, an issue that transcends all others.
Even if more politely expressed, the unease nevertheless runs as deep here as it does in Newcastle. Britain is worse than it was when united in the aftermath of war. The Duck Island Meltdown is just one more way in which an intelligible, kind, civilised, neighbourly, ethical, modest nation has lost to be replaced by . . . what?
A sense of loss and political failure is hardening in the people’s minds into something more forbidding than mere regret. “I don’t think it’s a revolution,” says Nixon. “It’s an awakening.”
The people are asking questions that they now know cannot be answered in Brussels or Westminster. The questions may be specific - about immigration, MPs’ expenses, public services - but they are all one question really: who are we?
If they find no answer, then the future is Stoke-on-Trent, a purposeless, ill-governed dump.
Source (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6350480.ece)
40%!!, and that is one unreliable opinion poll.
I can only hope the current we are swimming in at present, with the likes of MP expenses, the 500 in Luton openly displaying their distrust at the Muslims and their attitudes, amongst many others, will convert into a good result for the BNP.
I was reading an article earlier about the rise of the far-right in the rest of Europe and how the numerous parties are also being predicted a "worringly" increase in support.
I really do for the first time since supporting the BNP, feel an actual belief they will achieve something.