The Times
Pub-goers in Barnsley listening to a characteristically uncompromising Nick Griffin denounce privatisations and express sympathy for striking miners
Outside a large, modern pub on the edge of Barnsley, penned in by police, 150 demonstrators chant “Nazi scum off our streets” and “String ’em up like Mussolini”. Inside, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, is whipping up 300 white, working-class supporters — men and women, young and old — with a speech tailor-made for these days of deepening recession, rising unemployment and profound disillusion with expenses-fiddling mainstream politicians.
“This country is full. It’s time to shut the doors and look after our own people,” he declares from a platform adorned with a huge Union Jack. Britain should leave the European Union so it can stop the “huge swamping wave of mass immigration from places like Poland which has put hundreds of thousands of our people out of a job”. Instead of bailing out “greedy, corrupt, incompetent banks”, Westminster’s “scumbag, thieving politicians” should be using those billions to rebuild British industry.
Mr Griffin expresses sympathy for the 1984 miners strike, triggered by the closure of the Cortonwood colliery in Barnsley. He denounces the Government’s privatisation programme. He accuses Labour of crushing ordinary people to ensure maximum profit for its corporate financiers. “It has sold out,” he thunders. “The old Labour Party is dead. Long live the new party for British workers — the BNP.”
His audience stands and cheers. “Labour has sold this country down the Swannee,” declares Christine Hanson, 59, whose two sons fought in Iraq. “Why the f*** should foreign people take English jobs when there are English lads who can’t get work,” says a young man in a baseball cap — one of the more thuggish faction.
It is a remarkable speech for the leader of a far-right party: large chunks of it could have been delivered by Barnsley’s very own Arthur Scargill. But the shameless economic populism and scapegoating of immigrants resonates in struggling towns like Barnsley, and look set to propel the BNP to a startling breakthrough in next month’s European elections.
In the Yorkshire and Humberside constituency the BNP needs only about 11.5 per cent of the vote to win one of the six seats. It took 8 per cent in 2004, and support for the rival UK Independence Party, which took 14.5 per cent, has since collapsed along with the economy.
The BNP has an even better chance of capturing seats in the North West Euro-constituency, where Mr Griffin is the BNP’s lead candidate, and in the West Midlands.
The prospect of the BNP sending MEPs to Strasbourg alarms the established parties, and with good reason. Success on June 4 would generate great dollops of publicity and credibility, hundreds of thousands of euros in EU funding, and the right to participate in political programmes on radio and television. It would undoubtedly accelerate what Mr Griffin calls a “virtuous upward spiral” for a party that already claims to be the fastest growing in Britain.
In the bluff northern town of Barnsley, where ugly concrete blocks jostle with fine old public buildings in a town centre ringed by rows of terraced housing, Labour was struggling to counter the BNP’s advance well before the recession struck.
This is a former coalmining community where 15,000 men were employed in 16 pits as recently as the 1980s, and whose economy and raison d’être collapsed when the last of those pits was closed in the early 1990s.
Those mines have now vanished beneath shopping centres, industrial estates or country parks, and the handsome stone building that houses Mr Scargill’s once-mighty National Union of Mineworkers is occupied by little besides ghosts.
But many of Barnsley’s 220,000 inhabitants remain wedded to “old Labour”, and feel betrayed by a “new Labour” Government that has — they believe — forgotten its working-class roots and ceased fighting for the underdog as its members milk the public purse.
The town’s deprivation is obvious in the downmarket shops — though it does have a wonderful market — and ubiquitous groups of unemployed youths loitering on street corners. There is little industry left. The council and hospital are the biggest employers. Outside the public sector, employment is mostly in minimum-wage retail or service jobs. A quarter of the workforce is economically inactive and on some form of benefits, and the town has one of the highest rates of obesity — 10 per cent — in England.
Barnsley’s sense of betrayal helped the BNP to secure 17 per cent of the vote in last May’s local elections, and although it won no council seats it beat the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats into third place behind Labour and the independents. Since then the party’s prospects have only improved. Nationally, Labour staggers from one debacle to another, while locally the recession has clobbered an economy that had begun to recover for the first time since the pits closed.
The number claiming jobseeker’s allowance has doubled in the past year, and the Jobcentre has opened an overspill office in the library. Repossession orders rose 39 per cent in 2008. The Barnsley Building Society has been swallowed up by the Yorkshire after unwisely investing in Icelandic banks. Numerous shops have closed. Steve Dutton, owner of the Fleets pub where Mr Griffin spoke, said he let the BNP use his premises despite dozens of protests because “at this point in time I can’t afford to lose any custom at all”.
The council’s £300 million plan to demolish and rebuild a quarter of the town centre, part of its ambitious regeneration programme, has been put on hold. A small mountain of rubble in the town centre marks the spot where Barnsley College was recently demolished, but the Learning and Skills Council — a government agency — can no longer afford the £42 million it promised for a new campus.
Barnsley’s discontent is pervasive, and you can sense the accelerating defection of Labour supporters to the BNP in a town where the Tories are still reviled, the Liberal Democrats have made little headway and Mr Griffin’s party is losing its pariah status.
Barnsley’s BNP is well organised, well funded and active at grassroots level. It claims to have put 65,000 leaflets through letterboxes last year, and mans a stall in the town centre market every Saturday where it promises “British jobs for British people”. It mines a rich vein of xenophobia in a town that is still 97 per cent white by claiming that East Europeans have stolen local jobs and driven down wages, and by portraying the town as an enclave of Britons ringed by large, threatening Muslim communities.
“We’ve been going down ever since they shut the mines . . . Labour has done nowt for us and I think someone else should be given a chance,” says Jean Cook, 53, a taxi driver, as she drives The Times around the town.
Andrew Scorah, 26, an unemployed gardener attending a Credit Crunch Roadshow in the library, says: “Labour have done a crap job . . . everybody I talk to says they’re going to support the BNP.”
Alvin Kellett, 71, a former miner attending Mr Griffin’s rally, says: “The BNP is growing, growing, growing every day, people are that p***ed off with the Labour Government.”
Eric Illsley, one of Barnsley’s three Labour MPs, joined the demonstration outside. “The BNP exaggerates people’s fears and worries about unemployment and losing their jobs and that’s how they thrive here,” he counters. “It’s sad people get taken in by the rubbish they peddle.”
Barnsley’s Labour-run council has made strenuous efforts to revive the town’s fortunes in recent years. It has built a new £22 million transport hub and a digital centre for start-up businesses, converted the old Civic Hall into an arts centre, persuaded the University of Huddersfield to open a satellite campus in the town and will soon start rebuilding all its 14 secondary schools in the biggest programme of its kind in Britain.
It is offering under-18s free transport and free swimming, and has frozen the council tax for the elderly. “It’s a way of saying we’ve not forgotten you, no matter what the BNP says,” Steve Houghton, the council leader, tells The Times. But such measures seem to count for little when set against the savagery of the slump and the Government’s bungling.
Mr Houghton says the Government has done a lot to help the white working class through tax credits and by raising the minimum wage, but needs to communicate much better — “the Labour Party can’t afford to let its core vote get disaffected”.
Robert Cockroft, editor of the Barnsley Chronicle, believes mainstream politicians must start engaging, not ostracising, the BNP. “We get letters from Labour councillors calling them names, but these days that’s not sufficient. They have to engage in the arguments,” he says.
Meanwhile, because a low turnout would favour the BNP, some Labour councillors are taking the remarkable step of urging disgruntled supporters to vote Tory or Liberal Democrat on June 4 — anything but stay at home.
“We understand your anger. We know you want to give us a kick up the proverbial, but vote for anybody but the BNP because they’re dangerous,” says one, Mike Stokes.
Another, Joe Hayward, a former mayor who was once attacked by a BNP candidate while distributing anti-fascist leaflets, says: “I’m very concerned. If I remember rightly, a bloke called Adolf Hitler came to power during a recession.”
