I do actually talk to members of the liberal elite, when I get the chance. Usually this is in broadcasting studios, as we wait to take part in discussion programmes, or university debates. Sometimes it is at 'literary festivals', those strange artificial gatherings to which I am occasionally invited.
These encounters (and of course I include Cameroon Tories in the liberal elite category) are difficult, and especially awkward for them, because I can sense their discomfort at the way my knuckles brush the ground. How, you can almost see them asking themselves, have I ended up in the same room as someone like this? I truly empathise.
Normally they would be insulated from people like me. I don't live near them, or take my holidays where they take theirs, or even eat or drink where they do. My tastes in almost everything from music to sandwiches are different from theirs. So I value these chances to remind them of the parallel world which exists, separate from theirs but there all the same.
And one of the points I try to make to them is this.
"You may regard me, and everything I say, as contemptible. But you should at least attempt to listen, if only because I am nothing like as bad as what you will get if you don't. I believe in pluralism, liberty of speech, freedom of the press, tolerance, the rule of law, an adversarial parliament, an independent civil service. I believe it is possible to persuade and to be persuaded, to make and to admit mistakes. I am opposed to violence in politics. I am even more opposed to racial bigotry."
This, by the way, sums up quite clearly why I shall always loathe the BNP, why I am not a secret supporter of it suppressing my views to save my job (as some of its members madly believe) and why I would never have anything to do with it, will always oppose it and would probably have to fly the country if it ever came to power. I differ fundamentally from it and draw my ideas from another tradition. I am, in a way, flattered by the way such people have adopted issues which I have been warning about for many years. They realise that these are important and that many people are concerned about them. But I think they have adopted them for propaganda purposes, not because they really care about them or have serious remedies for them.
To the liberal elite, I would add: "If you scorn my warnings about the effects of mass immigration, unchecked crime and disorder, penal taxation to finance needless empires of client workers, undisciplined education, state-sponsored immorality and the rest, then you will in the end deliver a large part of the electorate, so frustrated that they won't care any more about words like 'Nazi' and 'Fascist', into the hands of unscrupulous demagogues, who will employ these causes to seek power and may eventually destroy you - and me - completely."
I used to say: "It is all very well, during this period of artificial prosperity, to rely on people not caring enough. But if that prosperity ever ends, it will be much, much more dangerous".
Now I think I can leave off the last bit. That is why I was so alarmed by the outbreak of 'British Jobs for British Workers' protests. For a growing number of people, prosperity is a thing of the past. I am by no means sure it will ever come back. I fear that what is happening to us now is a permanent descent into the league of poorer, less stable countries.
I have also (though some of my critics on this site never seem to notice it) more than once opposed attempts to suppress and persecute the BNP, because freedom of speech only exists when you give it to people you despise. I also think of Hitler's sneering riposte to the Social Democrat MP Otto Wels, who bravely risked violence and arrest when he went to the last more-or-less free session of the Reichstag to oppose the Nazi takeover. Wels (I have written about this before) movingly opposed the suppression of opposition parties.
The trouble was that Wels's own party had in the past voted for legal restrictions on the Nazis (these restrictions had, as such things tend to do in free societies, failed). Hitler jeered at Wels's delayed conversion to tolerance in words which are hard to translate but could be summed up as: "Well done, pity you didn't think of that earlier when you were trying to ban us.” I do not want to hear such words spoken in our Parliament by the triumphant leader of a national socialist party.
It is an old ploy, I suppose, the threat of something worse in the background to make yourself look more acceptable. But I have always meant every word. I am genuinely alarmed that this country might eventually incubate some sort of national socialist populist force, trashing liberty in the name of order and patriotism, thanks to the appalling combination of ill-educated ignorance and increasingly justified discontent created by the policies of the liberal elite.
I thought it would be interesting to reproduce here (and afterwards make some wise-after-the-event comments upon) an article I wrote for the Mail on Sunday six years ago, on 9th February 2003, largely based upon an interview with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. I had also been spending some time in the Pennine towns, where the BNP was becoming active and the problem of large, unintegrated Muslim communities had recently become rather obvious. Now the BNP bandwagon has moved south, and last week scored an alarming and possibly significant victory in formerly Labour-held council seat in Swanley, roughly where Kent and Greater London meet.
The results (which bear no relation to recent national opinion polls) were:
Paul Golding, British National Party: 408 votes.
Michael James Hogg, Labour: 332 votes.
Tony Harry Searles, Conservative: 247 votes.
Turnout for the election was 31.3 per cent.
The local MP, Tory Michael Fallon, one of the more intelligent Conservatives, commented: "It's a more general frustration at the failure of government to address quality of life issues - petty crime, vandalism, housing, jobs. All the main parties have got to address these more vigorously.”
Peter Hain, a former Labour cabinet minister, said: "It is areas when Labour has traditionally been strong - like Swanley - where the BNP has been making a great deal of headway and exploiting fears and spreading their racist and fascist beliefs."
Well spotted, those two. But as things stand, both your parties have nothing to say to the disenchanted. My article on Mr Griffin below was written, remember, six years ago.
It appeared under the headline: "This sinister sect of creeps, misfits and racists will soon be a bigger threat to Labour than the Tories"
And it said...
"A tiny sect of seriously strange people, odder than the Mormons, creepier than the Moonies and far smaller than either of them, is on the brink of transforming British politics.
In the past few weeks, the midget British National Party has succeeded in altering the policy of the Labour movement, scaring it into a position it would once have condemned as racist. Only the BNP's growing electoral success can explain last week's sudden denunciation of black-on-white violence by the Oldham East and Saddleworth Labour MP Phil Woolas.
It came just after the BNP astonished itself and everyone else by winning yet another council seat - this time in Halifax -annihilating the Tories and shouldering its way past Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
These victories can no longer be dismissed as localised freaks. In the Pennine towns where race riots are a recent memory and tension is still high, Labour now sees the BNP as a bigger adversary than the Conservatives. A recent document circulated to Labour activists in Burnley warned that the BNP is 'replacing the Tories as the enemy'.
These worries are real. In Burnley where the BNP now has three council members, cunning tactics and clever populism may well bring it still more seats in the May elections, and almost certainly more votes. By saying little and working assiduously on local issues of crime, housing and clean streets, its councillors have won a reputation as serious and sober, though all three of them have CCTV cameras installed at their homes to deter harassment by their foes.
The three councillors themselves were too nervous to meet me. Party policy seems to be that as soon as they are elected they are advised to stay away from national media in case they say something embarrassing.
Instead they copy the Liberal Democrats' successful methods, and concentrate on non-political pavement-level issues. Their scruffy organiser and spokesman, Simon Bennett, proudly shows me leaflets on abandoned properties, noisy neighbours and bad planning decisions.
And he believes the BNP's critics have failed partly because they are so alarmist: 'Our opponents said that the town would be a pariah if it elected BNP councillors, and that the local economy would suffer because businessmen would not want to invest here. They said racial tension would get worse. None of these things happened.' He also thinks - and he may well be right - that the constant denunciations of the BNP as Nazis and fascists no longer have any effect. 'People have heard it so many times they just switch off when they hear it again.' When Channel 4 recently filmed Young BNP leader Mark Collett praising Hitler, it had no effect in Halifax, though Collett was swiftly sacked from his post.
Mr Bennett gloats over Labour's new stance on the street violence issue, which his party has been complaining about for years. He is sure it is the result of BNP success. 'Phil Woolas is suddenly taking in the language of Mick Treacy', he says, a reference to the BNP's raucous and rough-edged council candidate in Oldham, much denounced by Labour during the last elections. 'They are playing catch-up, trying to preserve their power.' When the BNP holds its members' meetings in Burnley, more than 100 people turn up, ranging from footstomping skinhead youths to alarmingly passionate old ladies, but also including quiet, middle-aged, soberly dressed people who have bought their council houses and feel overtaxed, neglected and threatened in Tony Blair's multicultural Britain.
But the movement's success does not depend on membership and organisation. The votes seem to be waiting to be harvested.
In fact the BNP may well actually do better where it has no real presence, and no machine to speak of. In last year's mayoral elections in Stoke-on-Trent, where the BNP had hardly any organisation at all, it did alarmingly well. If their luck holds, the BNP leaders hope to make much greater gains in 2004 when millions of people will have three votes in local elections, and may be tempted to give one of them to this new force, just to rock the boat.
By doing so, they may start an avalanche, sweeping away the familiar political landscape. Labour leaders have known for decades that many of their voters are far from liberal on immigration issues, but have been able to ignore the problem because there was no other working class party that could outflank them.
Now there is, and the BNP is careful to be very Old Labour on issues like the NHS, which it supports vigorously.
The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, says he now thinks his party may be within sight of winning a seat in Parliament. Yet the very idea ought to be ridiculous. The BNP is a pitifully small grouplet of fanatics with unhinged policies on the economy and alarming, even barking members. Even as he told me of his organisation's string of electoral successes, Mr Griffin admitted to me that its total membership was 3,724 at the last count, and has perhaps now risen to 4,000. This is seriously small and I was amazed that he was willing to reveal such a dismal total.
And who are these people, the members rather than the voters? Many, probably most of them are consumed by depressing racial prejudice, which is actually written into their rules. Mr Griffin, affable and frank on most topics, goes very stiff and strange when asked about the party regulation which declares that membership is open only to those of British or 'closely kindred European descent'.
Some BNP members believe it says 'Northern European descent', which is rather close to 'Nordic', but Mr Griffin, himself no blond Aryan, denies this.
His hands tremble slightly as he refuses to say what he thinks about this creepy stipulation. It means that it doesn't matter what you think or even who you are. If you're the wrong colour they won't have you. A black Briton who accepted all the BNP's other policies would be shown the door because of his skin.
He explains that the definition of 'closely kindred' is a 'grey area', which is one way of putting it. Greeks can join but Turks can't. Bosnian Serbs can but Bosnian Muslims can't.
In fact, Muslims in general can't, because, says the BNP, their first loyalty is to Islam rather than Britain.
'Some members think it should be changed. I don't comment on it because it is a divisive issue,' intones Mr Griffin, quite unaware of how ludicrous this statement is, coming from the leader of a movement which is not known for avoiding divisive issues.
It is also strangely coy coming from a man who recently expelled an old friend from the BNP for the sin of having a girlfriend who was, hilariously, a South American asylum seeker. Party rules give the leader almost absolute power over the members. He is, it seems, quite prepared to use this power to take tough decisions of one kind, but not of another.
It gets more ludicrous still. As we discuss Mr Griffin's unconventional views on Jews and the Holocaust (he says he can't spell them out in case he is hauled off and tried on the Continent under the provisions of the new Europe-wide arrest warrant, which gives you a pretty good idea what those views might be), he reveals a jaw-dropping fact.
One of Griffin's party colleagues, who resents his power, suspects that Griffin himself may be Jewish and hiding the fact. This elderly maniac saw Griffin's father on television and thought his nose looked rather Jewish. It will be poetic justice if this Third Reich-style investigation finds that the BNP leader is, in fact, Jewish.
One can only hope.
Most of the time Griffin sounds quite reasonable. A Cambridge graduate with pleasant manners, who did his A-levels as one of two boys in an all-girls school, he is plainly intelligent and has a strong sense of humour.
He has run a business and gone bankrupt and done real hard-graft jobs, including stacking supermarket shelves. He is married to a nurse and has four children. He is perceptive about politics. For instance, he has spotted a major problem for Labour that nobody else seems to have noticed - that its eagerness to start a new Gulf war is devastating its previously solid Muslim Asian vote and handing it to the Liberal Democrats.
He has grasped, as many Tories have yet to do, that the Conservative Party is dying from the roots upwards and that the widespread contempt for Toryism cannot be cured by changing the image or aping New Labour.
He suspects that many Labour voters find it easier to switch to the BNP than to vote for the party of Margaret Thatcher, especially in the industrial areas where she is still blamed for the decline of manufacturing.
He wonders if Labour began by secretly hoping for BNP gains so that it could permanently split the Rightwing vote - and is now alarmed that the plan may have worked all too well.
He is elated by his impact, boasting: 'Voter turnout goes up everywhere we stand.' And he knows that he cannot get anywhere with the votes of louts and no-hopers, since most of them don't vote anyway and many of them are not even on the electoral register.
'The best response we get as we go round, in terms of thumbs-up, is on the rough estates, but the actual turnout is pitiful.
'We are not the party whose vote comes from the sink estates. We thought it did but it doesn't. It comes primarily from owner-occupied places, terraces or council estates where people have bought their homes, pay taxes and resent the way those taxes are spent.' Nobody should underestimate this man's acumen or his knowledge and understanding of the British political system.
Yet it is hard to match one half of this picture with the other. On the one hand is a cunning and skilful vote machine, on the other ingrained and discredited racial theories, Holocaust-deniers, nose measurers and violent oafs.
It is a measure of the profoundly dismal state of British politics that such a party exists or that any decent person should feel able to vote for it."
All these years later, I still remember that odd lunchtime in a nearly empty Shrewsbury pub, both of us warily circling the other. Mr Griffin had come up from his Welsh fastness and, as I recall, didn't drink alcohol. I didn't think then, and I don't think now, that he has it in him to make a national breakthrough. But I do think he has the wit to go quite a long way in that direction.
I don't at all discount suggestions that the BNP might win a seat or two in the European 'Parliament' elections, and I think they could appear quite prominently in a lot of local council polls. As to whether they can break into the Westminster Parliament, ask me in six months or so when we have begun to grasp just how bad the economic crisis is, and just how little the conventional parties can do about it. I'm not saying, by the way, that the BNP can do anything about it either. People will vote for it because it's not one of the old parties, in much the same way that the chronically ill, disappointed by conventional medicine, will turn to fringe quacks at the end, on the grounds that they can't be any worse.
I think the BNP's progress has been slower and less incremental than I thought back then. But there's no doubt of two things. One is that for many people the 'Nazi' jibe now just bounces off. The other is that intelligent Labour politicians, such as the thoughtful and original Jon Cruddas, are genuinely worried about votes sliding off in this direction.
Cruddas knows from his own Dagenham constituency just how quickly Labour voters can switch to the BNP. I think he also knows that his party's political correctness is at the heart of the problem, and I suspect he realises that he cannot defeat that. By the way, Mr Cruddas is one of the few remaining Labour MPs who hasn't sold his soul to Brussels. Labour resistance to the EU is an important political tradition going back to Hugh Gaitskell through Peter Shore and Tony Benn, and often forgotten these days.
I don't think such voters would ever have gone to the Tories. The tribal loathing of the Tories is endemic in Labour, and will not go away. It's one of the reasons why I am convinced that David Cameron cannot get an overall majority in a United Kingdom election. Even if Labour loses, he will not necessarily win. Labour unpopularity just won't convert into Tory popularity, or even grudging Tory votes.
What's needed, as I say over and over again, is a party that isn't the Tories but is genuinely conservative, neither bigoted nor politically correct. Such a party could not only give the country a chance of revival. It would be the only guaranteed democratic way to stop the BNP.
