Ah, Tipton. That scary bit between Brum and Wolves where I got lost on my way to work. I tend to regard everything on that train line - Smethwick, Sandwell, Dudley, Tipton, Coseley - as urban, squished as it is between two cities. No doubt they’d be furious and cling on to their neither-Wolves-nor-Brum independence, but since last time I was there they had posters saying “people like you vote BNP!”, I really couldn’t care less about their feelings in the matter.

Regarding the Nick Griffin thing, what does this mean in practice? A more openly nasty leader? A less openly nasty leader? Amusing implosion with lots of factions and never getting organised enough to fight an election ever again? Cos #3 would be good, but I’m scared of #1.

I’ve just realised that as analogies go, this is about as counterproductive to the point I was trying to make as it possibly could be.

I couldn’t agree more.

Well, up to a point. It is an issue as far as the ongoing controversy is concerned with respect to the years of the Civil War and the dictatorship, and whether they should continue to be forgotten.

I think the point though is less the party itself - regardless of Aznar’s political background, I don’t think it’s going to launch an uprising from Pamplona if PSOE win the next election - but its support, since the PP’s core support can without excessive unfairness be defined as “the sort of people who supported Franco”. There’s always a sizeable section of of people who would have no huge problem with a fascist party or government wwere one to emerge and for that reason I’m not sure we can rely on the considerable ability of British far-right parties to expose themselves as bumbling oafs.

(The PP aren’t really “Franco’s party”, by the way, though their founders were people who had been Francoists. Whether this is any more or less relevant than the Stalinist background of East European post-Communist parties, I don’t really know.)

Again, this depends on the definition, I suppose. Tipton is not ‘urban’ per se but is a peripheral part of the West Midlands conurbation, with a roughly similar relationship to Birmingham that Becontree has to Central London. Stoke is a city consisting entirely of small towns, all of which (except perhaps Hanley) regard themselves as peripheral and all of which resent each other. Going beyond these examples, the BNP have also had a councillor elected in Chelmsley Wood, which like Becontree is a large white working class estate on the edge of a major city.

I agree that the housing issue is not as important on a national level as Jon Cruddas thinks it is, but the BNP do court a similar demographic harbouring similar resentments wherever they go, and there are notable similarities between B&D and some of the other places they have done well, so while it shouldn’t be treated as symptomatic of the rest of the country nor would I really consider it a case to be taken in isolation.

good spot - I erroneously believed that Kilroy-Silk got into Westminster on a UKIP ticket but he didn’t. With respect to the PP, their history is that they’re Franco’s party, but this has basically no practical relevance today.

Simon - my mental definition of “urban” is “larger than Wrexham”, which Loughton and Tipton aren’t but Stoke is (although Stoke on Trent city council is quite an electoral oddity and low turnout effects are going to be even more pronounced here). I don’t think that any of the three of them is particularly similar to B&D, not least because they don’t really have the same housing issues.

I think the real damage done to the body politic is done by the major political parties’ pandering to the BNP electorate, precisely because they regard it as winnable by dog-whistle politics or sophisticated electoral bribery. If the BNP was a mainstream party fighting elections on a similar basis to the Greens, there would be no point in trying to skim off their supporters with BNP-lite policies, and so nobody would have dreamed of anything like the preferential housing policies that Margaret Hodge has suggested, and the Tories wouldn’t have spent ten years flogging the “asylum seekers” issue - with genuine consequences for the people who got sent back as a result.

Not especially true, depending on how you define urban. They have six councillors in Epping Forest, all in the ex-LCC estate area of Loughton which is reminiscent of Becontree in B&D. Then there’s the seven in Stoke, and they were very strong in Tipton until this year, though they appear to be dying off there now. In the north, they tend to do well in the urban-rural periphery - chunks of ex-industrial town which happen to be surrounded by countryside.

“And if they get elected, then they should be given their state money and recognition even if it eats us up inside”

Yes, this is my point - if they get elected we are required by law to afford them a certain amount of legitimacy and public funding, which even if it doesn’t result in an accumulation of support, does have a damaging (albeit minor) effect on the body politic. This is why I support efforts to stop them getting elected. I wouldn’t favour gerrymandering or anything like that (although I do support the policy of all three main parties that they do not work with BNP councillors under any circumstances).

(Did UKIP have an MP? I’m not sure. Mind you I was living in Thame during the last Euro-election but one and it felt like a one-party state where UKIP was the party.)

I think you’re likely wrong, to a degree, about housing. Perhaps it impacts on me because it was a major factor in my emigrating, but the inaccessibility of housing is very serious in contemporary Britain, and just because it’s not remotely logical or fair for it to be connected with immigrants (like it’s immigrants who are buying all the houses in Norfolk villages!) doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I’d reckon it’s resource shortages which normally form the basis for the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities, even though they’ve usually got less of those resources than anyone else. Of course if there wasn’t a basis of racism in the first place then the scapegoating couldn’t happen.

Not sure what you mean about the PP, could you elaborate? (For what it’s worth, from where I am they mostly look like a party of sleek rich kids, a bit like Justine Greening. Basically interested in low taxes and not much else, although quite happy to play the anti-immigration card if it helps them get elected.)

And at the end of the day we have to say are we serious about democracy here; like Yellow Pages, proportional representation (if we’re serious about it and I hope we are) has to be there for the nasty things in life too. If the BNP can garner 5% of the votes, then it deserves a seat on the GLA and maybe even a MEP (albeit that this seems unlikely to me since the support here is drawn off by UKIP, the nationalist non-Nazi party). I am just not a fan of the way that people lose all objectivity when the BNP are the subject, and start agreeing to all sorts of fixes and gerrymanders which are bound to be used against minority parties in general.

And if they get elected, then they should be given their state money and recognition even if it eats us up inside - one of my big reasons for being against state funding of political parties is that I’m pretty sure that fairly serious constitutional damage will be waved through under guise of “whatever means necessary to rook the BNP out of their state funding”.

I don’t believe in the “increasing returns” dynamic that Simon and Justin are worried about - the FN and the various Italian fascists have both topped out, and this despite having undergone a multi-year political striptease of every distinctively fascist policy they ever had - the limiting case of this would be the Spanish Popular Party of course. UKIP got themselves an MEP, an MP, places on Question Time, the whole shebang and shooting match and see how much good it did them.

On the specifics of Cruddas’ views, I think he’s extrapolating from Barking & Dagenham, which is a very atypical area of BNP support (as far as I can see, it’s basically their only electoral[1] power base in an urban area). He’s also taking for granted that the racist vote isn’t actually a racist vote but is motivated by a resource conflict over council housing. I really, really, don’t see this; we had the whole debate over “our children can’t afford to buy houses in the villages where they were born” ad nauseam in Wales and I thought it was pretty ridiculous then, but in effing Dagenham? He also seems to believe that the white working class population would thank Labour for removing right-to-buy, which I doubt.

[1] Important point here that the electoral power base of the BNP doesn’t necessarily match up to the power base of fascists in the streets - frinstance, the BNP were able to start a race riot in Oldham a few years ago, but they’ve never had a councillor elected there. Similarly, they are strong in the streets in Bradford, but their electoral victories there have been in outlying semirural suburbs.