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The BNP and the Local Elections.

Old Hickory

On Thursday the local elections went underway but the result was rather muted, with very little overall change amongst the parties.  The elections are staggered over a four-year cycle rather than having all the councils up for grabs at one time.  This year none of the shires were contested.  A mixed night left Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats with little to celebrate.  The result was that Labour has 63 councils with 2,402 councillors, the Tories 42 councils with 2,006 councillors, the Liberal Democrats 15 councils with 1,262 councillors with the others having 2 councils and 96 councillors.  The British National Party’s [BNP] result was described by Le Pen as very encouraging on Friday because of their three new councillors – though they controlled no councils.  There were 52 councils with no overall control.  The Tories were up by 238 councillors and the Liberal Democrats by 44 councillors but the loss of 339 councillors for the Labourites was not as bad as they feared.

The turnout was 35%, the highest for any local election since Labour came to power and up significantly from the 29.6% in 2000.  It was highest in the areas that tried out the postal vote and a leading Labourite, Charles Clarke, predicted that the General Election would be by post within a decade.  In Iain Duncan Smith’s first major electoral test, the Tories gained Adur, Swale, Peterborough, Wokingham, and Enfield, where Michael Portillo lost his seat in 1997.  But they lost power in Cheltenham, Worthing and Eastbourne.  Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram called the Conservative performance “workmanlike”.  He added: “We are at a very early stage in building our policies and I think we can be satisfied with last night.”  But there was talk in the press of discontent with the leadership over there being less progress than expected.  Smith pressed on with his reforms in the party (Sunday 5 May) by sacking Ann Winterton for telling a racist joke that had the punch line that the Indianids were ten a penny.

A number of mayors arose but hardly enough to make the reform anywhere near complete or the new norm in the towns and cities of England.  The Liberal Democrats achieved a mayoral victory in Watford.  Labour now has mayors in Newham and Doncaster.  The Conservatives have a mayor from the closely fought mayoral contest in North Tyneside.  Two new mayors were elected that caused a stir.  The one that many thought brought politics into disrepute was campaigning in a monkey suit.  He got the suit in his job as a football team mascot where he was known as H’Angus the Monkey.  But his actual name is Stuart Drummond.  He is now mayor of Hartlepool.  But he immediately threw off the monkey suit and announced “I have resigned as H’Angus.”  He is 28 single and still lives with his parents.   The media loved it.  They asked all sorts of people what they thought of him. The local MP likes him and looks forward to working with him and that is Peter Mandelson.  He told the Today Programme that he was quite a bright fellow with considered policies and that the gimmick did not matter much.  The Monster Raving Loony Party thought that it was a wonderful event and they wish they had thought of it.

The other mayor that mattered was the one they call Robocop.   He is Ray Mallon, the pioneer of Zero Tolerance in the UK.  He is mayor of Middlesborough and that is not far from Hartlepool where Mallon was suspended as a police chief after making a success in the role in Middlesborough.  He is popular in both places but was tied up in what many hold was a trumped up charge – a result of envy at his success.  He now has little to do with policing as mayor but that is not how he sees it.  He said “I intend to use every local authority power possible to translate the fear of crime from the public to the criminal.”  The eight million pounds spent on the corruption enquiry that involved Mallon and sixty others was thrown out earlier this year.

The Liberal Democrats won Norwich which had been a Labour stronghold for almost 70 years.  Labour got more of their supporters out to vote in some of its traditional heartlands but the party still lost 20 seats.  They lost overall power in Hull, where their deputy leader John Prescott is the MP.  They also lost control of Stoke-on-Trent.  The party’s vote dropped 14% in London boroughs, where it lost Lambeth, Enfield and Harrow.  However, they did win back Bexley.  The NHS support group that arose in the General Election continued their success at the council level.  The Kidderminster campaign to save the town’s hospital repeated its victory at the general election.  The Greens put up their best performance since the 1989 European elections by winning 7% where they stood and that was up two points up on 2000.

The Independent featured the threat from the British National Party [BNP]on the front page, taking up the whole of it, on Saturday 4 May.  They clearly think it is big news.  The BNP last had a councillor elected nine years ago.  The BNP victories are the first time a far right candidate has won a seat since Derek Beackon in the London borough of Tower Hamlets in1993.  This time they got an average 27% of the vote in Oldham but failed to win any seats there.  However, civil engineer David John Edwards did triumph in Burnley and was later followed by his party colleague, Carol Hughes.  Their anthem is The Dam-busters March.  Like Eric Coates, they are more typical in outlook to the 1950s than to pre-1939 Germany.  After recounts on Friday, Terry Grogan joined them to make three councillors in the UK for the BNP – all in Burnley.  Terry Grogan won by just four votes.  He had suffered five recounts.  The turnout was higher than in most other places at 53%.  Similarly, the turnout in France on 5 May was high.  This phenomenon is good for democracy.  It is not often that over 50% of the electorate turn out to vote.  Edwards polled 898 votes.  Carol Hughes, a 43-year-old divorcee and sometime Labour Supporter, won a seat in Rosegrove with Lowerhouse with 751 votes.  She used to be a care worker but she is now a section leader in a local car parts factory.  In her election leaflet, she denied being a racist but she said that New Labour had lost touch with the people of Burnley.  Both refused to speak to the media as they claimed to have been unfairly treated by them in the run up to the local elections.  She has a sixteen-year-old boy, and Paul Harris (The Daily Mail, 4 May 2002, p7) reports that her neighbours like her and they say the BNP is no longer as it used to be.  The BNP had run in 13 of the 15 Burnley wards.  The town’s Labour MP, Peter Pike, said the voters had been conned by “racist” candidates but the BNP said they had been open on all the issues.  Labour chairman, Charles Clarke, who was on the ITV Dimbleby programme on 5 May, said that the BNP’s success was “disappointing”.  They were only interested in strife.  But the BNP leader Nick Griffin called the result a “triumph”.  He said that the BNP’s objective remained “an all white Britain”.  He added, “It is very good news for us.  It is an amazing victory.”

The BNP averaged 18%, roughly the same as Le Pen was reported to have had in his 5 May 2002 play off with Chirac in France.  That result was their best so far and not so far off the peak the National Front reached in the late-1970s.  They fielded only 68 candidates for the almost 6,000 seats contested in England.

UP HOME    © Libertarian Alliance  2002

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Two new mayors were elected that caused a stir.  The one that many thought brought politics into disrepute was campaigning in a monkey suit.  He got the suit in his job as a football team mascot where he was known as H’Angus the Monkey.  But his actual name is Stuart Drummond.  He is now mayor of Hartlepool.  But he immediately threw off the monkey suit and announced “I have resigned as H’Angus.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Their anthem is The Dam-busters March.  Like Eric Coates, they are more typical in outlook to the 1950s than to pre-1939 Germany.  After recounts on Friday, Terry Grogan joined them to make three councillors in the UK for the BNP – all in Burnley.  Terry Grogan won by just four votes.  He had suffered five recounts.  The turnout was higher than in most other places at 53%.  Similarly, the turnout in France on 5 May was high.  This phenomenon is good for democracy.