The Far Right and Human Rights
Created | Updated Jan 29, 2003
'We're over the Pennines'
Those words will, I'm sure, haunt me for a long time. I heard them on a TV news bulletin on Friday morning, and they were being uttered by one of the occupants of a van full of jubilant British National Party supporters. Among the people in the van was Adrian Marsden, the newly-elected Calderdale Borough Councillor for Mixenden in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
Marsden had just become the fifth person to be elected to a local council as a representative of the BNP, whose policies include the 'voluntary' removal of non-Caucasians from Britain and a ban on any further immigration into the country by non-white people. He was, however, the first to bring the BNP's brand of bigotry to a council in Yorkshire. Their other triumphs had come in Oldham and Burnley, two towns in Lancashire, on the other side of the Pennine hills. The BNP were indeed over the Pennines - and hearing them boast about it while sitting at home in Bradford, just down the road from Halifax, I felt sickened. A filthy, scummy tide had flowed far too close to home.
Marsden's victory was, in some ways, a freak result. He received only about 29 per cent of the votes cast, and won because of an unusually even distribution of votes. The seat had previously been held by the Labour Party, but on this occasion the Labour vote was split because a former Labour councillor was standing as an independent candidate. The local council was under a cloud because of controversial payments to councillors, so a lot of voters were looking for a way to cast a protest vote.
In the end, three candidates - Marsden, the official Labour candidate and a Liberal Democrat - received between 600 and 700 votes. The divided opposition, and a vigorous campaign by the BNP, enabled Marsden to scrape home by 28 votes.
Marsden is a former member of the notoriously violent racist skinhead group Combat 18, whose name is a cryptic tribute to Adolf Hitler (A and H being the first and eighth letters of the alphabet). These days, however, he wears a suit and does his best to look respectable. Like the American Ku Klux Klan, the BNP are trying hard to improve their image and make racism seem reasonable. During the Mixenden campaign, the BNP even had the nerve to try to present themselves as champions of free speech, claiming that anti-racist campaigners were trying to deny them the right to be heard. The sight of fascists pretending to be heroic defenders of democracy would have been hilarious if the election result hadn't suggested that some were fooled.
However, that wasn't the main issue on which they campaigned. The BNP's campaign literature repeatedly stressed their hostility to the most scapegoated, demonized people in Britain: the dreaded asylum seekers.
When I was very young, it was fairly acceptable in mainstream British society to use crude racial epithets like the n-word and the shortened, hostile form of 'Pakistani'. Over the years, that thankfully changed. You'd regularly hear people saying that they weren't racist, good Lord no, but that they thought there were too many immigrants in Britain.
Somehow, you sensed that they weren't talking about immigrants from Australia or the Netherlands.
These days, you don't hear the word 'immigrant' so often. It isn't done in polite society to be mindlessly rude about all foreigners. However, you can be as ignorantly abusive as you like about asylum seekers and still be regarded as a voice of down-to-earth common sense. Reading some newspapers and listening to some populist politicians, you could get the impression that most such asylum seekers were terrorists living in mansions at the taxpayers' expense.
The reality is that, under legislation recently introduced by the Blair administration, many asylum seekers in Britain are denied any assistance when arriving in Britain. As they can't legally be employed, they often end up sleeping rough. Somehow, though, newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail never seem to get around to writing about that.
The human rights group Liberty has launched a legal challenge against the most recent round of legislation, and their lawyer Mona Arshi has commented: 'We're already seeing hundreds of people denied shelter and food, and facing a desperate situation in the middle of winter. Many are having to sleep rough. This is an appalling way to treat people - and it's a shameful way for the Government to act. It's creating a terrible injustice for the sake of looking tough, to distract attention from the bureaucratic shambles and under-resourcing that is the real problem with our asylum system'.
This is how the Government sees fit to treat people who dare to flee to Britain from countries like Iraq - where the regime is so awful that its human rights record is being put forward by the pro-war lobby as a reason to bomb the country. In fighting the Government's current stance, Liberty took up the case of four Iraqi refugees who'd been denied food and shelter after arriving in Britain.
But it seems that even that degree of cruelty isn't enough to satisfy the Government. At the weekend, Tony Blair suggested that the asylum 'problem' was now so acute that the UK might consider withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. The section of the Convention that troubles him is the one in which signatories promise not to send would-be immigrants back to countries where they're likely to be killed, tortured or persecuted. Such a commitment is, apparently, now too much for the Blair government.
Was it, I wonder, entirely coincidental that Blair made this statement three days after the BNP showed how popular xenophobia can sometimes be with the voters?
I don't know for sure. What I do know is that, before the next local elections in May, I'm going to be out campaigning for the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy was quick to condemn Blair's remarks about the European Convention on Human Rights - not for him the Prime Minister's cheap populism.
And if just 15 votes had been switched from the BNP to the Lib Dems in Mixenden, the fascists wouldn't have had their moment in the spotlight last week. They may have crossed the Pennines, but perhaps we can stop them from getting any further.
