Airstrip One

The we're all right club

David Carr says he "hearty commend" my piece on working class alienation. Interestingly the analysis that Mr Carr and myself share is not that dissimilar to a certain far left group that Mr Carr dismissed as producing "semi-literate drivel". Never mind.

A tad more complacent is Jim Bennett, who claims it's all down to this lovely Anglosphere. "Rather than garner 15 percent of the national vote, the BNP took three local council seats of the nearly 6,000 at stake, not dissimilar to performances in other times."

Well no. The BNP has only ever won one council seat in the past, and that was in a bye-election with Labour collusion (they wanted to get the Liberal Democrats out of Tower Hamlets). They have now taken three seats, in the face of a concerted campaign and in a general election. It's small breakthroughs like this that got the Lib Dems started.

Iain Murray also comes up with a bit of a redundant suggestion, "I've always said that Tories should attack Nazis for being un-British and therefore un-patriotic."

Well, this has been what the Anti-Nazi League (look at the name, it's not the anti-radical nationalist league), Searchlight and the Labour Party have been trying for years. It simply ain't working.

Firstly the BNP strenuously tries to put on suits and put away the black shirts. They may not be completely succesful, but they will get more so as their "Euro nationalist" strategy continues apace.

Secondly many of the working class don't actually care about the BNP's views on whether the holocaust happened or whether the Jews control the media. To them this is all academic. What matters is how bad their schools are, how much crime there is on their estate and how their children won't be able to get a job or flat in the town they've grown up in.

The BNP address these issues. Now, they're wrong on their diagnosis and solutions, but they do address the working class despair that is being ignored by all the other parties - especially the Labour Party with its domination by the working class's enemies in the white collar public sector unions.

It is by addressing the root causes of the right - working class despair - rather than saying "Don't vote Nazi" (there's an original slogan) that the far right will be worsted.

The Conservative Party can beat the far right by addressing Labour's lost constituency, not by irrelevant name calling.