BNP Win 2 seats in the European Parliament

It's been announced that the BNP have won 2 seats in the European Parliament, something which was far from expected. I wondered what peoples opinions were with regard to this 'victory', do you think this is likely to lead to more seats being won in local elections? Or will goodness and sense prevail and people step back from the brink and realise that they're only hurting themselves by voting for them.

Are people voting for these parties to make a protest against the ones that inevitably share power?

Is the trend of voting for right-wing parties on the rise around Europe?

This post has been edited by m15hun: Jun 8 2009, 01:44 AM

I notice that they were voted in by backwards northeners...

In Norn Iron until the peace process the DUP (proddy boys kick the pope, taigs out etc) and Sinn Fein (kill the queen and all brits etc) were the two main minority parties... Then there was the cease fire and they became the 2 MAJOR parties... And we end up with Ian NEVER NEVER NEVER Paisley as 1st minister and Martin murdering scum bag Maginniss as minister for education...
With Tony I don't deal with terrorists Blaire grinning like a demented idiot in the middle of it all....

My point, the world didn't end....
The BMP (British muppet Party) won't make a blind bit of difference to a corrupt system where the winner of the x factor got more votes than Tony wank Blaire...

Especially when elected to a body which "influences" but does not make policy...

Maybe as far as the Euro elections go. As far as the local council elections, there's a distinct southern bias:



I note however that in the locals, the BNP got about the same share of the vote nationwide as did Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nutbar Independence party - hardly a political powerhouse.

The BNP have growing support in the South and it seems to be mainly in working class, industrial areas. Near me they are out leafleting all the time and have made significant gains with the local population. Just up the road in Grays they are the dominant party, but that's not surprising as the place is a dockside town and is largely full of skinhead knuckle-dragger, West Ham fans.

I'm seeing and hearing more and more people, who I thought were sensible, coming around to their bullshit and they seem to me marketing themselves more successfully as the 'If you don't like Gordon Brown or David Cameron, vote for us!' Party.

I understand that was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek reply, but it should be pointed out the flippancy may inspire others to ignore the fact that the much vaunted London Assembly has a BNP member. Or that the very first BNP councilor to be elected was in Millwall, London. Or that the biggest ever share of the vote for a BNP candidate was in Goresbrook, East London where they received 54% of the vote in a local election... Which greatly overshadows the 9% these clowns received in the North for the recent EUP.

Far from being a Northern problem, this is a national issue. Infact, had recent local election results from London (where the BNP received 17%) been reflected nationwide in the EUP election, the BNP would have had received nearer to 12-15 MEP seats instead of the 2 they limped home with yesterday.

Don't anybody think that the fascists are only in somebody else's back yard, because they're everywhere... The national average share of the vote for the BNP in this election is is only marginally lower (2 point something percent) than that which got these tossers elected in the North.

On the other hand they got elected with less votes this election than the number of votes they got last time round (figures here) so we may congratulate ourselves that there are fewer wankers than before. Even in the north.

When I complained about the catastrophic lurch to the right in Europe, and the ascendency of the far-right in the UK, some guy I'm arguing with on another forum tried to claim that far from being a far-right party, the BNP was in fact a far-left party, due to their policy of wanting to nationalise all key industries. Do you think he's right? I did point out that the German Nazi party (National Socialism) was a big fan of nationalisation, and that fascist parties do tend to want to run managed economies...

Calling the BNP a far-left party is putting a tad too much spin on the matter, for me - fascist is more the mark!

It's an interesting point. They're definitely right wing, but they recruit from traditional Labour areas and from people that otherwise would be a dead-cert for a Labour vote.... I guess they realise this and play to their crowd accordingly.

Generally speaking though, those that call the BNP far left, tend to do so because they get their political understanding from tabloid editorials that do nothing but bleat about how evil the left is.

The founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, was a Labour minister before embracing Fascism.

The terms left and right wing originated in the pre-revolutionary French Parliament and described more or less the same duality as was represented in the English Civil War: on the one side the landed aristocracy led by the king and in opposition the newly wealthy merchant class.

I think it makes more sense to talk about parties in terms of their philosophical stance and use the term far-right as a synonym for Fascism in general, which encompasses both the rampant nationalism of the UKIP, with rabid Nazism of the National Front and the more general fascism of Jorg Haider's mob (I can't remember the names of every nutball party in Europe.)

The BNP far left? Thats a laugher. What I do find interesting being a north american is that there actually exists left and right parties in Europe. All we have here (in Canada) are 2 center/right parties and a center/"left" (in large quotes) party. In the US there are only two center/right parties. Must make elections a little more interesting anyway. Elections here are a joke, the choice between one pro business moron or another pro business moron wearing a slightly different colored hat.

Here too mate, hence my earlier post... Pompus fuckwits who are ALL in it for the money... The average MP only gets 5 hours sleep he needs to spend the rest of his time defrauding the system... The only difference between Tony wank Blaire/ Obama/ Brown/ etc etc etc and Pol Pot/Mugabe/Hitler is that they haven't figured out how to get away with it yet....

Isn't Obama starting a Hitler, Ahem! ooops Obama youth movment here here or more moderately here... I said in an earlier post in a different pre election topic that there would be little difference in American foreign policy under Obama, well it's been over 6 months and what has he done, SIMLED a lot, Preached and promised CHANGE and HOPE... Unfortunately the people of Gaza can't eat hope the Iraqis can't rebuild their decimated country with hope and the children of the world blown to bits with American bombs can't be replaced with HOPE...


Didn't Hitler call for Change and Hope for the future.... Isn't Obama sending more troops into Afghanistan and interning and torturing even more innocent people in Guantanamo.. Ahh thank fuck we got a peaceful president... As Neville Chamberlain proudly proclaimed after meeting Hitler "Peace in our time"

This post has been edited by bigbaldybloke: Jun 9 2009, 11:00 AM

Well have fun in Stalagluft Europe

Here in NZ, they elected the Nationals, who are tories by any other name. They've been in power 6 months and everybody's fed up with them already. I think after years of a decent honest labour government, everybody forgot what actual tories were really like (bastards, mainly). Well at least NZ has fixed 3-year terms so we don't have to put up with the fuckers for long.

It's not really surprising that Europe took a lurch to the right. There's a recession on and people get petty and mean and less altruistic when insecurity sets in. Thatcher traded on that for years. But parties like the BNP transcend left and right - they're about the worst instincts in human beings. A vote for the BNP is essentially a vote for the idea that human beings are just animals incapable of transcending their genetic predisposition to fear the stranger, and that anybody who is not of our tribe is somehow less than human. The fact that so many otherwise reasonable people are prepared to buy into this fear of the unknown, without first taking the effort to read up on the fucking subject and just going with what they read in the Daily Mail, is a source of endless disapointment.

IMHO there hasn't been a lurch to the right. In most countries the center (left and right) have lost, benefitting the wings (right and left) or in some cases the ecologists (who are mainly left in economical matters).

Well, if Foggy's earlier link was accurate (and I see no reason to believe it wasn't) then the fringe parties have actually got less popular, but have given the impression of doing better by a fluke brought about by poor voter turn-out for the main parties.

Either way, I'm deeply ashamed that Britain now has two fascists sat in the EUP claiming they represent the mindset of the people of this country

Like it or not though YMG, that's democracy in action. If one thinks about the number of MEP's that there are (33 in the UK) then two utterly racist MEP's probably represents the proportion of utterly racist voters. I have often thought that the upside of having racists in elected bodies is that it makes closeted racists in the mainstream parties less able to hide behind weasel words. If there were a BNP mp then David Cameron would have to make it clear in each speech that he makes that the reason his membership support whatever policy were for quite different reasons that the BNP fella agrees with them.

A decent poll a few years back showed that little under half of Dutch speaking Belgians consider themselves racist. Up till last elections our racist far right party Vlaams Belang scored around 20%.

At first, and for quite some time, I thought that was really shameful and appalling until I realised that that meant that the majority of racists don't want to see their racism reflected in politics.

IMO the difference between last elections ant those that went before was that Vlaams Belang lost it's monopoly on Flemish independence to NVA, which got around 14%, and govt corruption innuendos to Lijst Dedecker, which got around 7%. Leaving only the hardcore racists and the utterly dimwitted as potential voters.

Not sure how that translates to the GB imo backward political system, but the key elements to defeating the far right seem to be denying them the beaten puppy / underdog effect (what we call the Calimero effect), attacking them on their messages, not the messengers, addressing the few valid points they do have and accepting that the chronically malcontents and truly dimwitted will keep voting for them.

Our executive has no popular mandate, our legislative chamber is historically elected by a minority, our oversight chamber is entirely unelected, and our head of state got the job because her dad was the boss beforehand. Our judiciary and legal advocates and our legislative officials wear a mix of women's stockings, 18^th century buckle-shoes and/or powdered wigs.

I fail to see how any of this is backwards! Are you sure you meant OUR system and not somebody else's?