Simon Marcus writes for Platform 10 about what he learnt from his experience as Conservative PPC in Barking. The right people have to talk about the issues in the right way otherwise politicians will not regain voters trust.
It was a privilege and also tremendously enjoyable to serve as PPC for Barking in the 2010 general election. The seat became well known as the political battleground where the BNP, playing on the fears of the ‘white working class’, tried to make a major breakthrough. This of course they failed to do, coming a surprise third behind the Conservatives.
While the BNP resoundingly lost it is perhaps pertinent to ask who really won? Labour’s Margaret Hodge fought a strong campaign with support from the unions and anti-fascist groups and romped home with a 16,000 majority and the Conservatives secured over 8,000 votes, showing that their message still has resonance among blue collar voters. However, what will become of the people of Barking and hard working people like them, struggling to make ends meet, all over Britain?
The message that screamed out at me from the doorstep was that so many decent, tolerant, hard working people no longer believed their politicians cared. Many were, quite frankly, disgusted by us. They were angry about the expenses scandal, mass immigration, rising crime (reality remains in conflict with statistics), the credit crunch and the banks walking off with tax payers money, and that these issues reflected a lack of fairness throughout society.
I remember speaking to a lady who came to Britain with the Windrush generation. She could not conceal her frustration at how hard she worked to buy a house and bring up her children, when others get a free ride; how she did her best to contribute to her country, play by the rules and pay her taxes, when others come here and are subsidised to preach hate. She complained that in her road half the people didn’t speak English, didn’t work and her grand children had go to a school where they were not taught properly, and where students were stabbed.
I doubt these feelings of resentment have gone away and I wonder how they will grow with the added misery of cuts? We are in a time of great economic difficulty with inflation and increased living costs here to stay, while national, corporate and personal debt will slow down growth. When you throw in higher unemployment, pension reductions, university fees, and probable rises in crime that come with cuts, there isn’t a great deal to be optimistic about if you are among the C2, D and E social groups, the very voters the BNP seek to target.
This mess has taken generations to make and is too complex to unravel here. It may simply be an inevitable shift of wealth and power from west to east. However at a far more basic level we can make a difference if we get some simple things right. We need to stand up for the unchanging values that so many voters in Barking have lived by and feel are no longer reflected in society: Responsibility, discipline, patriotism, respect for authority and the law, aspiration, family, decency and fairness.
Has New Labour reflected these values? I recall a long and disturbing conversation with an ardent Labour activist after the election. She believed that traditional families were unnecessary and children didn’t need fathers, that private schools should be abolished and that education should only be run by the state. She believed that the cuts were Tory ideology and we really could carry on spending for ever, and that crime was something you were compelled to do by ‘poverty’. She was uncomfortable with patriotism, the greatness of our history and only agreed with limits on immigration as a reluctant but necessary concession to the working class that New Labour, in so many ways, seemed to despise.
Labour have little hope of engaging with many disaffected voters when the majority of their front bench have neither lived nor worked in the real world. We Tory’s can, and in many ways are fighting back, but it is not easy. We have come a long way as a tolerant and progressive party and the sort of language Margaret Thatcher used to destroy the National Front in 1979 is no longer permitted. However on a surprising number of occasions in Barking I was surprised to hear people say with a glint in their eye ‘bring back Maggie, she knew how to run the country’.
No doubt Thatcher had her faults, but she spoke to the British people of their own reality and with a blunt honesty they appreciated and understood. It won’t do any more to say that talking boldly about immigration and other controversial issues is pandering to the BNP. That is cowardice, dishonesty and intellectually naïve. The BNP will undoubtedly learn from Barking and we had better stay ahead of he curve. There may well be plenty of fertile ground for them in the coming years, they are forming new alliances in Europe and similar extremist groups like the EDL are constantly evolving.
We have to truly understand and speak to disaffected voters and take action. My campaign in Barking was based on this reality and the BNP came third. So the message for the future is simple: The right people have to talk about the issues in the right way and make the right changes. If not, the wrong people will talk about the issues in the wrong way and make the wrong changes and that is a future none of us want to see.
Related posts:
Barking and Dagenham will go the same way as Tower Hamlets and Newham. White indigenous people have been disenfranchised for the sake of the propping up the Labour vote. If the Tories do not tackle immigration/colonisation this term they could be out of power for a generation. Both Labours victory in Barking and Dagenham and the Tories victory nationally is looking very shallow so far. The people will notice this.
Bob, your approach is, I think, a good example of the problem that Simon discusses in his article.
Politicians with the right values should stand up for the issues that voters care about, otherwise politicians with the wrong values step into the vacuum and take advantage.
As I have written before, I believe that the way to beat you is to demonstrate why you are wrong. I do not believe that your party has the right values; I think you are looking to play on people’s fears to further your agenda. I think the behaviour you showed and the views you expressed in the documentary are wrong and I am very glad that you were so comprehensively beaten.
Simon’s conversation with the lady who arrived with the wind rush generation says a lot about what went wrong. Labour likes dividing people up into groups and then handing out money to those they decide need help. This alienates those who are not in the ‘right’ group. Everyone should be treated the same.
Fiona let me put it this way so you understand perfectly well where I am coming from. The British people were never asked if they wanted their country changed beyond recognition by immigration nor did they get to vote on it. Much like the conspiracy of silence surrounding further European integration.
I am afraid the moral high ground is not with people of your ilk anymore and Tory and Labour are caught in a vicious circle which will inevitably lead to a very dark and chaotic place. I actually wish this was not going to happen because at the end of the day it will be the British people themselves who suffer the most. Cameron has time but if he does does not pull his finger out his party is stuffed. I am not confident he is already in the death grip of non British interest groups. The politics the BNP represents will continue to grow it is another inevitable.
If Hodge was prepared to say to an audience of ethnic minorities on national TV that ‘everyone in this room’ would be ‘thrown out of an aeroplane over the sea’ should the BNP win, I wonder what she was saying to them privately on the doorstep?
‘Playing on the fears’ of certain sections of the electorate, anyone?
Deliberately scaring the living daylights out of them, more like.
Her basic pitch was: ‘ We know you hate us but if you don’t continue to vote Labour there’ll be blood on the steets, race riots, mass lynchings etc.
It’s called lying.
And it’s 100 times more racially inflammatory and despicable than anything Woolas did.
So why is she still an MP?
In the final analysis, the people of Barking found another five years of the liar Hodge marginally more preferable to (supposed) Armageddon.
Bob: I, sadly, do understand where you are coming from. You are against the fact that we are an open society which is happy to welcome people of any race, colour, creed, whatever; to help those who need help; and which wants people to succeed.
Don’t try to distract from your racism by talking about European integration.
Inevitable? Really? Why, then, did the BNP lose all its seats on the council? Why did Nick Griffin do so badly in the Westminster seat? You are part of the problem, not the solution.
You have the wrong values, you are wrong, and you are not representative of the vast – VAST – majority of people in Britain.
I could have sworn I’d just explained that.
How many people currently in Asia and Africa need help?
10 million? 100 million?
How many would you ‘help’?
Perhaps it might have been a quaint idea (and terribly democratic) to have consulted the British people before ‘helping’ millions from the Third World?
No permission was ever sought (and continues not to be sought) because they damn well know what the answer would be.
I’m rather comforted by Francis Drake’s observation that the English eventually tend do the right thing just before it’s too late.
Fiona that’s what the system is about (i won’t call it democracy because it is far from democratic) people of different opinions it does not worry me if you like it nor my party of choice. But when party’s lie to people work against their best interests manipulate the system to win votes then don’t be surprised if decent intelligent people get upset. The British people are being disenfranchised and they are waking/stirring to that fact. Dave Cameron is effectively asleep on watch the Libdims look more effective than the Tories at the moment.
We are not going away.Try and be more patriotic steal our policies we lap it up. Party hacks and hangers on its just us a job to you. Why not given us some proper answers instead of this glib open society bull. Tories where is the substance you believe in nothing anymore. Great.
‘You are against the fact that we are an open society which is happy to welcome people of any race, colour, creed, whatever; to help those who need help; and which wants people to succeed’.
You mean in unlimited numbers, indefinitely, and including those who hate us and would rather we were living under Sharia Law (37% of young Muslims, according to a BBC survey)?
Do you live in North Devon, by any chance?
A good line from Simon Marcus’s blog is: “My campaign in Barking was based on this reality and the BNP came third.”
The future should be about hope and how to improve the situation you find yourself in. The comments from Bob and Wat are framed in this “us” v “them” narrative which isn’t relevant. We all grow together or we don’t grow at all. I suspect that many people who voted BNP in the council elections of 2006 were not real supporters of the ideology, they wanted to give Labour and the Tories a kick-up the behind for ignoring their concerns. This is why the votes evaporated in 2010.
Sorry this is rather a delayed response.
Your argument about helping those less fortunate is a canard. You can argue for it either from left or right – helping those less fortunate is a moral imperative, and it helps to make our country more secure. The commitment to aid is in all the main parties’ manifestos. You think that the aid budget should be part of your so-called ‘voluntary resettlement policy’ – I think that we have a moral and economic duty to fund projects in developing countries that make them more secure, more successful and more democratic.
I don’t think Margaret Hodge should have said that about aeroplanes, but she’s right that the BNP want to encourage non-white people to leave. I think that’s indefensible – if you’re British, you’re British. And I’m glad that our country is big-hearted enough to help people who are fleeing persecution, and hard-headed enough to welcome people who want to make the most of themselves.
We DO live in a democracy – that’s why the BNP, when people know what you really stand for, gets so few votes. People CHOOSE to vote for other parties.
‘Your argument about helping those less fortunate is a canard’.
I asked a simple question re how many ‘deserving’ people currently in the Third World we should help – a rather fundamental question, I would have thought.
You just ignored it because you can’t answer.
You also glossed over the undeniable truth that nobody ever voted for mass immigration.
Likewise, because you have no answer.
Wat: As many as possible. I believe, as I already said, that it is a good thing both morally and in a hard-headed way. It’s not a numbers thing – would you, for example, say “only 4 per cent of people may claim unemployment benefit at any one time”? No, of course not, you’d say whoever needs it should be able to claim but – crucially – you would work hard to reduce the numbers by creating jobs, training etc.
I do think that there has been extensive and prolonged mishandling and misrepresentation of the immigration issue (for example, there is an unforgiveable tendency to conflate economic migration and asylum seeking). I think governments should be better at making sure public services are properly available and fairly delivered – but that’s NOT an immigration problem per se, that is a problem of general governance.
But I repeat: We do indeed live in a democracy – a brilliant one in so many ways. All parties have immigration policies (some better than others). People vote for parties based on their own assessment of how those parties answer their concerns. And the BNP – forgive me, I’m really not trying to be confrontational about this – is not exactly winning elections. So that leads me to conclude that most people don’t want your policies.
Fiona:
‘It’s not a numbers thing – would you, for example, say “only 4 per cent of people may claim unemployment benefit at any one time”?’
4 per cent is, um, a percentage, not a number, so you can hardly use it as an example of why ‘it’s not a numbers thing’.
For anyone with the task of determining immigration policy it patently *is* a numbers thing.
‘I think governments should be better at making sure public services are properly available and fairly delivered – but that’s NOT an immigration problem per se, that is a problem of general governance.’
How could it not be at least partially an immigration issue?
I’m sure you’ll agree that immigrants are people – additional people – additional numbers of people.
And I’m sure if you actually thought about it you’d also agree that additional people need additional housing, jobs, health care etc.
Space is finite, resources are finite.
In fact, the only thing that isn’t finite is your generosity with other people’s money.
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that we’re still the benign, benevolent Empire of old, with the funds to lavish on our dominions.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the UK is up the monetary creek without a paddle.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but real life isn’t a perpetual Hope not Hate jamboree with exotic recipes and unlimited free balloons for everyone.
Whilst charity might normally begin at home, in the current financial climate anyone remotely sane would argue it pretty much ends at home, other than in exceptional circumstances.
And that certainly wouldn’t include aid for countries with nuclear weapons and a space program, for starters.
How do you reconcile your laissez-faire, ‘all are welcome’ attitude with The Optimum Population Trust’s assertion that, for reasons of sustainability, a UK population of 30 million would be, well, optimum?
‘I do think that there has been extensive and prolonged mishandling and misrepresentation of the immigration issue (for example, there is an unforgiveable tendency to conflate economic migration and asylum seeking)’
Incorrect.
Mass Third World immigration to Britain (and Europe) was and is deliberate government policy (see Andrew Neather and the article I mention further down – which you really should make the time to read).
‘And the BNP – forgive me, I’m really not trying to be confrontational about this – is not exactly winning elections. So that leads me to conclude that most people don’t want your policies’.
I think you’ll find that the BNP’s lack of major success at the ballot box, thus far, is more a result of their being a somewhat tarnished brand due to the historical antics of some of their senior members, rather than the electorate having ‘rejected their policies of fear and division’ (giggles).
Obviously the illegal intervention of the plethora of Labour front groups and quasi-homeless SWP/communist/anarchist-types whose sole aim is to see how many times they can get the word ‘Nazi BNP’ into a sentence doesn’t exactly help them either.
Most people I know broadly support the bulk of the BNP’s *stated aims*, although most don’t quite have it in them to put their cross where their mouth is, so to speak.
Yet.
Things need to get worse, unfortunately.
But with this, the latest traitorous government in a long line of traitorous governments, they most surely will.
Nothing whatsoever will be done to curb immigration or deal with Islam.
And things will continue to fester, exacerbated by the economic situation.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Beginnings’ springs to mind.
The BNP do seem to have developed a talent for self-destruction recently, though, so perhaps you can safely cease your mildly confrontational cry of ‘Nazi scum off our streets’ for now.
Although, hold on, the baton seems to have been ably picked up by The English Defence League (and not before time, either).
You may not be pleasantly surprised at how far they run with it.
N.B. There’s an excellent article about the whole mass immigration scandal today at the website http://www.gatesofvienna.com entitled ‘Book Review: The Perils of Diversity’.
You should peruse it; it may give you food for thought.