Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe

From Local to Transnational

Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, Brian Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136330384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years the revival of the far right and anti-Semitic, racist and fascist organizations has posed a significant threat throughout Europe. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe provides a broad geographical overview of the dominant strands within the contemporary radical right in both Western and Eastern Europe.

After providing some local and regional perspectives, the book has a series of national case studies of particular countries and regions including: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Scandinavia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. A series of thematic chapters examine transnational phenomena such as the use of the Internet, the racist music scene, cultural transfers and interaction between different groups.

Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this is essential reading for all those with an interest in contemporary extremism, fascism and comparative party politics.

PART I
Local and Regional Perspectives

1

BACKLASH IN THE ‘HOOD’

Exploring support for the British National Party (BNP) at the local level¹

Matthew J. Goodwin

Hurrah for Barking’s ancient town,
And fishing population:
May ample gains
Reward their pains,
And help enrich the nation
(Verse from The Song of the Ice, John Frost 1849; cited in Curtis 2006)

Introduction

The extreme right in Britain is typically considered a failure. In contrast to the performance of similar parties in several other European states, extreme-right parties in Britain have seldom appeared as more than a minor irritant in the party system. The failure of parties like the National Front (NF) in the 1970s and more recent British National Party (BNP) have been traced to several factors: a national tradition of tolerance, deference to authority and anti-fascism; an electoral system that hinders minor parties; the positioning of the centre-right Conservatives who have offered a more credible brand to citizens anxious over immigration; and an agency-based approach that emphasizes the nature of the extreme right itself. Seen from this latter perspective, one explanation for the historic failure of this movement in Britain has been the nature of extreme-right parties themselves and their overt allegiance to neo-Nazi ideology, namely radical xenophobia, biological racism and an outright rejection of democracy, parliamentarism and pluralism (Carter 2005). These features have arguably been especially pronounced in the absence of strong and charismatic leadership, which might otherwise have minimized electoral losses.

It is important, however, not to lose sight of an alternative perspective that takes as its starting point the observation that while the extreme right has failed to achieve a national breakthrough, in particular local enclaves it has rallied significant levels of support. Despite its extremist origins and organizational weakness, in some areas in Britain the BNP has built on a longer tradition of public support for exclusionary campaigns, and among communities that appear especially susceptible to perceptions of intergroup competition and threat. At the same time, however, the wider literature on the extreme right in Europe devotes only limited attention to these ‘local breakthroughs’, and the way in which they are often embedded in a specific local history and set of circumstances (though see Mudde 2007; Veugelers in this volume). This explorative chapter aims to sharpen our understanding of the importance of local context to the emergence of extreme-right parties by investigating the rise of the BNP in two case studies (and doing so prior to the party’s setbacks that followed the general election in 2010). While a focus on the local level limits the level of generalizability, the potential benefit is a richer and more nuanced understanding of how movements on the extreme right mobilize initial support amidst particular local environments.

Ethnic competition and local context

In recent years, attempts to explain public hostility toward immigration and – by extension – support for the extreme right have often drawn on ethnic competition theory. Seen from this perspective, actual or perceived intergroup competition and threat is a core explanatory variable for the development of exclusionary behaviour, whether hostile attitudes toward immigration and asylum or a preference for more restrictive policies (Ivarsflaten 2005; McLaren and Johnson 2007; Schneider 2008; Sniderman et al. 2004). Rather than stemming from economic self-interest, these studies and others trace public hostility to a more diffuse set of concerns over perceived threats to national identity, the unity of the national community and values. Several studies of support for the extreme right have built on this literature, tracing the rise of these parties to perceptions among some citizens that resources and interests are threatened by immigration and rising ethno-cultural diversity (e.g. Gibson 2002; Goodwin 2011; Veugelers and Chiarini 2002). Confronted with these ‘threats’, citizens turn to extreme-right parties as part of an instrumental attempt to halt these demographic changes, and endorse their claim that the state should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native in-group while out-groups are threatening the national community (Mudde 2007: 21–22; also Betz 2007).

In earlier decades, similar arguments were recruited to account for rising support for the extreme right in Britain. In the 1960s and 1970s, some suggested that a combination of a new phase of immigration and an economic downturn produced a strong anti-immigrant and nativist backlash that found expression in support for the maverick Conservative MP Enoch Powell and, slightly later, the National Front (Messina 1995: 694). During this period, it was argued that the Labour Party in particular was ‘vulnerable to losing voters inspired by racist and xenophobic feelings in marginal neighbourhoods and working-class districts where residents felt economically and culturally threatened by the new migrants’ (Kitschelt 1995: 246). Importantly, however, when seeking to explain support for the NF these studies also drew attention to the importance of idiosyncratic historical experiences and traditions in certain areas of the country, where members of the working classes appeared especially susceptible to feelings of intergroup competition and threat. Aside from the Greater London and West Midlands regions, a more specific example was the inner East End of London, where disproportionately high levels of support for the extreme right were linked to a tradition of economic insecurity and casualism, which had its roots in the old docklands. Alongside a history of ethnic homogeneity, the argument was that these local conditions had contributed to the emergence of a culture that was parochial, combative, and prone to territorial sensitivity and – when ‘threatened’ – oppositional scapegoating and racist mobilization (Husbands 1983: 143; also Stedman Jones 1971; Whiteley 1979). The National Front subsequently mobilized support in these areas by appealing to sensitivities that were deeply entrenched in sections of these working-class communities, and thus found that its appeals had a deep and historically based resonance (Husbands 1983: 140).²

These arguments in early studies of the British extreme right – and the importance of local contextual factors more generally – have largely been glossed in the recent literature on the ‘third wave’ of extreme-right parties that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Generally speaking, rather than undertake detailed studies of (often isolated) local breakthroughs, scholars have devoted more energy to analysing large-scale comparative datasets and aggregate macro-level data. Given recent methodological and theoretical advances (see Mudde 2007), this approach has yielded important dividends and insights. Nonetheless, by downplaying local context these studies often lack a rich and nuanced understanding of how these parties achieve their initial electoral breakthroughs. The next section summarizes the emergence of the BNP and research on its support, before investigating the party’s growth in two local areas.

The emergence of the British National Party

Following the demise of the 1970s NF, the BNP was born in 1982 and for much of the next two decades remained in the electoral wilderness. Since 2001, however, the party recruited rapidly growing levels of support and became the most electorally successful extreme-right party in British history. Between 1992 and 2010, the number of BNP candidates at general elections increased from only 13 to 338. Over the same period, the number of BNP votes at these national elections increased from 7,000 to over 500,000. This electoral growth partly reflected a change of strategy, which led the party to invest in targeted and community-based campaigns. Some evidence of the more targeted strategy was the growing number of deposits that the party retained at general elections. To contest a parliamentary constituency each party candidate is required to deposit £500, which is returned only if a threshold of five per cent of the vote is met. The BNP retained seven deposits in 2001, 34 in 2005 and over 70 in 2010.

Despite these gains in national contests, the BNP essentially remained a phenomenon of local politics. A lack of resources, an unfavourable electoral system and a strategy that sought to emulate the early local successes of the French Front National (FN) in areas such as Dreux all led the BNP to focus heavily on contesting local elections. This strategic shift paid some notable dividends. In contrast to the National Front in the 1970s, the party obtained a foothold in local government after electing councillors in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, Bradford, Broxbourne, Burnley, Epping Forest, Kirklees and Stoke-on-Trent. This momentum continued in May 2008, when the party gained one seat on the Greater London Assembly. The investment in these local contests reflected the party’s embrace of a ‘community politics’ style of campaigning, whereby it sought to cultivate an image of legitimacy and electoral credibility at the local level. This led activists to target a disparate array of local grievances: allegations of ‘anti-white’ racially motivated attacks in Pennine Lancashire; discontent over a lack of social housing in outer-east London; or local rumours that Asian gangs were ‘grooming’ young white girls in West Yorkshire. These campaigns were often delivered through intensive grass-roots activism that included strong emphasis on encouraging face-to-face contact with voters. One study of BNP voting in three northern towns suggested that residents experienced more face-to-face contact with BNP activists than with their mainstream counterparts (JRCT 2004; also Wilks-Heeg 2009).

The BNP’s social base of support

Broader research on anti-immigration sentiment in Britain suggests that the citizens who are hostile toward immigrants and favour more restrictive policies are motivated less by concern over personal well-being than the perception that immigrants and minority groups threaten British culture and wider society. As noted by McLaren and Johnson (2007: 715; see also Bowyer 2009), these feelings of intergroup competition and threat ‘may be rather symbolic in nature and may stem from concerns about the loss of certain values or ways of life because of the presence of minority groups and immigrants’. In earlier years, studies of support for the extreme right similarly emphasized the importance of these concerns. The emergence of the National Front was traced to skilled manual (male) workers in regions that experienced higher than average levels of immigration, though mainly Greater London and the West Midlands, where competition for jobs and social housing was felt particularly acutely (Harrop et al. 1980; Husbands 1983; Taylor 1979; Whiteley 1979).

In more recent years, a growing literature on support for the BNP has produced similar findings, highlighting the importance of immigration-related concerns to explaining this trend (Bowyer 2008; Cutts et al. 2011; Ford and Goodwin 2010; Goodwin 2011). The findings in these studies point to the con clusion that the extreme right performs strongest in areas where deprived and less well educated members of the working classes feel under ‘threat’ from immigration and, in particular, Muslim communities of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage. During the period of its early local gains, analyses of aggregate-level data indicated that the BNP recruited most of its support in areas where there were large numbers of skilled and semi-skilled workers, and higher proportions of citizens with no qualifications (Cruddas et al. 2005; John et al. 2006). Subsequent and more sophisticated analysis of BNP support at local elections suggested the party polled strongest in urban deprived areas, where education levels are low and housing markets are under strain (Bowyer 2008). This study also examined the impact of ethnic diversity, providing initial evidence that while the party was most likely to stand candidates and recruit support in local authorities that had large Muslim communities of Bangladeshi or Pakistani heritage, support was more heavily concentrated among white neighbourhoods within these more diverse areas. The first individual-level survey of BNP voters by Ford and Goodwin (2010) revealed how these supporters tended to be older working-class men who lacked educational qualifications and were profoundly pessimistic about their economic prospects. Foremost, these voters were concerned about immigration and were also extremely dissatisfied with the leaders of the three mainstream parties. Compared with support for the earlier NF, support for the extreme right had shifted northwards and was more evenly distributed among semi- and unskilled workers. While these studies shed light on the general drivers of support for the extreme right, they tell us little about how the BNP emerged in specific local areas. The next section examines the rise of the party in the two local case studies of Burnley in the North West of England, and Barking and Dagenham in outer-east London.

Two local case studies

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Burnley and Barking and Dagenham provided disproportionately high levels of support to the BNP. Interestingly, however, in both cases the party was a relatively new arrival to local politics. In Burnley, the local BNP branch was only established in 1999 and at local elections the next year kept a low profile (contesting only two wards).³ Yet despite this lack of an organizational presence, at the general election in 2001 the party polled over 10 per cent of the vote and quickly established a significant presence at subsequent local elections. In 2002, the party benefitted from lacklustre grassroots campaigns by mainstream party activ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: mapping the ‘right of the mainstream right’ in contemporary Europe
• PART I Local and Regional Perspectives
• PART II The Southern European Extreme Right after Dictatorships
• PART III The Extreme Right in a Post-Communism Context
• PART IV National and Comparative Perspectives: A Challenge to ‘Exceptionalism’?
• PART V From ‘Local’ to ‘Transnational’
• Index