Daniel Hannan acerca da polémica em torno da eleição de um representante do British National Party para a London Assembly.
Here’s your starter for ten: do you know how many Conservatives have just been elected to the London Assembly? How many Lib Dems? Or how many Greens? I’ll bet you know one thing, though: that the BNP won a seat, taking 5.03 per cent of the vote (they needed 5 per cent to get representation).
Why does this titchy party get so much attention? There are around 21,000 council seats in England and Wales. The BNP says that it now holds 103 of them, up ten from last week. Anti-BNP groups give a much lower total. Even if we accept the higher figure, it still represents less than 0.5 per cent of the total. Listen to the way some politicians talk, though, and you’d think Hitler had just been elected.(…)
You will have noticed that the BNP is almost never mentioned without the soubriquet “far Right”. The BNP doesn’t call itself Right-wing. On the contrary, it favours nationalisation, higher taxes, protectionism and (though it keeps quiet about this) republicanism. It markets itself as “the Labour Party your parents voted for”. Its manifesto calls for “the selective exclusion of foreign-made goods from British markets and the reduction of foreign imports,” and promises to “restore our economy and land to British ownership” and “to give workers a stake in the success and prosperity of the enterprises whose profits their labour creates by encouraging worker shareholder and co-operative schemes”.
As Hayek wrote in 1944 in his brilliant chapter on “the socialist roots of Nazism”, the dispute between fascists and socialists is a dispute between brothers. Labour and the BNP are, in a sense, competing for the same sort of voter: one who believes in the power of the state. The one kind of voter whom both fascists and socialists regard as beyond persuasion is the small-government liberal.
The real purpose of banging on about the “far-Right BNP” is to damage, by association, the mainstream Right. Critics of the BNP are using the word “Right-wing”, not as a description of the party’s policies, but as a term of abuse, a synonym for “wicked”. Their real target, in other words, is not the BNP, but the Conservative Party. And if hurting the Tories means giving the BNP enough free publicity to keep it alive, it’s a price they seem happy to pay.
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