Hmm, I am uncomfortable with the Royal Mail and union position on this one.

Like them, or (hopefully) loathe them, the BNP is a legitimate legal political party and I really do not think the Royal Mail (or the union) should be making decisions about which political parties it will deliver leaflets for.

If the union said it wouldn’t distribute LibDem election leaflets for the reason that it objects to their policies, would people think that acceptable as well?

In a democracy we have to live with the fact that political parties will exist that we disagree with. Allowing unions to refuse to deliver their leaflets is an attack on democracy itself.

Very worrying development.

A doctor is not forced to do a procedure he does not wish to perform.

#1 The BNP are different from the Lib Dems. End of story. The BNP might be a legal political party, but they are not a legitimate one. Well done to Royal Mail workers in Bristol: a courageous stance.

The BNP are loathesome but they are also a legal party; I’m not sure I want to set a precident where the postman decides what he should or should not deliver to my home.

Also banning their leaflets just adds to the BNP’s pretence of being anti-Establishment. The publicity they’ll get from postal workers refusing to deliver their leaflets will be a boon for them.

Most people chuck fliers straight in the bin.

As to newspapers, don’t buy them. Even free newspapers can’t survive if other advertisers pull out so as not to associate themselves with racists.

(2): A doctor doesn’t get to deny patients treatment just because he doesn’t agree with their opinions. Unless they are fat. Or smoke.

Postmen should not be able to refuse to deliver leaflets with which they disagree.
Crazy.

Papers which take BNP ads are a different matter.

Postmen and women daily deliver dodgy material: “you have won a prize so why not phone our premium rate phone line”, fake stock promotions, and at the extreme of honest trade, offers of credit to the indebted. All of those bids come in closed envelopes. The BNP submitted their electoral fliers in open form. Just shove it through the letter box. Forget about it. Post anti racist fliers in your spare time.

Sunny: “Local newspaper owner Newsquest is happily taking money from these racists.” Have you asked them how happy they are? Is the acceptance of BNP adverts a financial necessity for them? Note that acceptance and happiness are not equal.

Thanks for that.
I had a knock on the door last week and it was the postman. When he handed me my mail I noticed it contained a flyer from the BNP. I was a little confused over if the PO were getting paid for this, or did I have a BNP activist as a postie.
Thankfully down our street not one person has bothered their arse to pin their flyer to the window. Mine went in the bin.

“The BNP might be a legal political party, but they are not a legitimate one.”

How do we decide how a party is legitimate?

Are far-left parties that promote class hatred like RESPECT legitimate?

(2): A doctor doesn’t get to deny patients treatment just because he doesn’t agree with their opinions. Unless they are fat. Or smoke.

Or want/ need an abortion.

This is totally different from denying the BNP an open platform of the Royal Mail deciding who gets to hand out election leaflets and who doesn’t.

I fully support the right of racists to be racists but more importantly I support the right for people to decide on the conditions of their own work.

You are black, working class, possibly an immigrant, why should you deliver a BNP leaflet in an Asian neighbourhood (obviously a worst case scenario, but it will be happening), why should you not be free to say no?

What are competition laws like on this? I think Royal Mail ought to be permitted to discriminate (if it weren’t a monopoly provider especially). But is it allowed to?

The BNP have been given space for an advert on the website of my local paper, the Basildon Echo. It has the logo, as well as a gif image of the leaflet, along with voting pleas and Nick Griffin’s face. It is part of the Newsquest group.

[http://raincoatoptimism.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/who-is-advertising-on-my-local-rag/]

(10): ‘or want/ need an abortion’

Are we going to support doctors who deny patients treatment because of their own morals or political affiliations?

This is a tricky one isn’t it? I’m not really sure what I think. I grew up as a mixed race kid in England, so I have a personal, visceral hatred of these people and what they stand for.

I’m not sure of the rights and wrongs of it. But from a utilitarian perspective, is the danger greater in legitimising them by treating them like a normal political party, or in de-legitimising them by excluding them and thus allowing them to assume a certain kind of underground chic?

The BNP is a legal and legitimate party, and the only one with the courage to defend the interests of British people, and to make a principled stand against wave after wave of legal and illegal immigration that threatens to transform our nation into a war zone of inter-ethnic rivalry.

So a few leftie postmen refuse to deliver leaflets. It will make no difference at all, Labour is a spent force.

Roll on June 4th!

15. Joshua: the great danger is in allowing them to be perceived by the media, ergo the public, as someone it is acceptable to vote for. Fascist white supremacist Nazi scumbags should not be allowed to pass themselves off as a legitimate party in any democratic country. We should treat them as we would if they didn’t bother to hide their true colours and actually marched in blackshirts and jackboots.

As to the concurrent “underground”/aggrieved against narrative they adopt, whilst it may initially result in some kind of rogue popularity, if the mainstream parties actually dealt with the issues the BNP claims to address in order to distract from its blatant white supremacist views, then there wouldn’t be a market, underground or in plain view, for them to exploit.

I believe we need to push them right to the fringes of society, because that is where they belong: not in our newspapers, and certainly not on our websites. In West Germany following WWII they actually banned a number of the nuttier parties, leading to a very stable political system for many years. The Neo-Nazis only really came back onto the scene after re-unification, and their base is in the former East Germany where they currently prey upon the economically insecure who have yet to catch up with the former West Germany in terms of prosperity.

One bad thing about the PR system they have is that the parties elected to their parliament in general can rely on a certain percentage of the vote purely from West German regions, meaning that there is a remote but real possibility the Neo-Nazis could gain some power. However, Die Linke (their Left Party, about a zillion times more organised and successful than any far-left grouplet in the UK) are doing well to articulate working class concerns across Germany, including in the East.

Push the bastard BNP to the fringe: but don’t forget to bring on board the people they prey upon for support.

Rayyan – excellent points.

I heard something on Radio 4 the other day, from a Tory, that I found quite interesting (strange but true). He said that from his position (social conservatism), New Labour represented not a lurch to the right but the hegemony of the centre-left, that silenced the voices of social conservatism that had traditionally existed in the Labour Party. He suggested that this had opened the door to the BNP.

Now he was a hanger and flogger, so I took his words with a large handful of salt. But in reading the comments on this post, I’m reminded of the policies of the Dutch Socialist Party, who (apparently) oppose economic migration on socialist, not racist, grounds. I don’t know enough about them to know if that’s really true, or if they’re crypto-right, pseudo-left; either way I would be unlikely personally to agree with them, but what would our politics look like if we had such a party here? Would there be less of a space for the fascist right to move in? Or would it unwittingly act as the thin end of the wedge, and end up dredging up Powell’s rhetoric and stirring up trouble?

(I’m thinking aloud here – those are not rhetorical questions.)

Some time in the 80’s I was attending a meeting on unions and ethnic minorities and immigrants and got up to relate what I remembered of my upbringing in Darwen (now part of Blackburn) in Lancashire and said that in the mills both the management and the union representatives were English whilst the majority of the workforce were Italian (from an earlier immigration wave) and later Pakistani and that in my opinion that was not a healthy situation. Union reps from the Lancashire mills confirmed what I said but Ken Gill suggested to the audience that they ignore what I said since as far as he knew I was in favour of the EU. This area of the UK is now a happy hunting ground for the BNP!
It also strikes me that the decision by the Labour Government to go to war in Iraq and the subsequent events leading to a semi-deligitimisation of Islam has given even more grist to the BNP mill. I’ve recently had a row with an old school friend still living in Darwen who has been consistently sending what she is trying to pass as “funny” e-mails containing snide remarks about how refugees are kept in 5star accommodation and many of these “funnies” are embarassingly disrespectful of Islam. Sadly it would appear that many of these shitty e-mails are circulating amongst “friends” in that area.
What strikes me about the current situation is that a large part of the blame is due to a refusal by the labour movement in the first instance to face up to an obvious problem and then a refusal to acknowledge that an actual and also cultural war against Islam could also help the BNP cause.
I can’t agree with many of the posts above because they sound like sub-SWP student union politics. We should all by now be both older and wiser.

I’m glad you’ve raised those points, Joshua, because I was thinking the other day about some of the causes of the historic stability of the British political system. For example, whilst faith in the political class has undoubtedly been shattered by the expenses scandal, no one doubts that each of the main three parties will continue to exist in more or less the same form as before. As such it is not comparable to Mani Pulite in early 90s Italy, where the party system totally collapsed and new parties emerged from the rubble, which also led to a new electoral system.

Often people say FPTP is the reason we don’t have smaller parties at Westminster. I think this is true to a point, but other countries with FPTP systems have proven unstable and reliant upon large coalitions based less around ideology and more around political expediency – this is especially the case in South Asia, where in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India the two large parties/coalitions in each country are often termed centre-right and centre-left, with the former associated with religious groups and the latter ostensibly secular: in reality, neither party shares any real ideological differences. Those societies are more fragmented along religious or ethnic lines, whereas in Britain we enjoy relatively peaceful diversity. This means we have less cause for nationalist or ethnic-based parties in the UK – the BNP are the only party in the UK based on ethnicity.

Because we have an effective “two-plus” party system in the UK, with two parties alternating between government and a third that provides some degree of representation, most views are incorporated into parts of those three parties. For example, UKIP and its voters could fit entirely into the Tory Party, and during the 1980s the whole of the centre-left could have fitted into the Labour Party. Even now, I would say (and this was the view of Blair and Ashdown) that the Liberal Democrats could fit into the Labour Party. Some commentator remarked the other day that all three UK mainstream parties could fit into the US Democratic Party, which just goes to show how nutty the GOP are!

When the mainstream parties try to crowd around the centre ground too much or become out of touch with the electorate, other smaller parties emerge to represent the views of those on the outer edges of each party. For example, if Labour had in fact helped the working class and not exploited mass immigration without ever once trying to defend immigrants, there is no doubt the BNP would not be the threat it has become today.

On a related note, it is funny to hear Tories refer to New Labour as “the left” or left-wing. It’s like how idiots on the right say the BBC is “a leftwing conspiracy”, Brown is “socialist”, etc. or how pro-Palestine people say the BBC is biased towards Israel, and pro-Israel supporters argue the opposite. His argument is flawed because it is the job of the Tories to articulate social conservatism, whereas the only real conservatism in the Labour Party was of an economic nature.

Several postal workers here in Kidderminster have refused to deliver the BNP leaflets, thus missing out on the extra £15 per month that they’d get if they did. Good on them.

As far as the Newsquest papers are concerned, at a local level, we have contacted the paper, not only with regards to the video advert from Griffin featured on their website, but also with regards to the unbalanced coverage that the Kidderminster Shuttle gave to Simon Darby and the BNP in last weeks edition.

This is shown by the following quotation from Darby – as shown on the front page of last weeks edition:

“We don’t want immigration to turn Kidderminster into a place like Handsworth or Lozells in Birmingham. What About English people and their rights?”

“threatens to transform our nation into a war zone of inter-ethnic rivalry.”

As opposed to the BNP’s policy of deporting several million people from the UK. A policy that worked so well in yugoslavia, and one that wouldn’t at all lead to the nation becoming ‘a war zone of inter-ethnic rivalry’.

morons.

By refusing to deliver leaflets, the politicised Postmen are just giving publicity to the BNP and giving credence to their claim to be the anti-estalishment party, and more importantly, the only party to vote for if you are unhappy about mass immigration.

Another own-goal from the Left.

Rayyan: The funny thing is that there is no actual British ethnic identity. It’s by definition an amalgamation of ethnic groups.

Plaid and the SNP are nationalist parties though aren’t they? Not suggesting any equivalence. In fact it’s instructive, I think, to see the stark contrast. I do think that at certain times a degree of nationalism can be positive, but it’s only true when they are standing up for a genuinely marginalised group (e.g. the historical oppression of the Welsh, who are only speaking their own language now thanks to Welsh nationalism). Nationalism in the name of Britain is just ugly – there’s no need for it. What there is a need for – as you pointed out Rayyan – is a party that represents the interests of the working class. Labour used to be that party – and if it still was, the BNP would have no traction.

for fucks sake – the BNP are racist, pure and simple. So don’t give me that crap about not letting Postal workers decide what they want to deliver because, well, ooh they might not deliver for the Lib/Dems. Utter crap.
The PO workers are not delivering them because the BNP are a bunch of Nazi racists – simple as that. If I worked for them I would also forgo the £15 extra so as not to help with their electioneering.
Now how many times and for what causes have the PO workers not delivered certain ‘political mail’? Can someone answer that, because if it is never, some arguements fall by the wayside and this really is a single issue deal.
Yeah free speech is just fine and dandy when its not you they want to deport and it wasn’t your head they were trying to cave in during the late 70s and early 80s. I thought freedom of speech was something that should be granted when that speech doesn’t involve spewing hate filled bile!? Or would you prefer every fucking hate filled arsehole to be able to say just exactly what they like, when they like, about whom they like however fucking nasty it is?

This is the BNP we are talking about here and we all know exactly what they would do IF they had the power.

@ 23 – “Another own-goal from the Left.”
No that would be a goal for the PO workers.

Rayyan @17: “In West Germany following WWII they actually banned a number of the nuttier parties, leading to a very stable political system for many years. The Neo-Nazis only really came back onto the scene after re-unification, and their base is in the former East Germany where they currently prey upon the economically insecure who have yet to catch up with the former West Germany in terms of prosperity.”

Openly Nazi parties are still banned under German law. Prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, Nazi parties operated under the banning laws; ban one and another mushroom party popped up in its place. Paul Wilkinson wrote about this in the 1980s.

Post Berlin wall fall, and possibly in acknowledgement of the failure of mushroom stomping, German governments have banned fewer parties.

Yeah free speech is just fine and dandy when its not you they want to deport and it wasn’t your head they were trying to cave in during the late 70s and early 80s.

Thank you for saying this. Wherever the BNP organise and spread their message, Asians like me and other non-whites get beaten up and sometimes even killed. This pathetic idea, that by allowing them to say whatever they want through the media will mean that brave courageous libertarians will “defeat” their arguments and “expose” their idiocy, only really results in more people thinking that it is acceptable to want to kill and deport non-whites. Great result.

The point is that some postal workers have exercised teir legal right to refuse to deliver political leaflets, and quitr right too. They are legaly obliged to deliver all other items of mail (including junk mail). I would be delighted if their right was extended to these items. With regard to GW comment 16, the only reason that the BNP will gain any seats in the euro election is because they use the proportional representation system. Thats also the only reason that UKIP got 12 seats in the last elections.I recently read on the BNPs website in a comment to an article that in the next general election the BNP would get 90% of the vote. I would respectfully sugest that the only way the BNP could get 90% of the vote would be at gunpoint, and even then they would struggle