Twitter has been alive with outrage today at the BNP’s success in winning two seats in the European elections. There have been calls to block the BNP’s Twitter accounts and a Not In My Name Meme has kicked off. The election results are shocking not because a minority party with far right views won two seats, but that two-thirds of the UK didn’t vote.
Social networks are truly democratic. Authority in a network is developed by building reputation. We’re quick to celebrate examples of crowdsourcing when a motivated group of individuals is able to turn around opinion and create positive change, but we’re upset that this is precisely what the BNP has done in this instance.
The BNP’s new European Parliament members have been elected via a democratic process. Whatever your views please don’t turn the party into a martyr that will promote its cause. Instead use your networks to promote discussion via free speech. Only then will the BNP’s views become truly known and more people will be motivated to vote in future elections.
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Oh Temper! Oh Mores! (Arrington/Laporte and Flamewar 2.0)…
Was quite fascinated by the Leo Laporte / Mike Arrington spat on the Gillmor Gang on the weekend….not because of the spat itself (see above video of said spat) but because of the problem dealing with the commenting afterwards. (The spat itself wa…
While I do think it’s outrageous the BNP has got a foot on the ladder, I’m with you Wadds. Though I wonder how many people furiously expressing their anger after the event actually voted last Thursday.
Perhaps rather than Not In My Name, it would have been better to have Not On My Watch, to get people motivated and mobilised before the elections.
The BNP actually polled fewer votes in both regions than they did in 2004 but won their seats because turnout was so low. Rarely has there been such a price for apathy in modern UK politics. But discussing that is the case, and allowing the BNP to have a platform on which to show its true colours, should ensure future turnouts are far higher, as you say.
Hear Hear Wadds. It really disappoints me when I see calls for censorship for the BNP when they’ve been democratically elected. It’s attitudes like this that got them elected in the first place.
Every time the BNP has gotten a platform from which to preach it’s made a real tit of itself. Putting aside its repugnant views for 5 mins, its record when in local office is nothing short of abysmal, its TV advertising and all round marketing make a GCSE media studies class look like Saatchi & Saatchi and its “messaging” can be pulled apart by a 5 year old.
The only way to combat these morons is to engage with them and blow away their arguments with logic and reason. The reaction to their election is understandable, but equally calls for boycotts and bans makes me as worried as having them elected in the first place.
And please let us not make the mistake of thinking that people who vote for them are morons as well. Many will be but many will not. The task at hand for the other parties is to reach out to these people and show them – through example, through critique and reason – why next time round their X should go against another party.
And you’re right, there’s no better medium to start picking apart the “policies” (and I use that in the loosest terms) and arguments of the BNP than the Internet.
The great paradox of the BNP is that they trade on some misguided sense of Britishness, some White Cliffs of Dover, WW2, Island nation nonsense that we’re all somehow being subsumed by other cultures and that the white Anglo Saxon is an endangered species.
Of course, any student of British history will tell you that these isles have a proud history of welcoming immigrants from all over the world, and that the vast majority of people who fought in the World Wars did so exactly to preserve those freedoms.
So let’s debate immigration, let’s debate protecting the unique culture of the UK, let’s debate racism in all its forms and let’s show that the BNP are a bunch of insecure, irrelevant and most of all ineffective fools who trade on legitimate fears and worries to push a repugnant message which sadly has chimed with a lot of people thanks to years of neglect (from all Parties not just the muppets clinging to power now).
well put Wadds.
Will makes a good point when he states that the BNP’s vote has actually gone down this Euro election and they only got in cos people couldn’t be arsed to vote. You can argue that it is the main parties’ fault we are all so apathetic but this result will hopefully go a long way to ensuring people aren’t so lazy again.
In Australia you get fined if you don’t vote…should we be looking at compulsory voting? you can always spoil your paper if you really don’t want any of ‘em….would that work in the UK do you think?
“…the white Anglo Saxon is an endangered species.”
Bunch of German immigrants. Britain for the Britons – the true indigenous people (or at least arrived a bit earlier).
Seriously, though, we have been through this before in the 1980s (with the National Front) and early 1990s. Recessions bring out our inner xenophobe. The last time around, the BNP councillors who wound up getting elected showed themselves to be so incompetent that they didn’t last very long. The danger with the MEPs is that neglect may mean they last longer. So, I reckon this is an opportunity for much greater scrutiny of what happens in Strasbourg and Brussels as well as of the BNP’s conduct in itself. You can’t get around the fact that two have been elected, but that also exposes them to a much greater level of accountability.
As Stephen says, Twitter blocks don’t do anything useful in much the same way as waving your right hand in the air going “right on” didn’t do a great deal 30 years ago. But watching what the BNP (and any other party for that matter) can make a difference. This is a good time for us to look much more closely at the EP in general.
Fair play to you for sticking your neck out on this one today, Wadds, there’s been a load of “more disgusted than thou”-ism going on today on Twitter and i’m surprised you’ve not had emotionally charged rebukes from some quarters.
We’re lucky to live in a democracy and therefore, like it or not, the party-whose-name-i-won’t-give-airtime-to has as much right to freedom of speech as anyone else, as has Sinn Fein, for example, which has a very controversial past. Rather than trivialise the debate by baiting ‘that party’, like you say, open the debate on why – across Europe and some parts of the north of England (sorry, I’m from the south, I’m not getting tarred with this brush) – people are voting for far right parties. If there’s a debate to be had on immigration, let’s have it. if it’s about jobs, let’s have it.
I honestly think this is as good as it will get for them and things will return to the way they were as the economy stabilises.
While we’re on the subject, people should watch the excellent “This is England” to see what the BNP were probably doing in the early 80s before they put on suits and grew their hair.
PS – can I please get a cross-link going on with our blogs? http://hatchpr.blogspot.com
cheers
C
Apathy is the problem, and the BNP’s success in this election is just a consequence of that.
But I think it’ll take much more than the threat of growing BNP influence to get people out to vote.
Most everyday people just don’t seem to be interested in politics, except to vent their anger over the economy, MP expenses, or how often the PM cracks a smile. Why not take an interest in actively improving the system? People don’t seem to realise that it’s their vote, and nothing else, that really matters. What good is a democracy whose public cares nothing for its right to vote?
But certainly at the moment, politics is doing nothing to engage the electorate, or show the people how important it is for them to take an interest.
Politics is in desperate need of some good PR, and fast!
On another note, I think the problem with social media is that it gives us the feeling we’re having a say, when for the most part, we’re actually saying nothing. None of the BNP protests I’ve seen on Twitter have any use, because we’re only preaching to the choir. As you and Will both say, we need to take this debate a lot further.
Spot on Mr Edwards, all these German interlopers. If you’re blood line can’t be traced back to Bodecia then I think you should be deported forthwith.
Same goes for all you Normans as well.
I fear for the future of the Royal family as the Saxe-Coburgs may fail the BNP test
Personally I don’t think blocking or spamming any social media will do any good, in fact it does the opposite of “martyring” the BNP. The real problem for me is the normal right wing media like the Mail and the Sun. These papers spout endlessly about the problems of immigration/crime etc which scares the population into thinking any problem is more acute than it actually is.
If you take time to look at the BNP manifesto every proposal they have is to “solve” the garbage created by those papers; unemployment too high – British jobs for British workers, protectionism and send immigrants home; crime too high – build more detention centres and treat criminals harsher; NHS creaking, schools too crowded – send immigrants home etc etc.
Every policy is aimed at those papers’ target audience.
Debating may sound ideal and their policies are easily disproved, but by who by? How do you reach the people who are likely vote for the BNP when their media diet consists of the newspapers that have fed their initial fears?
Nice blog Wadds!
Spot on Ally. Openess and transparency will very quickly kill the BNP.
I was very disappointed that the BNP managed to get any seats in the European Parliament. I believe if more people had gone out to vote, this wouldn’t have happened. I am also irked by the fact that a lot of BNP supporters (or at least the one’s I have met) seem to know exactly what the BNP’s views are. At school, when we had a debate, a boy in my class said that:
‘The BNP are all for diversity but they believe there should be a limit,’
They also have very little empathy or sympathy for people. We had a refugee from Zimbabwe come in who talked to us about Mugabe and his own experiences. Let us call him Tom. He had had a few shops, they were his livelihood and Mugabe destroyed them in one morning when he found out that Tom opposed him. Tom described his journey, how his family was split apart. It was a very sad story and afterwards I told that boy:
‘If the BNP came to power they would send him back to Zimbabwe and he would be killed for sure,’
and that boy said to me:
‘It’s his own fault! He shouldn’t be apposing the government!’