Parties must listen to voters' fears

Could it happen here? Maybe that is no longer the right question. With the British National Party challenging strongly for seats in Burnley, Oldham and Blackburn in this Thursday's local elections, perhaps we should ask: "Is it already happening here?"

The answer depends on what "it" really is. Do we mean the existence of a significant minority of electors with Right-wing nationalist views? Or do we mean a state of affairs in which such views find a voice loud enough to debase democracy?

If we mean the first, then the answer is undoubtedly "yes". The YouGov poll for yesterday's Sunday Times found that 22 per cent say they would back "a party that wanted both to take Britain out of the European Union and to implement farreaching anti-immigration policies". Among Conservatives the figure climbs to 41 per cent. Given the right conditions a British Le Pen could find a ready audience.

We should not be surprised. Across Europe there are plenty of instances where extreme Right-wing candidates have been able to command upwards of 12 per cent support. This has been true of general elections in France, Italy, Austria, Norway and Denmark.

It has also happened recently in city elections in Rotterdam and Hamburg. There is no particular reason why Britain should be immune from the virus of hard-line nationalist emotions.

Historically, too, there is evidence to support this. In last year's general election, the BNP won 16 per cent support in the two Oldham seats. This is the same as the vote Sir Oswald Mosley won in 1931 in a byelection in Ashton-Under-Lyne when he was trying to establish his fascist New Party.

In the mid-Seventies the National Front occasionally scored about 10 pet cent in parliamentary by-elections. In 1993 the BNP actually won a council by-election in a small ward in Tower Hamlets, scoring 34 per cent.

So the sentiments exist, and occasionally we see electoral glimpses of them. But so far the extreme Right has failed to build on initial voting spurts.

This brings us to the real difference between Britain and the Continent. We have an electoral system that suppresses fringe parties; our European neighbours mostly have proportional voting systems that reveal their true strength. Indeed, the story of Le Pen's rise in France provides a cautionary lesson in the cost of cynicism when it comes to meddling with democracy. Twenty years ago France's National Front was a negligible force. Its rise, and last week's humiliation of Lionel Jospin, can be traced directly back to a decision by one of Jospin's socialist predecessors.

In the mid-Eighties President Fran?ois Mitterrand feared that the socialists would be massacred in the 1986 elections to France's National Assembly. He decided to change the constituency-based election system to proportional representation, believing that this would boost socialist representation. He was right; but the by-product was the election of 35 National Front deputies. Under the old system they would have had none; as it was, le Pen was suddenly on the political map.

The voting system was subsequently changed back, and Le Pen's party has been an insignificant parliamentary force ever since. But the man himself had arrived. He stood for president in 1988, won 14 per cent of the vote, and has been a thorn in the side of democratic debate ever since.

Or has he? Perhaps it is healthier for views, however extreme, that are held by substantial numbers of people to be properly represented on the political stage. If they are not, then many electors are likely to feel estranged from the whole democratic process.

This is the real lesson of what may happen this week in Burnley, Oldham and Blackburn. Much attention has been paid, rightly, to the unsavoury views of the BNP and the villainous past of some of its activists. But if the BNP did not exist, and only the conventional parties fielded candidates, the fears and tensions on local housing estates would still be there.

Yes, the BNP is exploiting these fears in a singularly nasty way. I hope its candidates are all well beaten on Thursday. But while their defeat this week will help to suppress the voice of racism, it will not solve the underlying problem.

It will merely reaffirm that our first-past-the-post voting system is good at locking extremist parties out of our democratic institutions, not that we truly possess a robust national consensus for moderation.

Only if the main parties engage more openly with voters who feel threatened by social change will political debate become healthy once again.

Otherwise, one day, somehow, the ultra-nationalist beast that lurks inside 10-20 per cent of the electorate will escape its cage and go on the rampage.