Slick image lets the racists gain

The return of the BNP to town hall politics gives the far Right its first genuine foothold in Britain for a decade.

But while the success of two candidates in Burnley is a great publicity coup for the party which ran an overtly racist campaign, it would be wrong to think of the BNP as anything other than a ramshackle group of extremists.

The exact membership is unclear, but it seems to stand in the hundreds rather than thousands, a far cry from the Seventies when membership of the National Front peaked at 17,000 and the NF could claim to be Britain's fourth and fastest growing party.

Yet while the extreme Right may still have a mountain to climb in Britain, the danger is that Burnley gives the BNP confidence to grow.

The lesson from Europe is that like the mainstream political parties, extremists can benefit from a slick image and a carefully packaged message. Hard-Right parties now support or take part in government in Austria, Denmark and Italy, and have made great strides in Belgium, Holland and now France, where voter apathy has placed convicted racist Jean-Marie Le Pen centre-stage in this weekend's presidential run-off.

Under the leadership of former Cambridge University graduate Nick Griffin, the BNP has adopted the same approach of polishing the image and refining the message. Griffin has dropped the commitment to forced repatriation for ethnic minorities and prefers to dress up the "rights for whites" message by playing on fears about crime, drugs, dismal housing and poor job prospects.

And his reward is the first election success since Derek Beackon won the BNP's only previous council seat at a byelectionin the Isle of Dogs in 1993. But amidst today's inevitable handwringing, it would be naive to suggest as Burnley Labour MP Peter Pike did in the early hours, that voters have been conned by "racist" candidates.

The BNP election literature is unambiguous in its racism, warning: "We, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within 60 years." The manifesto spoke of cash incentives to return immigrants to their "land of ethnic origin".

Nowhere in Britain could have been a more likely spot for the BNP's electoral return than the corrosive atmosphere of Burnley, where race riots erupted last summer. Britain does not yet have its own Le Pen. But the lesson of France - where his Front National scored its first electoral success in a 1983 local election in a small industrial town - is that once the extreme Right gets a platform, its ability to play on fear and create division grows rapidly.