Warning shot for Labour from its angry ex-supporters

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None of the main parties has much to celebrate in last night's election results, for disillusioned voters took the chance to kick whoever held power in their locality. But by far the most agonising kick was administered against the Labour Party in Burnley.

The BNP's triumph there is symptomatic of a deepening crisis between Labour and its traditional workingclass vote. It is no exaggeration to say that a large part of the working class now regards the Labour Party with contempt.

Until this poll, the most visible sign of that contempt was mass abstention, which many commentators imagined was caused by "apathy". Only if you went and talked to working-class voters did you discover that the refusal to vote was, in reality, an expression of anger and disgust with politicians from all the main parties, but particularly from Labour, the party that supposedly existed in order to give the workers a voice in politics.

Earlier this week, I was in Burnley, where I found a mood of intense resentment among white, working-class voters. They feel they have been abandoned by a Labour Party which has completely failed to protect their interests, and which could not care less what becomes of them.

To add insult to injury, they believe that Labour now cares far more about the welfare of immigrants and asylum seekers than it does about its traditional white supporters. This may well be a wildly unjust accusation, and it certainly contains a very large element of racism. The BNP is without doubt a racist outfit, which, in places such as Burnley, Oldham and, indeed, east London, seeks to profit from the resentment felt by considerable numbers of whites at the arrival of new waves of immigrants.

But it would be a great mistake to think the BNP appeals only to racists, or that it can be defeated simply by issuing pious condemnations of the evil of racism. We have to look at the other things that potential BNP voters care about and, in particular, we have to look at the circumstances that have given this horrible organisation its chance.

Chief among those circumstances is the Labour Party's move to the Right. Labour has come to be seen as a party whose main purpose is to defend the middle classes and the rich and, in particular, to provide opportunities for Labour politicians to enrich themselves.

Labour swept back to power in 1997 because it seized a large swathe of the middle ground from the Tories and persuaded the middle classes that it posed no threat to them. The fact that this repositioning dismayed many Labour traditionalists did not seem to matter. Those traditionalists had nowhere else to go - they were never in a million years going to vote Tory - and although many of them abstained from voting at the last General Election, they were tactful enough to do this mainly in Labour heartlands where the party could be sure of victory, even on a very low turnout.

Labour accepted without question the belief of Conservative free marketeers that many of our traditional manufacturing industries were doomed and should be allowed to go to the wall as soon as possible. One of those industries was textiles, which used to be by far the greatest employer in Lancashire, and which, even since Labour came into power, has suffered a further savage contraction, undercut by lower production costs abroad.

It is no coincidence that racial disturbances should have broken out last summer in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, former centres of the textile trade. A strong pound and high taxes were the last things that industries such as textiles needed, but the Labour Government did not seem to mind in the slightest if its policies destroyed hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, most often replaced (if at all) by insecure work in the service sector. People in Burnley told me how their neighbourhoods had gone downhill over the past 20 years. They blamed the Labour-run council, which they said had moved anti-social people around the town, ruining one locality after another. Tony Blair has attempted to show that he takes the problem of anti-social behaviour seriously, but as far as many members of the respectable working class are concerned, his initiatives have come far too late to save their areas from drug dealers, violent crime, robbery, vandalism and other forms of persistent hooliganism.

These are certainly very difficult problems to deal with, but people in places like Burnley feel that the council has been far too tolerant of crime, whether this involved selling drugs on the streets or setting empty houses on fire. Anyone with sufficient funds gets out of an area that is being ruined by crime, which makes those left behind feel even more abandoned. The BNP has exploited the despair felt by lifelong Labour supporters at the seeming collapse-of any resolve on the part of authority to uphold law and order.

Many of the charges thrown against the Labour Party are ludicrously exaggerated, but many also contain an element of truth. One woman said in a fury: "They are liars. Look at Tony Blair. He said he'd never put his kids in boarding school, and what's he done?" When it was pointed out to her that Mr Blair's children are not, in fact, at boarding school, she retorted: "He said he'd keep them in normal schools, and he hasn't done it. He said he'll always be like us."

The limited success of the BNP in Burnley should send a warning shot to Labour. In the last few days of the campaign, Mr Blair and his right-hand man, Alastair Campbell, pleaded with voters in Burnley to refrain from voting BNP. Labour's high command knew things had gone wrong, not least because Mr Campbell, as a passionate supporter of Burnley Football Club, has a close knowledge of conditions in the town. Mr Campbell denied, after he had spoken out, that he hopes to become Burnley's next MP, when the present decent, but ineffectual, member retires at the next General Election. But if Burnley's most famous fan cares as much about the place as he says he does, he surely ought to be prepared to go north and rescue it.