Euro Shame

It's a shameful night for the country when the British National Party wins it's first ever seat in the European Parliament for the Yorkshire & Humberside region.

The BNP has been making ridiculous statements about wanting to go back to how the country was in the post-war days, pulling together and showing one face to Europe which also, in a not very subtle reading between the lines, means before the mass immigration from the Commonwealth in the '50s. It's rather galling that the BNP is a fascist party and the last war was all about defeating the cancer of fascism but they're playing on it.

There's little doubt that this is a protest vote against the Government, just as Wales voting Conservative rather than Labour or Plaid Cymru, is a protest. This does not bode well.

Can we rely on the Government to do anything about this, about fascism and a party of hate? Perhaps we need to learn the lessons of the late '70s again, where people got political and took matters into their own hands and organised movements like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. Perhaps we need to do so again.

UPDATE 9 June: Astonishingly the BNP later won a second seat, this time for the North West where they polled less that in the 2004 election but, because of the drop in the number of people who voted, they actually won a seat since their share of the vote increased. That is appalling.