BNP message of hate takes the High Road

Published on Sunday 28 April 2002 01:00

JOHN McKenzie is not a skinhead. He doesn’t live in Sighthill, the Glasgow dumping ground for thousands of asylum seekers, or any other sink estate where racial tensions are running high. He is a homeowner from suburban Bishopbriggs. But in the Scottish parliamentary elections next year, he says his second vote will go to the British National Party.

The admission comes as a shock, particularly because the last time round he helped arch-socialist Tommy Sheridan get elected as an MSP. But McKenzie, whose first vote will go to the Scottish Nationalists, does not see his sudden support for the far right as in any way inconsistent.

"It’s the government’s fault. It has turned us into racists with its policy on asylum seekers," he says. "It is letting anyone into this country and we are all paying the price for it. Voting for the BNP will be a protest vote in the same way voting for Tommy Sheridan was."

McKenzie, a 37-year-old cab driver, does not believe he will be alone. "I meet lots of people from all walks of life and they are all saying the same sorts of things," he says.

"The BNP has suffered in the past because it has had a lot of anarchists in it. But if it could produce a credible, charismatic candidate, who spoke for the disaffected, I think it would have a lot of support. In fact, I think it’s almost inevitable."

McKenzie’s views on immigration may be extreme, but Scotland on Sunday’s poll on immigration, published today, suggests they have some resonance with a significant proportion of the population.

The poll shows that Scots have a complex approach to the issue. More than half of those questioned - 58% - say it is too easy for immigrants to gain access to the UK and 46% believe there should be some form of repatriation programme. Yet 46% believe that immigrants make a positive contribution to Scottish society, while 41% dispute the suggestion that there are too many immigrants.

To many, the idea that any ultra right-wing party could ever create a power base in Scotland, where the Labour party has dominated politics for a generation, is unthinkable. "You are talking about the country that kicked out Oswald Mosley way back in the 1930s," says Gerry Gable, publisher of the anti-racist magazine Searchlight. "He got no further than Glasgow Green before he was attacked by a mob, and the British National party got a similar response when it tried to leaflet in Sighthill [after the murder of Kurdish asylum seeker Firsat Dag]. "

In 1997, when the BNP fielded a candidate in Govan against Britain’s first Muslim MP Mohammad Sarwar, he polled so few votes he lost his deposit.

But Jean-Marie Le Pen’s sudden rise in France has prompted soul-searching in Scotland, as it has all over Europe, and given vent to the uneasy feeling that we are being just a little too complacent.

With proportional representation giving fringe causes unprecedented access to the political arena north of the Border, can we be sure a well-chosen candidate could not exploit people’s fear of crime and immigration, and their disaffection with mainstream politics, to similar effect?

The BNPs website shows it still has its eyes fixed on Scotland’s faultlines. At the moment leaders, including Glaswegian Scott McLean, deputy chairman of the national party, are directing their efforts towards opposing a centre for asylum-seekers earmarked for RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh Airport.

"Local elected representatives seem to be more concerned about the safety and wellbeing of the immigrants, not local people who take pride in their areas and invest in their homes and gardens," the BNP says.

Dr Elinor Kelly, an expert on race issues, says this kind of campaign is typical of the party’s tactics. "It has moved away from fielding lots of candidates and now targets hotspots, so it will be looking for any hint of tension it can exploit," she says.

"Once it manages to get a hold on a community, as it did in Muirhouse in Edinburgh in the early 1990s, it is very difficult to get the BNP out."

In France, disillusionment with mainstream politics split the left vote and led to a very low turnout in the first round of the presidential election. Here too, the BNP’s best chance of victory lies in places where people feel abandoned by their elected representatives and political apathy is rife.

This is why, in next week’s English council elections, they are fielding 13 candidates in Burnley, Lancashire, a former mill town still reeling from last year’s race riots.

With its dilapidated housing and graffiti-laden walls, Sighthill too seems ripe for infiltration. In the shopping centre, the heavy apple blossom does little to relieve the atmosphere of despair.

Leaning against metal shutters, groups of whites and groups of blacks and Asians eye each other with mutual suspicion. The graffiti is mostly harmless enough, but there is the occasional right-wing slogan: a UVF here, a swastika there.

Here, in a traditional Labour heartland, people have already turned their backs on the electoral process.

"I have voted Labour all my life," says Robert McKay, a former joiner who has been on the sick for 10 years. "But now the party is just another version of the Tories, and, as far as I can see, the SNP have no policies beyond independence.

"Here the issues are poverty, housing, unemployment. I am 1 a week above the poverty line. The asylum seekers get whatever they ask for, but I have to go through all sorts of rigmarole, and it doesn’t matter who comes in, they won’t do anything to help us."

Despite the palpable friction, Charlie Riddell, chairman of the Fountainwell Tenants Association, believes neo-Nazi parties are unlikely to gain a foothold on the estate. "Even at the height of the trouble here there were only two people who ever expressed any sympathy for the BNP. One of them came to a public meeting, hid behind a pillar and shouted ‘bollocks’ from time to time. That was the level of his debate. The other was invited to a meeting, didn’t turn up and has now moved on."

Certainly, if you ask people in Sighthill if they would support a neo-Nazi like Le Pen, you will receive an emphatic ‘No’. But it isn’t long before their conversation takes a disturbing turn that shows presentation is everything.

"Enoch Powell had the right idea," says pensioner Sadie McLellan. "If people had listened to his rivers of blood speech there would be no coloured people here now. He wasn’t a racist, he was just looking out for his country."

In Pollokshields, one of the most racially mixed parts of Glasgow, the notion that a right-wing candidate would garner significant support seems less likely.

Although the BNP targeted the area in the 1997 election, and then again after the death of Shawlands Academy schoolboy Imran Khan the following year, there is a tangible hostility to the party amongst ordinary people.

This is an area with a well-established, self-sufficient Asian community, some of whom are millionaires. "There is real integration here and it starts in the schools," says Pamela McKinney, a mother of two. "There is more likely to be trouble if people are struggling, but most people here are doing well."

However, Pollokshields lies cheek by jowl by some of the poorest parts of Glasgow, allowing resentment to foment. In the past, white residents on the south side have complained they feel intimidated by gangs of Asian teenagers, while the teenagers claim to have been harassed by the police.

Professor Hillel Ticktin , a race issues expert at Glasgow University, believes Scotland is immune from a sudden rise of the right.

"What you have to remember about France is that about 20 years ago, the Communist party, which had 20% of the vote there, marched against immigrants," he says. "That made it legitimate amongst sections of the working classes to be racist, but there is no tradition of that here."

Yet John McKenzie’s attitude suggests that public feeling is drifting towards the right more rapidly than any political pundit could have predicted.

Our poll shows immigration is an issue which worries a large number of people. A failure to deal with their fears will only allow racist sentiments to flourish.

"There are people in every country who are deeply committed to racial hatred," says Kelly, a research fellow at Glasgow University.

"Anyone who has been watching developments in Europe has to say nowhere is safe from this kind of racism. Instead of congratulating ourselves that it could never happen here, we should be putting in safeguards to make sure that it doesn’t."