ABSTRACT
The victory of Derek Beackon of the British National Party (BNP) in the Millwall council by-election, in London in September 1993, was greeted with both alarm and, it might be suggested, almost a curious sense of relief in liberal circles. There was genuine fear that a fascist party had tasted success in ‘mainstream’ British politics for the first time since the 1970s and concern that this was just the tip of the iceberg of a serious electoral presence of the extreme right. For some there was resignation to what they saw as the inevitable spread of racist politics across Europe eventually reaching Britain. The relief came out of the growing, if uneasy, recognition that racism in Britain was escalating in scale and intensity. The success of the BNP could then be equated with the growth in racial intolerance-the one blamed on the other. It has taken the period after Millwall for many in the media and beyond to realize that the BNP offers no electoral threat whatsoever on a national, or, with one or two minor (although not insignificant) exceptions, local level. In July 1994, when Parliament was discussing possible changes to the Public Order Act to include a new offence of racial violence, the Guardian announced to its readers that ‘Race hate is not the exclusive preserve of the BNP in east London’.1 This statement, actually presented as a remarkable discovery, contains a truth that, although actually banal, has still not been widely assimilated. Racism in Britain is persistently deemed to be the preserve of groups such as the BNP. If this were indeed the case, and ignoring the widespread evidence of racism beyond the limited realm of party politics, then the implications would be remarkable in the European context: Britain would be the exception
in terms of the rise of xenophobia and racism. Even though the electoral threat of neo-nazi organizations in some European countries has been overstated, there has clearly been a growth of extreme rightwing organizations on the continent that has not occurred in Britain. Is the myth of a ‘tolerant country’ actually borne out by the failure of Britain’s neo-nazis?2
