"EU Referendum": BNP is the new mainstream

This is a must-read article for anyone interested in British politics. Richard North, the astute editor of the blog "EU Referendum", begins by listing a number of Labour politicians who have warned in recent months that there is a groundswell of support developing for the extreme-right British National Party among working-class English whites, who feel forgotten about or betrayed by the Labour Party that formerly represented them. North backs this up with an array of respectable election results for the BNP in recent British elections; in particular, he notes that in the 2004 European Parliament elections, the BNP and another so-called "fringe" party, UKIP, between them scored 32.6% of the vote.

Parties which can do this well at the polls should no longer be dismissed as irrelevant. Yet that is precisely what the mainstream British media persist in doing, North observes. "[N]ewspapers (and other media organs) which were once the bellwether of public opinion have so far diverged from their readers, listeners and viewers that they now represent the opinions only of themselves." And the political class (perhaps because they get their information from those media) has "lost the ability to 'read' its own electorate." An editorial in the latest Sunday Telegraph blithely asserts that "No reasonable person disputes that . . . the British National Party is repellent." But, repellent or not, the BNP is the sole party that is seen to be serious about dealing with the growth of militant Islam in England—a growth that has now, for example, produced 30 simultaneous Islamic terror plots that MI5 says it knows about. The BNP, North concludes, is not only becoming representative of the actual opinion of the British public, as opposed to that of its élites; it is becoming the only party representative of that opinion.

It is leaving our politicians and their parties like beached whales, stranded on the shores of their own ignorance, complacency and arrogance, supported by a media which itself has completely lost the plot.
      That puts us in uncharted waters but, amazingly, the politicians still think they are in command. So insulated from reality are they that they haven't even begun to realise that they are heading for the rocks and that the passengers have disconnected the wheel from the rudder.