Rise in hate crime follows BNP council election victories

Acknowledegements to The Guardian


Reports of racial and religiously motivated crime rose following the election of British National party councillors in several far-right strongholds, police statistics have revealed.

Complaints of hate crime increased in wards in the West Midlands, London and Essex after the election of a BNP member, in spite of declines in reported hate crime in the wider police areas. In other wards race crime reportedly rose in the run-up to BNP election victories, according to the figures, obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

The findings came as the party stepped up its campaign to win its first seats in the House of Commons with a "weekend of action" in Barking and Dagenham, where the culture and tourism minister, Margaret Hodge, faces a challenge for her Labour seat from BNP leader, Nick Griffin. Hodge said the new figures cast doubt on police assurances that there is no link between racially motivated crime and a BNP presence.

Yesterday, BNP member Terence Gavan was jailed for 11 years after police found nail bombs and 12 firearms at his home in the borough of Kirklees, West Yorkshire, where the BNP has councillors. The Old Bailey heard that Gavan harboured "a strong hostility" towards immigrants.

One of the biggest increases in hate crime came in Barking's Eastbury ward, where racially motivated violence, theft and criminal damage more than doubled in the year after Jeffrey Steed won a council seat for the BNP in May 2006. A year later, hate crime rose again and 45 racial incidents were reported in 12 months.

In several other BNP wards, race crime fell in line with declines in the wider areas, but anti-fascist campaigners believe rises may be linked to BNP election wins. "Voters have been emboldened in their racist views by seeing the BNP in power and that could have led to the increases in racist attacks in some areas," said Sam Tarry, campaign organiser for the Hope Not Hate campaign, set up by the anti-fascist group Searchlight.

"The figures suggest that if the BNP wins more seats, people from ethnic minority and gay communities could face greater persecution because racist and bigoted views will have been further legitimised."

The BNP denies that increases in hate crime are related to its activities and blames the rises on increased immigration. Bob Bailey, the party's London organiser said: "This is due to an increase in the ethnic [sic] population. There are more people who are prepared to go to the police complaining they are victims."

The Guardian has analysed data from 11 police forces covering 29 wards across England where voters have elected BNP councillors in the past six years. In eight wards reports of hate crime rose following BNP election wins despite a wider decline across the police force area. It declined in 14 wards, in line with force-wide reductions, and there was no change in four and an insignificant amount of data in three.

In Essex, complaints of race crime rose after the election of BNP councillors in parts of Epping Forest, while in Chelmsley Wood, a suburb of Birmingham, the average annual incidence of race crime almost doubled after George Morgan won a seat for the BNP in May 2006.

In the four years before his election, there were an average 11 incidents a year rising to an average of 21 a year in the following four years. West Midlands police said some cases involved assault, while most were incidents of verbal abuse in shopping centres, taxis and in the police station with white and Asian victims.

Detective Chief Inspector Sharon Goosen said: "None of the offences reported in the area since 2006 can be directly attributed to an elected member or political organisation."

The BNP is understood to be planning to field more than 1,000 candidates in local elections and 300 candidates in the general election. Griffin and the BNP deputy chairman, Simon Darby, who is standing for Stoke Central, are considered to have the best chance of winning seats at Westminster.

I the accused

When thinking back, as I often do, to the fourteen and a bit years that I spent on the far-right, it sometimes occurs to me how different things might have been had I taken the time out to place myself, if only for five or ten minutes, into the shoes of those whom I was so quick to condemn.

I hope I am not being emotive nor descending too readily into pathos when I say this, but to have spent just a short time looking in through the eyes of a Jewish person, a "conspirator", and beholding the sheer unreasonableness of the charges being laid against me and others of my kind might - just might - have caused me to think things through to a more logical conclusion.

To be told the fact that some of my kind were politically left of centre and others to the right of centre provided "evidence" that I and 13 million others worldwide were actively scheming together to achieve a stranglehold over the political spectrum.

To be told that by marrying a fellow Jew I would be living proof of Jewish pretensions to racial supremacism, whilst by marrying a non-Jew I would ipso facto be part of an organised international plot to pollute the sacred Aryan bloodline.

To be told that I could not, no matter how much I desired to be but an ordinary guy in a world in which cultural differences were becoming forever less important to most, be anything other than the single-minded conspirator that it was my genetic disposition to be.

To know that this government-in-waiting that I see before me does not accept my presence in the land of my birth, yet acknowledges no home to which I might return in the event of my being compelled to vacate.

With good cause most people associate the far-right in Britain and Europe with opposition to non-white immigration and "multi-culturalism". And I, and others like me, would be told we were the architects of this historical inevitability and personally responsible for every wrongdoing committed by every immigrant, as well as by his ancestors, his offspring and his pets.

It is easy to be repulsed by the spectacle of such a self-evidently unreasonable and irrational mindset masquerading as a political ideology, but there must too be a temptation to humour it just a little. Humour is the most powerful of political weapons. I sometimes wonder why anti-fascists seem so devoid of it.

Maybe it is because fascism, leading as it does to disharmony, violence and murder, is no laughing matter. But all the same it wouldn't hurt, from time to time, to subject the absurdity of its worldview to public scrutiny and to inevitable public ridicule a little more than we seem given to do, and to titter just a little as it squirms whilst attempting to justify the absolute unjustifiability of its creed.