The New Republic

The Conservative Party has done a hideous job of marginalizing the bigotry and nativism that flourishes on the ultra-right. The nominally Tory Daily Mail is front to back a font of populist racist drivel that makes support of the BNP possible and, indeed, acceptable. The Conservatives have two choices: they can move to the right and encompass this populist racism; or they can reject it and make clear to its adherents that it is an unacceptable policy. They have, unfortunately, spent too long turning a winking eye to the problem to the extent that Melanie Phillips is still a high-profile commentator at The Spectator, the magazine of Conservatism, even as she has made herself the intellectual leader of this populist racism. The real problem for the Conservatives is not immigration but its status as a national party. Were Cameron to lead a minority government he would do so in a party that had managed to win only 9 seats outside England - including only 1 out of 59 in Scotland. (Even the Republican Party does better than that.) While many issues have been devolved to the Welsh and Scottish parliament, a minority Cameron government would have serious legitimacy problems with regard to contentious military and foreign policy issues.

- ndmackenzie

May 11, 2010 at 12:23am

Is it though? This would be a far more convincing article if it included poll numbers on immigration issues or immigration numbers in general. One could also see that UKIP saw advantage from Cameron's leadership of the Tories. First by promising a "Big Society" and trying to walk away from extremism, he also annoyed plenty on the far right. During the EU Constiution debate, he promised a referendum on the EU treaty. However, when the treaty was signed and passed in Parliament, Cameron ditched that promise (in my view rightly because it would have been an ex post facto referendum) but that no doubt alienated the more harder line anti-Europe right from him. As for the BNP, your argument is entirely specious. While it's certainly gotten bigger, it lost the seats it was going after. It lost its Council Seats in the Local elections. It had a very poor election. Moreover, the BNP seems less likely to take votes from the Tories but rather your disillusioned working class Labour voters. Nick Griffin and the BNP targeted the Barking constituency to try and go over the top (as the Greens, for example, did in Brighton, placing their party leader in Parliament for the first time). That seat was a safe Labour seat that had been held by the party from its creation in 1945. Labour won it 54-18(Tories)-15(BNP). It was a rare seat where Labour outperformed its 2005 share of the vote, notching a positive 6.5% swing and winning a majority of the vote. Its outcomes in the Local Elections concurrent with the General were even worse. They lost 26 of their 54 counsellors, including all 12 that had been elected in Barking in 2006. Whatever the BNP's successes, they don't come at the expense of the Tories.

- Crock1701

May 11, 2010 at 12:39am

Support for right-wing national parties has marginalized since the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections, in which the UKIP received a whopping 16.5% of the vote and became the UK's second largest party in the EP. If anything is surprising about the recent elections, it is the merely marginal influence right-wing national parties have had. Yes, immigration may have been a(n important) factor in these elections, but the UKIP's fall from 16.5% to 3.1% in a year's time suggests that the British election surely was not all about immigration.

- yzon

May 11, 2010 at 4:18am

I am idly curious about one aspect of British elections. How many constituencies were won by majorities? That is , if majorities were required, how mnay run offs would there be and which parties would be in them? I suspect that the Libs ran second in many places and would be in a good position

- stanmvp48

May 11, 2010 at 11:19am

-- Yes, immigration may have been a(n important) factor in these elections, but the UKIP's fall from 16.5% to 3.1% in a year's time suggests that the British election surely was not all about immigration. In a poor economy elections are always about the economy. However, and this is Galston's point, immigration could still have affected the election on the margin. The bigot" incident certainly drove the LibDem ascent off the headlines. It is perhaps telling that the woman in the incident, even though she is a lifelong Labour voter, chose to sell her story to the Mail on Sunday. The daily version of that paper is a populist tabloid that particularly targets women with its toxic mix of nativist anti-immigrant racism. -- Support for right-wing national parties has marginalized since the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections, in which the UKIP received a whopping 16.5% of the vote and became the UK's second largest party in the EP. European elections use proportional representation which aids the fortunes of small parties. In the elections that matter - general elections - Galston is right to point out the unsettling news that support for the Little Englander UKIP has more than doubled and support for the neo-Nazi BNP has increased by a factor of ten in only the last nine years. This horrific increase in nativist and racist sympathies is a direct consequence of prosletizing by ultra-right commentators like Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail and the supposedly high conservative Spectator. The Conservative Party has done itself immense damage and if Galston is correct may well have lost the election because of its habit of pandering to and winking at the nativist shenannigans of the Daily Mail and its media peers on the right.

- ndmackenzie

May 11, 2010 at 2:48pm

Crock and yzon cite data as the basis for their arguments that Galston is basically making an argument based on personal assumptions and documented by highly selected data.... and most other commentors are making . Certainly 5% of the total vote in the last election by nativist UK parties is of some concern--- and if you prefer unsubstantiated personal opinion-- probably a fraction of the vote such a party (mostly called Republicans) would get in the US.

- drofnats1

May 12, 2010 at 10:08pm

drofnats1 "Crock and yzon cite data as the basis for their arguments that Galston is basically making an argument based on personal assumptions and documented by highly selected data.... " Yes, and yes.... Crock1701 makes a compelling argument that Galston did't even come close to proving his point. as for Muckenzie, it's always safe to ignore his pathetic posts.

- jdyer

May 13, 2010 at 9:25am