I guess this is how traditions are established: one is a one-off, two is a repeat, but more than three is a tradition. So, welcome to my fourth annual New Year post. I think it was at the start of 2008 that I first noted the financial turmoil, which makes it nice to see that as 2010 looms over us, the coming year might end in a rosier state than it starts. I thought it might be interesting to note down some economic and not-so-economic stats just now, and see how things stand the next time I sit down to write this post.

Still, there is more to hope for next year than simply the alleviation of economic problems. Something that marked 2009 with a great big grimy smudge was the success had by the far-right, especially the British National Party in the North West and Yorkshire, where the good Lancastrians and Yorkshire-folk are now represented in the European Parliament by fascist MEPs. The problem though, is not that people are thinking horrible things about anyone who is a little bit different, but that they have little alternative but to think that. I firmly hold the opinion that the vast majority of the BNP’s voters are not nasty people, but simply forgotten people. Every major political party has neglected these constituents, and every major political party has been on the back foot in the debates on the far-right’s core issues.

I’m not just talking about immigration and racism, the BNP, with its new, clean image (laugh if you want, but not everyone is a liberal lefty with a built-in disgust of the BNP), champions a distortion of traditional values and morals that are just similar enough in image, though little else, to the traditional values that used to form part of British society in the ‘50s. Guess where the political mainstream is (and I include the green movement in this)? Nowhere is the answer; Mr Cameron might make some inconsequential moves to offer financial incentives to getting married, and Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson might talk about Britishness in a few speeches, but the debate on values, morality, and the question of what it means to be from Britain has been firmly grasped by the likes of Mr Griffin.

Morality has, of course, traditionally been the realm of the Church. I think the best way to describe my attitude to religion would be “actively agnostic”: I don’t currently believe in any particular god or religious structure, and I don’t think it is really possible to prove the existence of God, or even of gods, but I would never say for definite that these things cannot exist; I might one day be struck with a spiritual revelation, leading to a belief of the religious kind, so it would be foolish to keep a closed mind. The advantage of this convenient fudge is that I can do stuff that atheist can’t do, while not feeling guilty for being half-hearted as an apathetic agnostic might: in short, I can go to the Watchnight Service at St Giles Kirk on Christmas Eve, and pay attention to the sermon, without a Dawkinsian complex of any kind. In this particular sermon, the Minister took the time to praise Atheists and decry agnosticism: to paraphrase him, atheists present worthy opponents in debate, whereas agnostics are responsible for the downfall of society. I’m sure he didn’t mean to present such a sharp message, but I think it goes back to what I wrote about the far-right’s grasp on debates. For a debate to be had properly, all sides must be confident enough to make pronouncements on all ideas. Bad ideas must be exposed for what they are, and good ideas must be brought forth on sturdy legs.

In the Green Party, and indeed, in all major political parties, we need to grasp the debate and say what we think about Britishness, morality, and all the other issues which are held so tightly in the fists of fascists. We need to truly talk with all of the electorate, and we need to realise that the way that we can prevail in our political ambitions is through honest and fair discourse, not through aggressive confrontation with English Defence League, or by sneeringly mocking the BNP.

For all the apparent futility in the campaign to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name to the Christmas number one spot (sure, the profits from sales of the song went to the same musical multinational that McFabricated’s profits would have gone to, but did anyone notice that the Facebook group used to orchestrate it also managed to raise over £90,000 for Shelter?), it did raise my hopes for 2010, simply because it demonstrated a desire for a more honest and less fake way of doing things. If we can keep that spark of dissatisfaction with plastic society, then I’ll be a lot more confident that debate can be had, and perhaps even the statistics presented below might have nudged towards improvement in the next edition of this special post.

Here’s to 2010, an honest, argumentative, real, and better year!

Click here for an archive of past new year posts.

Do we never learn?! By ‘we’, I’m referring to anyone who is opposed to fascism rearing its head any higher than it already is in Europe. This post was prompted by both the recent appearance on the BBC’s Question Time of British chief-facist, Nick Griffin, and also his Dutch opposite number, Geert Wilder’s publicity and ego-trip to the House of Lords in London (at the behest of UKIP—talk about BNP-light!).

The problem is that, while we politicos like to think that any sane, decent, and moderate person finds the views of the BNP and the PVV vile and disgusting, the truth is that the people who are being targeted by these parties, and who form their electoral base, are not tuned into politics on the same frequency as the mondeo-man voter that Blair, Brown, Cameron, and Clegg, not to mention the leaders of the major parties here in the Netherlands, and across most of Europe, have identified as their ideal voter.

Most of the people who vote for the BNP and PVV are not racist. Some are, but most aren’t. They’re simply in communities that are ignored by most other parties (including, to an extent, my own party, with it’s ultra-middle-class culture), but which get attention from this different party that says it is full of decent, down to earth people; people who are like them. The BNP uses the easiest and most effective campaign tactics: playing on fears, having its candidates act as shadow-councillors before the election. With the anti-politics feeling that is present throughout Britain, it is only natural that these tactics work, and produce councillors and MEPs.

Instead of physically fighting the BNP—seriously guys, do we have to side with a bunch of angry-young-men?—we should be actively participating in the communities that we have neglected for too long. It shouldn’t be a case of sending missionary politicos into the communities either; Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberals, and of course, the Greens should truly be a part of, and stand up for, all communities, not just those which statistical software tells them will gain them the most votes.

There are so many things I want to say after what happened in the elections last night, so I’ll try fit it all into two posts here. First is the disaster that was the results from the UK. In the North West and Yorkshire & Humber, we’ve managed to elect BNP MEPs. I think this is one of those times that proves that it is easier to spread politics of hate and division when times are tough, than to promote politics of hope and optimism for what we could do with our future.

In the North West, the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, was elected with only a 0.3% lead over the Greens. Whenever things are that tight, the first question most activists in the North West will probably be asking is, “could we have done more?” I suppose we have to remember that, while we could have done more, and things didn’t turn out as we’d hoped, we made a tremendous effort which we can build on for next time, and use in national and local elections in the region.

The second I heard about the BNP’s gains, my mind jumped to all the things it could blame: the media for reporting the election on national issues instead of making it a European election; the voters for being such blithering idiots as to be taken in by the new face of the BNP—I don’t for one minute believe all those BNP voters are proper racists, just cretinous fools; the other parties for being so arrogant as to forget the people and their underlying ideologies; and us for not campaigning harder. The simple fact is that, as much as I desperately wish it were otherwise, the BNP have two seats in the next European Parliament, and we just have to get used to that, and do everything we can to make sure that it is us with at least a 1% lead over them in 2014.

Being freed from academic constraints such as exams means I can now focus on the European election that takes place in the UK on the 4th of June. Bizzarely I’m back down in Manchester as a visitor with a couple of other greens from Scotland to do a bit of ‘Stop Nick Griffin’ leafletting. The Telegraph carried an encouraging poll putting the Greens at 11% and the BNP at just 5%, though those are national numbers, not broken down for the North West, where we’re head to head with the fascists for the last seat. We’ve got a pretty good campaign around the value of tactical voting (www.stopnickgriffin.org.uk), and it’s just a case of letting as many people as possible know we can win, and that they aren’t wasting a vote on us. Anyway, I’m on the bus on my way to our temporary campaign HQ a Pop Boutique on Oldham Street. If you’re up for some leafleting, come along, we should have someone there for most of the rest if the day.

Of course the voting system is really very simple: you just vote for the Green Party. Nevertheless the North West Greens have made a short video explaining why, just in case it wasn’t obvious.

via North West Green Party