Barking Mad

The Guardian's Hugh Muir has filed a report from Barking, the depressed East London borough which has just elected eleven members of the British Nazi Party, sorry, the British National Party, to its council. Muir's observations make for depressing reading:

A middle-aged woman ambled towards a television crew filming black, Asian and white people shopping in Victoria Road. She drew level, grinned and punched the air with a cry of "BNP". A few yards away, an older white woman told of her hatred of east Europeans. "Isn't that racist?" she was asked.

"I am a racist," she replied sweetly. A man with a red face and wispy white hair watched a multiracial group sitting on the market's bandstand. "They should bring the army back from Iraq to sort these foreigners out," he said as he moved away.

For more on the British National Party and efforts to oppose it, check out the excellent anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.

The World Socialist Website is arguing, correctly I think, that the Blairite leadership of the Labour Party laid the foundations for the BNP's gains with its own racism and hypocrisy.