A View from Kent

There is a feeling of profound inevitability about the way that the Tories so blatantly played the race card in the run-up to May's local elections. Racism has always been a favourite instrument for Tory politicians; Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech and Thatcher's remarks about the "swamping" of British culture being among only the better-known examples.

Labour governments, too, it must be said, have consistently contributed to a heightening of racism in British society. They have repeatedly tightened immigration controls, backing the lie that immigration is "a problem". And it was a Labour government that introduced virginity tests for Asian women hoping to join their husbands in this country.

Yet, even though I have now been a political activist for almost a quarter of a century, I cannot recall another time when such intense and open racism has permeated the mainstream of British political life.

The Tories have taken such racism so far that they manage to make New Labour's most disgraceful ideas and schemes - detention centres, dispersal, and the voucher system - appear respectable. Which, in turn, gives an air of credibility and even respectability to the far darker forces of the various neo-Nazi groupings.

The effects of this on the ground could be seen around the May local elections themselves, particularly here in the Kent, where the continuing political venom against refugees has had the most resonance.

I'll use my own neighbourhood as an example. I live in Chatham, in Kent. My council ward is a solidly working-class area and is equally solidly Labour-voting, returning two Labour councillors at each local election with absolute regularity. A very small number of refugees, apparently all Kosovo Albanians, have recently been moved into the area. They live in two or three houses, in different streets, and there are a few refugee children attending the local primary school.

I spent quite a lot of time, as the elections loomed, talking with local people about politics. Elections, even the local variety, are peculiar affairs. Little doses of democracy for the majority who, most of the time, feel essentially powerless, they tend to create a brief focus for most people's ideas about their world; as well as providing a snapshot, of admittedly uneven quality, of political feelings at a given moment.

As I talked with people, three clear themes emerged. One, that the current Labour government doesn't give a damn about "ordinary working-class people like us". Two, that "all politicians are the same". And three, that "swarms of asylum-seekers" are straining already-failing public services to their breaking-point.

This gives us an interesting picture. For the most part, people are moving well to the left of New Labour. The indications, in my experience, are that most working-class people are actually shaping their views of their own needs within an essentially "old Labour" framework. But on one issue - the issue of asylum-seekers - there is a distinct shift in the opposite direction. It is quite clear, too, that the ideas that people at the grassroots are expressing on this issue directly reflect the public attitudes and language of mainstream politicians.

All this had an immediate effect in local election results. For a start, the turnout was remarkably low. My ward saw the lowest turnout of all for Medway's council elections; below eighteen percent. This was related to a noticeable slump in the Labour vote. The Tories, by contrast, notched up their first real electoral successes since their rout in the General Election.

The emphasis placed by both the main parliamentary parties upon the "question" of asylum-seekers certainly impacted on the results, but with widely differing consequences. For the Tories, racism as usual seems to have roused out the Right-wing vote. But for the traditional Labour vote, the Government's stance on the issue has led to confusion and even demoralisation. This has certainly been the impression I have had in my discussions with local people since the elections in early May, and the effect shows no sign of dissipating.

There have been more dangerous beneficiaries of this fresh infusion of racism into electoral politics. The neo-Nazi groups, on the whole, saw a strengthening of their vote. This has been fairly uneven; a more significant growth of support in a few areas. Here in Medway and in Gillingham, the neo-Nazis were less successful - 44 votes (2.03%) for an open National Front candidate in one ward, 143 votes (4.3%) for a "disguised" NF candidate in another.

The dangers implicit in this, however, are real. In my own ward there were, fortunately, no candidates to the Right of the Tories. Yet there is plenty of potential for racist politics to thrive in the current atmosphere of fear, rumour and bigotry generated by Tory and Labour politicians alike. They give racism a gloss of respectability, and it is the neo-Nazis who are given an opportunity to thrive.

Philip Kane

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