On the campaign trail with the BNP

Nick Morrison goes canvassing with the BNP.

"KILL the Paki bastards," came the yell, swiftly followed by "Kill the black c**ts." It isn't really the image Kevin Scott is trying to project, but if he is at all perturbed by the impromptu encouragement he doesn't show it.

The outburst, from a group of men gathered outside the Town End Farm Working Men's Club, is in response to a drive-past of Scott's election van, a blue Transit with one side covered in a huge Union Jack, and the other in a row of British National Party posters. "Asylum seekers are on their way to a street near you soon," proclaims the loudspeaker, as if warning of impending doom.

The van has arrived to support Scott and the half dozen BNP activists who are aiming to drum up support in the Town End Farm ward of Sunderland, for next week's local council elections. Today, St George's Day, they are joined by Nick Griffin, the party leader, and the timing cannot be without its significance. The North-East, and Sunderland in particular, is seen as potentially fruitful ground for the BNP. The party is contesting all 25 seats in the city, and 54 of its 200-plus candidates are standing in the region.

Griffin's presence also explains why there is a mini-Press pack following Scott and his canvassers around the estate. As well as The Sunderland Echo, there's Channel Four and a Danish radio station: the rise of the far right is news across Europe, with extremist parties making significant electoral strides in Austria, Holland, and France, as well as Denmark.

What these parties all have in common is that they have exploited concerns over asylum seekers and combined it with a disaffection with mainstream politics to create an electoral phenomenon, now causing considerable unease in the corridors of power.

Until recently, the BNP played no part in this phenomenon, but all that seems to be changing with the arrival of Griffin as party leader. Articulate, smartly-dressed and educated, he is a world away from the snarling skinhead who epitomised the far right of old. Despite the evidence of the working men's club doorway posse, Scott claims this image was always far from the truth.

"When I joined the BNP I don't think I ever met any thugs, they were all older people. You're more likely to see skinheads at a gay club than in a BNP meeting. A lot of the image you're talking about was created by the media.

"When you go to rallies there could be 400 people there and three or four guys with short hair, and that is who the media are interested in," he says.

Scott, the BNP's North-East organiser, joined the party when he was 18, attracted, he says, by the patriotic element, as well as its sense of being outside the establishment. But he is wholly behind the attempt to take on a new image.

"The BNP was a different animal when I first joined. We were interested in street-level activities - selling papers on the streets. I did it all over the North-East. But in the mid-90s there was a feeling that we were heading up a cul-de-sac, and if we wanted to win power we needed to change tack. If we wanted to influence people we had to appeal directly to people on the doorstep, through elections."

He says one result has been that the sort of people joining the BNP now are not the sort who used to stand on street corners selling papers. They are ordinary people, from all backgrounds, including two doctors, he tells me proudly. "We're hoping to change our image over time, and part and parcel of that is doing what we're doing here today: putting ourselves up for election and stating our case, that is the way we're going to get around it."

The case is largely based on asylum seekers. The latest edition of the BNP's newsletter in Sunderland, the Sunderland Patriot, self-styled "Voice of the Silent Majority", declares that "We all know that Sunderland has the unwelcome title of 'Asylum Capital of the North', before going on to insist that asylum seekers get colour televisions, new cookers, washing machines, fridges, freezers and kitchen utensils, as well as their gas and electricity bills paid.

The Patriot also claims that the election of BNP councillors has stopped the relocation of asylum seekers to Burnley and Blackburn, ending with the message: "If you want to stop any asylum seekers coming to Sunderland: vote BNP".

According to the latest Home Office figures, Sunderland has 1,030 asylum seekers, out of a population of 289,000. And far from it being the "Asylum Capital of the North", it has fewer than Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Salford, Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield.

As a Home Office spokesman points out, asylum seekers who qualify for state benefits get just 70 per cent of the standard benefits available for UK residents. As for colour televisions, he says "that's rubbish".

The BNP's policy is for an immediate halt to all immigration and the introduction of voluntary resettlement, in other words, encouraging people, many of whom have lived here for years and some of whom were born here, to go back to their "lands of ethnic origin". Asylum seekers are either branded as bogus, or told they should seek refuge nearer their home country.

But in many ways it's not so much the policies themselves - disturbing though they are - as the sentiments which lie behind them, that really chill the bone. As you discuss the finer points of dispersal of asylum seekers with a respectable-looking activist, you have to remind yourself that it is these views that fuel racial hatred, however unwittingly, or unwanted the connection.

But this has not stopped the new, smooth BNP from tapping into the fears of a sizeable part of the electorate by spreading a mixture of lies, myths and half-truths. Scott, who is himself standing in Gateshead, claims the response on the doorstep is positive, and he is confident that they will win their first seats in the North-East when the results are declared next week. More importantly, he says the BNP will be in a position to mount a stronger challenge next year.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of those who support the party are reluctant to discuss their reasons - Scott puts it down to the media image imparting a certain stigma to voting BNP - but Ken, 73, tending his front garden when the canvassers call, is a little sceptical.

"Some of what they're saying is true but a lot of it is bull, to be honest," he says. "All I know about asylum seekers is what I read in the papers, but I don't believe all that is written about what they're getting. As to whether they're getting colour televisions and that, I don't know, but if somebody comes to this country with no home they have got to have furniture."

But where Ken does agree with Scott is in his assertion that Labour has done little for the North-East, supposedly its heartland, and it is this feeling which may see the BNP post a good showing next week. After all, if Labour has let its own people down, and voting Tory or Liberal Democrat would stick in the craw, where else is there to turn?

And now the BNP has gone all respectable, it is in a position to take advantage of this disaffection. The question is, how deep does this respectability go? And even if it is more than just a veneer, does it still give succour to the "Kill the Pakis" brigade, just a few yards away?

Scott himself says the BNP's conversion to the ballot box is genuine. Perhaps less convincingly, he claims that the BNP is actively trying to prevent hostility to asylum seekers from turning into violence, by providing a pressure valve for the frustration, instead of fermenting it by painting asylum seekers as scroungers who get free colour televisions.

"What would you rather have, people expressing their resentment through the ballot box or people expressing it on the streets?" he says. "What we're trying to do is channel that injustice and resentment." No doubt it will come as something of a relief to the gathering outside the working men's club to learn that they finally have an outlet for their venom.