The Banal National Party: the routine nature of legitimacy
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00313220902793898
ISSN1461-7331
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Politics and Representation
ResumoABSTRACT Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the far right in Britain, under the auspices of the British National Party (BNP), has made noteworthy electoral gains. Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, the party has placed great emphasis on modernization. The concentration of BNP electoral gains within specific areas such as Burnley, Barking and Dagenham, Epping Forest, and Stoke-on-Trent has meant that academic enquiries into the party's activities have a more localized emphasis. As well as examining the ideological shifts within the BNP, an emergent body of literature has sought to focus on the means by which the party has been able to assume greater levels of legitimacy within particular locales. This focus on the party apparatus has yielded some interesting insights into the way in which the BNP has sought to embed itself within particular communities. Great stock has been placed on traditional forms of community-based politics. By tapping into everyday concerns and by selecting local residents as candidates, it appears that the BNP has been able to deflect charges of racism and extremism. Drawing on qualitative interviews with BNP voters and ex-candidates in Burnley, Rhodes suggests that it is the banality of the party, its discourses and its candidates at a local level that has enabled the BNP to acquire a degree of ‘respectability’. The party and its supporters have seemingly been able to exploit traditional conceptions of racism and nationalism as something out of the ordinary or ‘other’. There appears to have been a recognition that it is everyday articulations and representations of white racism that seem able to escape the label of extremism, appearing as more ‘legitimate’ forms of expression. Similarly, the way in which BNP voters, as well as the party itself, have been able to locate powerful tales of identity and entitlement within routine narratives will be explored in relation to the reconfiguration of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the contemporary period. Keywords: banalityBritish National PartyBurnleylegitimacynarrativesracism Notes 1Douglas R. Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000); Nigel Copsey, ‘Changing course or changing clothes? Reflections on the ideological evolution of the British National Party 1999–2006’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 41, no. 1, 2007, 61–82. 2Nigel Copsey, ‘Contemporary fascism in the local arena: the BNP and “rights for Whites”’, in Mike Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996), 118–40; Holmes, Integral Europe; Nick Lowles, ‘BNP profiting from hate’, Searchlight, July 2001; Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest For Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004); Roger Eatwell, ‘The extreme right in Britain: the long road to “modernization”’, in Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde (eds), Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge (London: Routledge 2004), 62–79; Matthew J. Goodwin, ‘The extreme right in Britain: still an “ugly duckling” but for how long?’, Political Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 2, 2007, 241–50. 3Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism; Eatwell, ‘The extreme right in Britain’. 5Les Back, ‘Guess who's coming to dinner? The political morality of investigating whiteness in the gray zone’, in Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 35 (emphasis added). 4Les Back, ‘Guess who's coming to dinner? The political morality of investigating whiteness in the gray zone’, in Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 33–59 (36). 6Les Back, ‘Guess who's coming to dinner? The political morality of investigating whiteness in the gray zone’, in Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 38–40. 7Les Back, ‘Aryans reading Adorno: cyber-culture and twenty-first-century racism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, 2002, 628–51 (641). 8Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos, ‘Beyond the racist/hooligan couplet: race, social theory and football culture’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 3, 1999, 419–42. 9Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995). 10Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995). 11Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995)., 6 (emphases added). 12Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage 1995). 13Nigel Copsey, ‘Meeting the challenge of contemporary British fascism? The Labour Party's response to the National Front and the British National Party’, in Nigel Copsey and David Renton (eds), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2005), 182–202 (193–4). 14Goodwin, ‘The extreme right in Britain’, 248. 15Peter John, Helen Margetts, David Rowland and Stuart Weir, The BNP: The Roots of Its Appeal (Colchester, Essex: Democratic Audit, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex 2006), 7. 16Peter John, Helen Margetts, David Rowland and Stuart Weir, The BNP: The Roots of Its Appeal (Colchester, Essex: Democratic Audit, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex 2006), 8. 17Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism; Eatwell, ‘The extreme right in Britain’; Goodwin, ‘The extreme right in Britain’. 18Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism, 55. 19Holmes, Integral Europe, 142. 20Holmes, Integral Europe, 126. 21Holmes, Integral Europe, 141–2. 22Holmes, Integral Europe, 122. 23Billig, Banal Nationalism; Georgie Wemyss, ‘The power to tolerate: contests over Britishness and belonging in East London’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 3, 2006, 215–36. 29Roger Hewitt, Routes of Racism: The Social Basis of Racist Action (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books 1996), 30–1. 24Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage 1995), 25–44 (30). 25Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996), 8. 26Robertson, ‘Glocalization’, 28. 27John Eade (ed.), Living the Global City: Globalization as Local Process (London: Routledge 1997), 3. 28Les Back, The Art of Listening (Oxford: Berg 2007), 34. 30Michael Billig, Susan Condor, Derek Edwards, Mike Gane, David Middleton and Alan Radley, Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking (London: Sage 1988); Teun A. van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse: An Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1984). 31The documentary was broadcast on BBC1, 15 July 2004. 32Matthew Taylor, ‘BNP leaders may face charges after TV exposé of racism’, Guardian, 15 July 2004. 33‘BNP duo to face race hate retrial’, BBC News Online, 3 February 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4672792.stm (viewed 21 January 2009). 34Nick Lowles, ‘Red, white and blue festival ends up black and blue’, Searchlight, September 2003. 35‘BNP leader jailed for ballot fraud’, Independent, 17 January 2002. 36‘BNP man in quit call over assault’, Lancashire Evening Telegraph, 15 February 2005. 37‘BNP councillor to answer race abuse charge’, Burnley Express, 25 November 2005. 38Searchlight, Vote Hope Not Hate, Thursday, 4 May 2006, pamphlet distributed in Burnley. 39David Renton, ‘“A day to make history”? The 2004 elections and the British National Party’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 1, 2005, 25–45 (40–1). 40See also James Rhodes, ‘The “local” politics of the British National Party’, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, vol. 31, no. 4, 2006, 5–20 (15). 41Copsey, ‘Meeting the challenge of contemporary British fascism?’, 192. 42Copsey, ‘Meeting the challenge of contemporary British fascism?’, 193–4. 43‘Lessons from the May election’, Identity, no. 79, June 2007, 11. 44Back, Crabbe and Solomos, ‘Beyond the racist/hooligan couplet’, 428 (emphasis added). 45This has also been a criticism of the anti-fascist movement in Britain, which fails to engage with more common and everyday forms of racism; see, for example, Alastair Bonnett, Anti-Racism (London: Routledge 2000), 108–11. 46John, Margetts, Rowland and Weir, The BNP, 14. 47Sue Madigam, “'we're just normal people say BNP trio’, Burnley Express, 7 May 2002, 8. 48Renton, ‘“A day to make history”?’. 50Steven Smith, How It Was Done: The Rise of Burnley BNP: The Inside Story (Burnley: Cliviger Press 2004), 45 (emphasis added). 49Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism, 149. 51Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism, 142. 52Julia Day, ‘BNP sponsors football team’, Guardian, 12 September 2002. 53‘The BNP's battle for Barking has began’, Voice of Freedom, February 2005, 8. 54Esther Addley, ‘On the stump with the BNP’, Guardian, 30 April 2003. 55Holmes, Integral Europe, 141–2. 56Holmes, Integral Europe, 141–2. 57Caroline Knowles, Race and Social Analysis (London: Sage 2003), 25. 58Phil Cohen, ‘All white on the night? Narratives of nativism on the Isle of Dogs’, in Tim Butler and Michael Rustin (eds), Rising in the East? The Regeneration of East London (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1996), 179–96 (194). 59Knowles, Race and Social Analysis, 89. 60Les Back and Michael Keith, ‘“Rights and wrongs”: youth, community and narratives of racial violence’, in Phil Cohen (ed.), New Ethnicities, Old Racisms? (London: Zed Books 1999), 131–62 (145). 61Derek McGhee, Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press 2005). 62Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge 2000), 7. 63Billig, Banal Nationalism, 94.
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