qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

The District Line is a sprawling, slow giant of a railway line and one of the oldest parts of the London Underground. It snakes from Richmond and Wimbledon in the west to Upminister in the east. By a neat geographical coincidence, it forms an axis, the diametric poles of which demonstrate one of New Labour’s biggest failures.

An eastbound train bound for Upminster, after leaving the high-rise, high-money density of the City passes through Stepney, Bow, West Ham, East Ham, Barking and Dagenham, on its way to London’s periphery. As we all know, the new MP for the first two of those stops, RESPECT’s George Galloway won Thursday’s election with 35.9% of the vote (interestingly, Galloway would have come a very poor second had not there been big swings from Conservative and Lib Dem voters). Moving east, in West Ham and East Ham, RESPECT both won around 20% of the vote. RESPECT, for all its claims of inclusion, is an extremist party, an uneasy combination of Trots and conservative Islamists, borne out of the alliance between the Muslim Association of Britain and the Socialist Workers Party in opposition to the Iraq war. In order to please their new-found comrades, the old socialists have had to forget old-fashioned leftish principles like women’s and gay rights.

As your District Line train trundles from zone 3 to 4, and you’re wondering why you didn’t just get the British Rail all the way, you’ll pass through first Barking, then Dagenham. In Barking, the BNP got 16.9% of the vote, and only lost second place to the Tories by 47 votes. In Dagenham, things are a little better, the BNP only got 9.3% of the vote, but this is still a relatively large rise from the 5% they got in 2001. The BNP, as you should all know by now, are little more than a bunch of violent thugs and criminals dressed in suits; their campaigns in Barking and Dagenham were based on what geeks call FUD, and what the rest of us call lies and hatred (example here).

Yesterday I said RESPECT were a minor concern, trumped up both by the extreme left as proof of a new political movement, and the pro-war left in an attempt to deflect criticism of the Blair government’s mistakes in Iraq. But I’ve changed my mind – I was wrong in trying to justify their marginality by looking at them in a national context. Just like the BNP, RESPECT are an extremist threat, if only in the poorest and most marginalised areas of the country. The two halves of the eastern branch of the District Line are the opposing ends of the axis: a mainly Muslim vote, angry at Blair’s foreign policy and Islamophobia in Britain at one end, and a white working-class vote, angry at what they see as jobs and tax revenue being taken away by newcomers, at the other.

What I’m saying is nothing new, what is new is that for the first time, both sides are wising up and using the ballot box as a way of expressing their discontent in large numbers. This has woken up some in the Labour government to the dangers. Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking, writing in today’s Observer bemoans the local poverty, and the government’s complacency in acting to alleviate it, for the rise in the BNP’s share of the vote. But she utterly fails to concede, that as the local MP, it has been her job to represent her constituents’ needs, and that she has failed utterly to do so, even more so considering as a Minister of State, she must have had some clout.

The BNP and RESPECT both deliberately target and exploit communities wracked by poverty (there were very few RESPECT or BNP candidates in middle-class or wealthy areas, and those that did stand received far fewer votes) and other deep and divisive social problems, problems that the Labour government of the past eight years has failed to alleviate in any great way. It’s easy for Blairites to paint the likes of RESPECT as misguided hardliners and friends of the fascists (this may well be true, but it is irrelevant). It is not only middle-class bruschetta-munchers who have turned on the party, and to paint the electoral rebellion against Labour as such is utterly ignorant. Labour has failed and alienated the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country, and the vacuum it has left behind has been filled. The electoral success of RESPECT and the BNP are the natural consequences of Labour ignoring the very people it is supposed to serve and protect. Though this may be restricted to a few socially deprived areas of the country, to ignore it and write it off as a minor aberration would be a betrayal of the Labour Party’s founding principles.

I am off for an intense one-week course at the university Management School this week – so I don’t expect to have much time to contribute to the blog or respond to comments. If I do get time I will try and write some more…