There's a good article on the Witanagemot pages entitled 'Mongrel nation' (not written by me).  Personally I think the left shoots itself in the foot when it says that there has always been migration, and Britain has always been multi-cultural.

The fact is that contemporary immigrants have arrived in unprecedented numbers, and from places not previously dreamt of.  That causes a clash of cultures, competition for resources and problems in regard to integration.

If the left could admit that instead of pretending that everything is so hunky dorey, and Britain has always been like this (it hasn't, and people remember when it wasn't) then there might be a chance of a grown up debate.

GetReal -

You are right that today's 'multicultural' and multi-ethnic Britain is unprecedented. But this doesn't mean the country was previously 'homogenous.' Yes, most people were white, but this was still a state made up of four separate nations - five if you choose to include Cornwall - at least two of which were agitating to break away from the union, and one of which used violence in order to achieve that aim. Within those nations, regional cultural diversity was also much more pronounced than it is today.

My point was not that 'we have always been multicultural' in the contemporary sense of that word, because clearly we haven't. But neither have we ever been the cosy ethnically homogenous 'extended family' that Nick Griffin likes to bang on about.

More widely, and more importantly, the question is: why does this matter? My view is that we should be concerned about the fragmentation of British society on a number of levels. A tendency towards ethnic and religious ghettoisation is one of them (though not the only one) and we need to do something about it. The left certainly needs to be more honest in acknowledging this than it has been thus far.

But this is a cultural and political issue - it is not a racial one. People like the first poster here seem to believe that people of different races living in the same country is a problem in itself. I don't agree, and I doubt many people in Britain do these days either. Even if you do agree, there's nothing you can do about it, so you'd be better off going and doing something more positive and humane than complaining about it.

Hazel Freakin Blears has entered 'the debate' now:

"Sometimes people feel the political world is very far-removed from their everyday existence.  There's something about the language we use... it's sometimes
like a very closed world. If mainstream political parties leave a
vacuum, people like the BNP will fill that vacuum."

It makes me shudder to think that we are governed by such vacuous imbeciles.  People have been warning Labour about the BNP for the past decade, and their response is just to talk down the immigration problem or say that there's no upper limit.  

"There's something about the language we use.."  What's that Hazell, the language you say, you mean the way that Labour imply that anyone that is concerned about immigration is a racist?

I find it telling that the main parties attribute the rise of the BNP to their 'failure to communicate' or to 'connect', especially with white working class voters. The implication is that if they can only start 'communicating' or 'connecting' again, all will be well. This is what the main parties have been saying for a decade, as voter turnout slides and minority parties gain. They seem to think it's all about failed marketing.

There's no doubt that the BNP's rise is fuelled by immigration - but this is also only part of the story. Few people in this country, I would imagine (and hope), are concerned about our lack of 'racial homogeneity', as the poster above suggests. And few people, actually, are especially badly affected directly by immigration, in the sense of experiencing overcrowding, rapid cultural change, waits for housing etc. Some certainly are, but much of the rest of the resentment is filtered through the media - which is why most of the stories you hear in pubs about 'asylum seekers being given free houses and cars' never happened to the teller - only to a friend of a friend ...

It seems to me that the rise of the BNP could convincingly be lumped in with the rise of anti-immigrant parties elsewhere in Europe; with the rise of left-wing anti-capitalism; with jihadism; and even with English and Cornish nationalism - in the sense that they are all reactions to the insecurity and loss caused by capitalist globalisation. In all these cases, people are turning to things that seem solid, ancient, 'real' and based on community rather than money.

Some of these reactions seem reasonable to me, with some solidity behind them. Others - the BNP, the jihadis - are based on creating false stories about a pure past (a racially homogenous Britain; the paradise that was the Caliphate) and identifying enemies that prevent it from being reborn (immigrants and communists; Americans and corrupt Saudi princes).

This explains, incidentally, the fact that the BNP is indeed a mix of a kind of old-fashioned working class Labourism (strong unions and co-ops), modern environmentalism (energy independence and windfarms) and good old-fashioned xenophobia. In their own way, these are all comforting. And what the world needs right now is comfort. 'All that is solid melts into air ...'

Surely the point here builds on the long history of warnings about the financial emasculation of local government since Thatcher's days. If they do not have their own resources, whether from the business rate, local VAT, and more intelligent rates, they can't respond to local needs whatever party they are. This provides an opening for those with a new argument while all the main parties get demoralised and their members leave, givinging up on their thankless task. Then the advance of the BNP (or the Greens) is used by the the main parties and the Westminster administrators to justify their refusal to allow local communities their own budgets because they 'can't be trusted'.

You tell him Random !! 

It is significant that the BNP's support is concentrated in Labour areas.  

The BNP are not "far-right"!

Their economic policies and nationalism are left-wing, nothing to do with the right. They are nationalist socialists, as opposed to the internationalist socialists in communist parties.

There's no mystery about the progress of the BNP - only blinkered, politically correct establishment grovellers fail to see the way in which our traditional British culture and identity is being destroyed by a Communist or Marxist cabal at the heart of our democracy - and all without our permission and with no apparent benefit to the majority of us. I always thought democracy is government of the people by the people - where and when did we give a mandate for converting our racially homogeneoous society into a multiracial one?