How Britain's all-white party gained its following

The British National Party claims opposition status in the council of the London borough Barking and Dagenham.

Gaiutra BahadurNovember 14, 2009 08:51Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

A woman looks at leader of the British National Party Nick Griffin as he speaks to the media in Manchester, northern England after his all-white party won its first seat in the European Parliament, June 7, 2009. (Darren Staples/Reuters)

LONDON, U.K. — The London borough of Barking and Dagenham demonstrates why Gandhi is "a big role model" for the British National Party (BNP) : "India was an occupied country, wasn't it? And he was able to liberate it from foreigners," said the party's leader, Bob Bailey.

Bailey is not the only person to project an ideological struggle onto the dockside community of 170,000, where populist disenchantment with immigration, Islam and established political parties combined to give the all-white BNP its first major electoral breakthrough.

In 2006, the party seized 12 of 51 council seats, making the government body the only one in Great Britain where the BNP is the formal opposition. One of the borough's two parliamentary representatives, Labour MP John Cruddas, calls Barking and Dagenham "the frontline of the battle against the far-right." It served as base for the BNP's successful bid for its first seat on the London assembly last year. The party, which is debating this weekend whether to allow non-Caucasion members, hopes also to have a British Parliament seat based on its popularity here.

The area used to be a Labour stronghold, its identity tied to the state providing the working man a decent perch. Around 1930, the government built 25,000 cottages east of the city for veterans, which started the borough. Soon after, Ford moved in, turning what was then the world's largest municipal housing estate into its company town for a half century. The white, skilled working-class predominated.

It still does. The borough is 80 percent white. But mannequins in the shops model major transformations in the last decade: They wear headscarves and headwraps from West Africa. In addition to the Muslim and African arrivals, white residents include refugees from the Yugoslav wars and economic migrants from Eastern Europe. On a main road, Albanians play chess at a pool club and the nearby minaret of the Barking Mosque overlooks the borough's 85-year-old housing stock.

During the 2006 election, the BNP accused boroughs near 2012 Olympics venues of giving African residents 50,000 pounds ($83,000) to relocate to those iconic homes — a rumor that several residents said they still believe. The party also wildly inflated the rise in crimes and ethnic minorities in the borough, suggesting a cause and effect. "The BNP tend to rely on fears and in some cases downright lies," said Barry Kirke, editor of The Barking & Dagenham Post, which debunked the statistics. "It was just total complete rubbish."

Why did residents believe the tales? Jobs and subsidized housing seemed to disappear as immigrants arrived, creating both a sense of dispossession and a scapegoat. During the 1980s, Ford pulled its factories out of the borough and half the council-owned houses were bought by their occupants under a Thatcher administration initiative, removing them from the government pool. Many long-term residents fled with Ford, leaving a void that immigrants seeking cheap rents and first homes filled, said realtor Gary Pridmore. Then, a decade later, the Kosovo crisis injected many refugees, almost overnight.

"That encouraged racist views that I haven't heard publicly since I was a boy," Pridmore said, remembering when local pubs were hubs for the neo-Nazi National Front.