I think you've fallen for the Labour (and BNP) propaganda here. Respect is much less communalist than it's painted, while Labour's campaign in BG&B was far more communalist than many Labourites would like to admit.
Here are a couple of democratic secular leftists who support Respect (I don't, since I'm not a traditional socialist) - I'd recommend scrolling through a couple of their posts on BG&B and the nature of the campaign rather than taking your cue exclusively from nutters like Mel P and embittered ex-Trots like Harry...
Yeah, since I'm not over there it's hard to get a real feel for things. I wrote this quite late at night and was not as explicit as I probably should have been about not really being sure how much to believe (although I did mention that I wasn't sure how much to believe of Mad Mel's piece, certainly the Salma Yacoub flyers on the Respect site were more than just the Kashmir/Islam pandering that Mel was seeming to claim).
Plus, I mainly wanted to uncork a rant.
According to the (admittedly quite right-wing and anti-Muslim) columnist Melanie Phillips, in Birmingham Sparkbrook the Respect candidate, Salma Yacoub, spent the lion's share of her time campaigning on Iraq and Kashmir (because most of the Muslims in the area are originally from the disputed state of Kashmir)
Then again:
Salma Yaqoob [...] mentioned that their friendly local Islamic fundamentalists had printed leaflets calling her an apostate, saying her children were illegitimate, that she would be buried "with the dogs" - the usual. What was a little more surprising was her claim that equally friendly local Labour Party activists had helped produce and distribute these charming missives. I'd heard rumours that this collusion had been taking place, but never on an accountable public record.
Apart from the debate about communalism (which is far from closed, & I'm certainly not saying that Respect have no charges to answer),
I particularly like the point about multiculturalism tending ultimately to foster white racism - all the more so when it's combined with New Labour's (deeply middle-class) antipathy to class politics.
I wasn't happy about the election of Galloway (though not terribly sorry about Oona King), but couldn't it be the other way around? Could Galloway's election be a sign of the failure? To me it signifies how isolated Muslims in Britain have become, if they decide to align themselves with the far left. In the USA, Cuban Americans and Jewish Americans manage to attract mainstream support for their foreign policy causes, in large part because they are capable of framing the issues that are important to them in a way that appeals to most Americans.
I'm not sure how strong the muslims are electorally. Are they not mostly concentrated in inner cities, where the main opposition, the Tories, are very weak?
About the BNP, I think the threat from them shouldn't be overestimated, so I don't think that argument like 'well, if you do that, it will benefit the BNP' is very powerful in itself. In the current electoral system, both the BNP and Respect will remain very, very marginal. I hope the Brits decide to keep it. FPTP is best in order to create strong, stable government, and doesn't let extremists put a foot in the door.
I was just wondering, about the multiculturalism breeding white (and presumably other forms of) racism thing, if the reason this happens is that political parties appeal to groups qua groups, what's the equivalent effect for a class based politics, or a politics, as Britain had in the nineteenth century, of denominations? I can see that it's tempting to ascribe the growth of the BNP (and perhaps even UKIP) to acting on a false set of normative political claims, but if that's the case, then presumably in relevantly similar cases - i.e., any politics involving appeal to groups qua groups - there should be a similar blowback effect. I don't think there was (but then I'm by no means an expert on the periods in question, in Britain at least), so presumably there should be some other causal factor at work.
Rob, I think the core factor of the BNP's recent growth has been their (relative) moderation of their rhetoric. Although they are, mostly, a protest party I doubt they'd have the amount of votes they have if they still had the more overtly neo-fascist policies from when John Tyndall was leader. That's the main thing. Beyond that, I think that there is an intersection of two more factors that helps to explain their growth. One is the multiculturalist idea of all cultures as being worth preserving in aspic, and the BNP have certainly been clever in exploiting that rhetoric in appealing to the emotions of people who, in the second factor, feel that 'the country is being overrun', a byproduct of both real demographic shifts and of media hysteria. The race to the rhetorical bottom of the two main political parties on immigration and asylum also plays an important part in normalizing the sort of paranoid victim mentality that is a major part of the BNP message. I think it's hard to precisely map back to the 19th century, simply because there are so many differences between then and now.
Danny, I probably should have been more explicit about it being a fairly localized phenomenon. For the most part, Muslims voted for either the Lib Dems or Labour, so it was only several areas where Respect got a big vote. I was thinking of the future, and whether or not this meant anything in particular, but I don't think I did that good a job.
As for the BNP, I don't think that they themselves represent a particular political threat, but I think that their ideas do. One of their central problems is their past, the fact that until quite recently they were a more or less openly neo-fascist organization. Their leader, Nick Griffin, may now portray himself as a reasonable, somewhat moderate character, but his past is full of all kinds of ultra-dodgy stuff. What worries me about the BNP is that the sort of things they say at the moment is not much different from a lot of quite successful far-right parties on the Continent, so if there was a new ultra-nationalist party in England without the baggage of the BNP I think they could do quite well, and their presence and ideas could go a long way towards poisoning matters further in places where religious/ethnic tensions are already quite strong.
Just to add to my response to Rob's comment, when I mention demographic shifts, I am not endorsing the idea of Britain as being 'invaded' or 'overrun', just that there are real demographic shifts going on (quite explicitly in some areas), and the fact of them gets magnified by some people into an avalanche. I remember reading a poll of Britons where the average answer to the question as to what proportion of the population they thought was composed of ethnic minorities was 23%, as opposed to the real figure of 8%.
u r a race traitor!
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