>On the other hand, the Tories got so comprehensively carried out at the last
>election, based on a truly dreadful dog-whistle-racism campaign designed by
>Lynton Crosbie (John Howard's political consultant) and based on various
>slogans about "bogus asylum seekers", that they are for once trying
>to play the
>opposite tune; to try to tell the electorate that they are a normal people's
>party and the racist nutters are no longer welcome. My barometer of whether
>this is a) sincere and b) working is the support level for the BNP, which is
>rising and rising. I take this as a *good* sign in UK politics as I think it
>means that "working class Tories" (an electoral grouping who are
>given the most
>bizarrely excessive respect in British politics as a bunch of
>salt-of-the-earth
>types who are far more in touch with the real world than trendy leftie middle
>class socialists, but who nevertheless love their country and their heritage;
>actually most of them are just nasty little racist fuckers who would have
>turned coat the minute the first jackboot landed in Dover) have got
>the message
>that the game is up. Having the fascists out in the open in an explicitly
>fascist party with no hope of power is much better than having them hiding in
>corners of a party that might run asylum policy.
Someone once told me that the reason that Britain never had a serious LePen-style politician in the 1980s was that Thatcher made one unncessary. Is there any truth to that?
Doug