>> Message: 2
>> Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 08:49:57 -0400
>> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>>> 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?
>>
> Otoh, I was not old enough to vote in the 1980s so I might have missed some
> nuances, particularly in the early half.
The usual line that's used to flesh out this argument is from 1978, when Thatcher said, after some small riot or other: "People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people of a different culture". And some people think that this was her way of telling supporters of the National Front that it was safe to vote Tory after all; and the Front did do badly in the 1979 election (300+ candidates, 300+ lost deposits); and Mrs Thatcher did rather well and became Prime Minister.
But on the whole I agree with Daniel.
One problem that the British far right has faced in getting people to take them seriously is that they like their Nazi iconography, and British people on the whole find Nazis ridiculous.
Although I think it's too quick to say that Mrs Thatcher prevented the emergence of a Le Pen-style politician in the 1980s, I think the way in which the Conservative Party has successfully organised the right-wing electorate in a pretty stable way for well over a hundred years has a lot to do with the fact that a nationalist/racist party has never been able to operate successfully to its right for any considerable period of time, whether in the 1930s or more recently.
And the electoral system has traditionally worked to force extremists to work inside rather than outside the traditionally dominant parties. (Now that there are PR-style elections for various bodies, including the European Parliament, we're seeing the cranks and the loons from anti-EU parties like the UKIP and Veritas getting elected, but this certainly wouldn't be happening if we'd stuck to first-past-the-post for everything.)
But the Conservative Party does contain a large number of people with pretty repulsive racial politics. A survey of 500 delegates to the Conservative Party conference in 1983 found that a quarter thought that the "best" British society would be exclusively white, and that 14% favoured compulsory repatriation schemes. In 1991 a poll of 2,466 randomly selected Party members found that 70% "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the statement that "A future Conservative government should encourage repatriation of immigrants". (I don't think we've got good information about attitudes inside the Party more recently - and they may very well be quite different: a lot of the membership will have died off since the 1991 poll.)
Chris