The British National Party has taken a council seat in Yorkshire. This looks bad, but it isn’t as big a disaster (or victory) as people like to make out. More people voted against them than for them (over 2:1), and you can bet there was a low turnout- most of the people who didn’t vote would have gone for one of the other candidates. What is interesting is that they intend to go for seats in Allerdale next time. This is quite close to home and I remember, a few years ago, reading that the parliamentary seat of Workington, within the council’s boundaries, was the third most white constituency in the country. Which is probably why they’re trying out there.

[Actually, Workington is the only place I’ve ever seen the National Front trying to sell their paper. This was in the mid eighties. Whenever we went shopping there on a Saturday I’d pop into the town’s big newsagent to get model magazines and comics and outside would be the NF man trying to sell The Briton, or whatever it was called. The amusing thing, for me, was that he was always shadowed by a Socialist Worker who would be across the precinct touting copies of the eponymous rag. I stopped visiting so regularly, but it stopped some time around when I went to University. Any Workingtonians dropping by want to tell me when?]