onetwo07

You're right, it was a really good interview - he was very frank without being confrontational.

I disagree, I thought it was the best interview I've seen with him so far. Considering the circumstances I thought KGM held it together brilliantly, which spoke volumes for his professionalism. Brons was much twitchier and slimier than I have seen him before, and seemed to actually have been put under a bit of pressure (he certainly didn't explain 'voluntary repatriation' well, especially for those who had nowhere else in the world to be repatriated to). That said, I think Jon Snow is the best interviewer on any channel at the moment and would have been intrigued to have seen his approach. But back to the Doncaster mayor, he's surely going to have tougher interviews than with someone from Phoenix Nights! I can't imagine what a victimised strop he'd pull if he was interviewed by Andrew Neil or Jon Snow.

Well, he hadn't even started the job yet. but still managed to come across as a truly indept bufoon who clearly can't have been expecting to be elected. He doesn't seem to know what his policies mean past the Daily Mail soundbytes. 'What are politically correct jobs?' 'Dunno, ones that are advertised in the Guardian.' You couldn't make it up, the whole thing reads like something from Brass Eye, and I can only assume people voted before engaging brains: http://andys.org.uk/b/2009/06/08/a-whole-lot-of-nothing/ You've also got to love the way these 'non-mainstream' politicians seem to expect/demand an easy ride from interviewers. Proper tough interviewing should only be reserved for 'the pigs'! Incidentally C4 News carried a good interview with Andrew Brons yesterday, Krishnan Guru Murphy was clearly raging but held it in check, though he did manage to put him in very awkward positions (particularly when he almost directly asked him, 'do you want me to "go home"'.

What you don't seem to realise is why low turnout across the board, in all probability, does not explain why the BNP's vote was down in Yorks and Humberside. In fact, it does the opposite. If people were not voting Labour, they should have been voting BNP, according to what has been said before the election (ie. the white working man who previously voted Labour, would now vote BNP). But he didn't he simply didn't vote (to deliver a message to Labour). There is a world of difference, even though the net result was still to allow the BNP to scrape a representative despite their own depleted vote (a reason to vote next time if ever there was one). If the BNP cannot gain any extra votes in working class Yorkshire, when the Labour Party has jettisoned a huge percentage of its traditional core, freeing them to vote BNP, it never will. I for one am delighted about that. I probably won't bother reading your next single line retort, but please keep trotting them out because it doesn't alter the fact: the BNP has failed to increase the number of it's supporters around here.

But I thought your lot were an antidote to the mainstream parties? 'Punish the pigs' and all that, but they haven't voted for you, have they (apart from the people who did anyway!)?

So success for the BNP is losing voters, but losing fewer voters than a Labour Party that suffered its worst tonking in 100 years. If the BNP can't gain supporters (in fact they still lose supporters) when so many people are utterly peed off with all of the parties, it doesn't say much for their actual appeal to people.

So the BNP's core vote held up better (which you would surely expect). They did not broaden their appeal in the slightest, however, despite a tremendous loss of support for labour (whose disillusioned voters would surely have been looking for alternatives).

They scraped in largely by mobilising their core supporters reasonably well. What is comforting is that they don't seem to have made a leap into mainstream, even allowing for such dissafection with mainstream politics as is currently being experienced. Interestingly their vote held up less well in places where they have traditionally been stronger (or that seems to be the case, I haven't had time to properly run over all the figures). In Burnley, where they have a councillor, BNP vote was down even after Labour's decimation. Similarly in Yorks/Humber, where they were already relatively established in '04, there vote is down slightly. I haven't checked the overall North West stats, that said. They have increased voter numbers in the UK overall, but seemingly in areas coming from a very low base, suggesting perhaps they are close to exhausting a core group, where latent far-right sympathies seem to exist normally.

As an aside, I expect a lot of people who did not vote this time will, in future elections, come out to cast a vote specifically against the BNP (that's the, very unscientific, impression I get from acquaintances/workmates etc). If the BNP have done one good thing, it is to provide a reason for the silent majority (ie the 60% who did not vote and are overwhelmingly not far-rightists) to attend a polling station.

That's hardly relevant. The share only increased because people who did vote Labour didn't vote on Thursday. Nobody(in a psephological sense) in Yorks/Humber who previously voted Labour, or any other party, turned to the BNP on Thursday, however disillusioned they were: is that not a failure? Only the BNP's original hardcore of support turned out to support them and slightly less at that, they are therefore no more popular and no more mainstream.

So, the BNP has acquired no new voters since 2004 in Yorkshire and Humberside? There are 6000 people in Yorkshire and Humberside who voted BNP in 2004, who did not this year? It isn't wrong, it is a fact.

Yes, fewer people voted across the board. You implied, however, that people telling Yorkshiremen not to vote BNP had driven them towards the party, which is obviously not correct. Plus you would expect the fringe vote to hold up, studies have shown that their hardcore supporters are more likely to go out and vote than floating mainstream voters. But that is what they are, a hardcore of natural supporters, whose numbers have fallen despite supposedly ideal conditions for them to grow. It's still indisputable fact that fewer people voted BNP in Yorks and Humberside than in 2004, which is pretty incredible given the noise they've been making.

If they are that popular, and growing that fast, why did fewer people in Yorkshire and Humberside vote BNP than last time out, despite all the disillusionment with mainstream politics?

But you're fundamentally wrong, in Yorkshire anyway. Less people voted BNP than in 2004. Therefore, it's nothing to do with 'telling people not to vote for them.' It's simply a result of people not voting for Labour, the BNP have lost voters in Yorks and Humber.

Well, the IMF was saying last week that the policy response of this country had lessened the impact of recession, but that's not the point I'm making. The point was, that the borrowing/spending requirement will soar over the next couple of years due to policy response to the recession (ie. an additional, intentional increase in spending to attempt to offset negative growth as far as possible). That as well as an unplanned, enforced de facto nationalisation of several large banks. The biggest impact upon the finances has not been the welfare tab (which has always increased with every recession). I'm not even arguing on the rights and wrongs of that, but what I am saying is that the level of spending before the crisis/recession, at under 40% GDP, is sustainable according to past records (as it has stayed, on average, below levels of the previous tory administrations). The need to spend more this year and the next couple could have been mitigated with a different policy response, but that seems somewhat beyond the point. We were not, historically speaking or relative to other developed nations, in particularly bad situation before this recession, despite investment in public services (and a top-down approach by this government which certainly created inefficiencies along the way). That's what the % GDP/spending figure suggests anyway.

http://http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_20th_century_chart.html According to these figures, which seem reasonable, spending as a % of GDP was identical in 2007 as it was in 1997 (about 39%). Historically this would appear to be somewhere in mid range. In fact whilst 12 out of 17 tory years saw spending above 40% of GDP, since 1997 40% GDP has not been breached up until last year. Had this government retrenched now the figure could have been kept lower than where it's going to end up, but this has been tried countless times before without much sucess. It seems to me that the policy response is racking up spending to counter the effects of a downturn, which may or may not help long term (but surely after a hundred years of trying nothing different, it seems worth a go). However this, to me, is a slightly different debate to what is sustainable spending in the long term. Incidentally, if this recession does prove to be over reasonably quickly, the debt should be reduced as growth resumes and welfare bills fall.

I think you're arguing with a straw man. I'm not sure who this massive elite of 'left wing hand-wringers' are, or why they are causing you such consternation if they are so irrelevant. It seems to simply be anyone who might dare to have a hint of optimism or faith in humanity buried anywhere within their entire worldview.

The leap in public spending as a % of GDP is, though, linked to the recession and financial crisis. Nobody forecast billions of pounds necessary to prop up the financial sector (because people were blind to the excesses of the market). Tax revenues have tumbled, and the government has embarked upon a path of fiscal stimulus, expansionary policy and QE aimed at shortening the recession (which, incidentally, may be working according to current economic indicators). This is different to your typical 'tax and spend' debate though, because even the most strident critic could not argue that the hole in current public finances have been caused by the NHS, education or even Iraq. That have been caused by a financial crisis, economic recession and unorthodox policy response to both of the former. Hopefully those decisions may prove vindicated in the longer run (and if they're wrong for us, they're wrong for everyone in the world who seem to to be in a broadly similar boat, so there's hardly a comparative advantage to be had). To my mind it would be perverse to make the majority of ordinary people pay for a crisis patently of the making of big business (and the market). Any cuts to public services should thus be kept to a workable minimum. This recession and financial crisis is not a failure of the state, in fact without the state goodness knows where we might be (I wouldn't have fancied my bank going kaput). It is a failure of the unregulated market, and a failure of venture capital. We need to structure our society moving onwards to pay much more regard to what it offers its citizens, in a way that reconciles entrepeneurship with responsibilty, and enterprise with social justice. Either is fatally flawed without the other, and we need to get the balance right.

You insinuated that more people (In Yorks and Humber I'm guessing) voted BNP, which they didn't. Less did by 6000. So no mass growth in support there. Proportionally they gained more of the vote, but only because disillusioned voters stayed at home. BNP support in Yorkshire and Humber therefore fell, it just fell by a lot less than Labour, hence the seat in the Euro parliament. Nationwide the BNP polled up about 9/10 % (900,000 from 800,000 in 2004). However this is a tiny jump in support when compared to the difference between 1999 and 2004 (1999: 100,000, 2004: 800,000). This suggests that, despite all the problems that we're going through, growth in BNP support has radically fallen away.

In fact, having just checked the figures, the Yorks and Humber BNP have declined in popularity since last time, by 6000 votes. They've only sneaked in because of an increase in people staying at home - perhaps a good example of the 'good people doing nothing.' Nationwide, the BNP vote is up about 9% (100,000) which is admittedly worrying, but represents only modest progress given the unique combination of factors that seemed to make this election a 'perfect storm' for them. The 100,000 gain this time, as compared with a jump from 102,000 -> 808,000 from 1999-2004, is actually far smaller, and perhaps suggests that the BNP is going to struggle to move any nearer to the mainstream. It's natural base is becoming stretched and there may well be a mainstream backlash.

You're completely wrong. In 2004 the BNP polled 126,538. This year they have polled 120,139. So the BNP have polled 6000 fewer votes, despite all the agitation, lots of money thrown at their campaign and a massive economic crisis. That's actually something of a failure. It is still 120,000 votes too many, but apathy has played into BNP hands here - not sympathy.

Just to be clear, very few people have voted him in (barely more than voted for them last time when they didn't get an MEP). What has happened is that less people have bothered voting altogether, which actually has quite different implications. I think there will be something of a backlash against this when it next comes up to an electoral test. Expect at least 10% of the 60% who have not voted this time around to come out, if only to deliver an 'anyone but BNP' ballot.

Without wishing to spoil what must be a great moment for a hardcore of right wing nut jobs, it would appear that, in general, BNP voters are still just that. Very few people who did not vote BNP in 2004 have made a vote for them this time around. The party's popularity is largely unchanged (except for pockets in specific areas). The change that has allowed them representation is simply that many of us have not come out to vote, particularly those who may previously have voted Labour. The fact we have a BNP MEP in Yorkshire now is not much to do with overt supporters, it's actually down to 'respectable' types who couldn't be bothered exercising their democratic right. I'm not sure if that's a truth which is more or less disturbing, but I hope it serves to illustrate to people why they should make their voice heard.

But we weren't. I'm pretty sure that our public sector debt was smaller than the vast majority of other developed countries. It is only this recession (particularly in view of the financial meltdown) that has caused the finances to deteriorate so much. Still we'll be relatively in better fiscal shape than the US, and Obama is nontheless running on a pretty social democratic ticket, at least in American terms. I sometimes think we have a sort of self-punishment mentality in this country. If there are some good years, and services improve (which in my opinion they overwhelmingly have in 10 years, notwithstanding some wastage along the way) we feel a need to have a period of time for things to deteriorate so as to 'pay it back'. I desparately want decent basic services, certainly no worse than now. If there is cash for foreign policy misadventures such as those we have tolerated in the last few years, then there should be cash for things that people rely on. We do not need to go back to the days (that I can remember and I'm only in my 20s) when each winter you saw news stories about hospitals overwhelmed by seasonal flu, or someone dying on a porter's trolley in a corridor because of bed shortages. Politics needs to be recast as 'the art of the possible', and I'm pretty confident that a hell of a lot is possible if people get involved and demand it.

decades of left-leaning luvvies smearing anyone that dares have a different view to their own Do you really think this?! I'm not certain I'd describe any of our post 1979 administrations as 'left-leaning luvvies'. It has been pretty much the opposite.