Article by Griffin is up on their website. I think it is important reading not only as they just polled 300k votes in local elections but it clearly states their strategy .. worrying reading, not just as this startegy is working but that the left seem incapable of understanding how and why it is .... obviously not going to link but not hard to find full article .. heres alot of it .. sorry for cut and paste ..
p.s. this is the same strategy as hamas, as the Liberal Focus, as SP, as SF, as iwca .. it works .. it may in the bnps and many cases be cynical .. but it is working
"Election 2007 – BNP leader Nick Griffin assesses the big picture and sets out where we must go from here.
( first para was lots of nonsense based on something Wellington said!
)
Moving up a level
So here’s the bottom line: Several years ago our improvements in our own electoral machine caught our opponents off guard and gave us the string of victories that made us the story of successive elections. But the shock and humiliation of losing to the BNP forced the other parties to up their game. So from shock firsts we’ve been forced down to good but shell-shocked seconds. And that is where, by and large, we will stay unless we learn the lessons of May 2007 and take our game up a level as well.
Labour and the LibDems have learnt to concentrate on mobilising their own core vote (the elderly, ethnic minorities and the local functionaries of Brown’s welfarist empire), while their leftist allies combine expensive smear sheets and phone calls targeted at especially at postal voters to depress our vote. This is why, from key seats up and down the country we got reports of sitting Labour councillors trudging round the streets putting out their election addresses by themselves. Their activists weren’t sitting on their hands, they were manning telephone banks to identify pro- and anti-BNP voters and work on them accordingly.
In our best areas our people easily ‘won’ the traditional battle of the leaflets, often dropping three or four to every house in a ward for the single one put out by Labour. And our leaflets were good, clearly winning the political argument every time.
But that’s the problem. We’re assuming that the public are as interested in political issues as we are; that they can be won over or mobilised by political concerns about the long-term big picture.
Some can, which is why our vote (more than 300,000 in total in the English District and Borough contests, an average of 14.7% of the electorate) is so substantial and held up well even though we were fighting so many more seats in so many frankly weaker areas. But the majority are left cold by party politics, which is why nearly two-thirds of the electorate didn’t vote for anybody.
Our politicised hardcore may well grow with external events, but even so we’ll be very lucky under remotely ‘normal’ circumstances if our core vote comes to exceed that of Labour and the LibDems and the minorities combined – and, make no mistake, that is what we’re up against.
And since trusting to luck is never a good policy, we are not going to. Over the last few days I have been in frequent and lengthy discussions with a number of our key election experts and organisers. Together we have analysed these elections, worked out how we have been pegged back and why in some places we bucked that trend and won, and begun to design an even better election-winning machine for the future.
More will appear on this subject in the new editions of Identity and Freedom, and much more will be rolled out at training seminars around the country and at the Summer School.
Grass roots upwards
For now it is enough to point to the fact that all our wins - bar one or two where the effort of keeping us out of Ward A simply left Labour unable to stop us in Ward B – came in places where our candidates and a handful of local helpers have been particularly effective at getting involved in real grass-roots community politics, and in using local newsletters to tell everyone in the ward that we are a ‘Good Thing’ for them and their area.
It is now crystal clear from these experimental operations that seeing our people do good and practical things for their community not only reinforces the willingness of our politicised supporters to go out and vote BNP, and undermines the effectiveness of the anti-BNP smear sheets, but also mobilises on our behalf an additional section of the essentially non-political population.
This, then, is where we have to go from here – rolling out the experience from these successful experiments to become the norm for every BNP branch, group and even lone activists.
Perhaps we should not have had to wait until such hard pounding forced us to take a long hard look at the shifting balance of power in the conventional political arms race between us and our opponents over the last year or so. After all, there is nothing new in defeated opponents learning new tactics to turn things around. Neither is there anything new in viewing the role of the organised nationalist movement as a sort of school that moulds first individuals, then groups, then entire communities, remaking them and turning passive, selfish consumers and observers into active citizens building a better future.
But being aware of this point in theory, and setting out to turn it into practice are two different matters. For the last few years we have been fortunate enough to be able to win seats while directly indulging our passion for politics and political argument. Until Brown’s ‘economic miracle’ heads South and other ‘events’ change the political landscape, those days are gone.
Electoral progress can and will be made over the next couple of years, but only by those who model what they do on our winners this time around, and not on what we did to win over the previous few years.
The first step will be raising the profile of, and the value placed upon, community politics work. We are already working on ways to do this, and they will be rolled out in the months ahead. Just to give one example, Martin Wingfield and I have already agreed that, from now on, Freedom will not be carrying reports of internal meetings, except occasionally in new areas or if there is something particularly unusual such as a huge collection for an especially useful cause.
From now on, if you want to see your branch or group’s name in lights and photographs in Freedom or on the regional news pages of the website you will have to press your Organiser to arrange a community clean-up or celebration, or one of a hundred other ostensibly non-political things that can be done to improve the lives of local people and the standing of our future candidate in one of our target wards. If you want to be in our headlines, if you want me to spend a day in your area, then you’d better plan to get me in overalls and high-viz jacket. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and get covered in mud!
The conventional politics won’t go away, of course, indeed it is our aim to step up the internal education process which turns protest vote new recruits (and there are plenty of those to be signed up over the next month or so, provided they are contacted and visited promptly) into fully-fledged and well informed nationalists. It is only what we are going to be doing with those new activists and older ones alike that is going to change:
Less about politics, more about people – for it is by serving the people that we will secure enough extra votes to keep our bandwagon rolling towards the power we need to have a serious impact on politics and the future.
p.s. this is the same strategy as hamas, as the Liberal Focus, as SP, as SF, as iwca .. it works .. it may in the bnps and many cases be cynical .. but it is working
"Election 2007 – BNP leader Nick Griffin assesses the big picture and sets out where we must go from here.
( first para was lots of nonsense based on something Wellington said!
)Moving up a level
So here’s the bottom line: Several years ago our improvements in our own electoral machine caught our opponents off guard and gave us the string of victories that made us the story of successive elections. But the shock and humiliation of losing to the BNP forced the other parties to up their game. So from shock firsts we’ve been forced down to good but shell-shocked seconds. And that is where, by and large, we will stay unless we learn the lessons of May 2007 and take our game up a level as well.
Labour and the LibDems have learnt to concentrate on mobilising their own core vote (the elderly, ethnic minorities and the local functionaries of Brown’s welfarist empire), while their leftist allies combine expensive smear sheets and phone calls targeted at especially at postal voters to depress our vote. This is why, from key seats up and down the country we got reports of sitting Labour councillors trudging round the streets putting out their election addresses by themselves. Their activists weren’t sitting on their hands, they were manning telephone banks to identify pro- and anti-BNP voters and work on them accordingly.
In our best areas our people easily ‘won’ the traditional battle of the leaflets, often dropping three or four to every house in a ward for the single one put out by Labour. And our leaflets were good, clearly winning the political argument every time.
But that’s the problem. We’re assuming that the public are as interested in political issues as we are; that they can be won over or mobilised by political concerns about the long-term big picture.
Some can, which is why our vote (more than 300,000 in total in the English District and Borough contests, an average of 14.7% of the electorate) is so substantial and held up well even though we were fighting so many more seats in so many frankly weaker areas. But the majority are left cold by party politics, which is why nearly two-thirds of the electorate didn’t vote for anybody.
Our politicised hardcore may well grow with external events, but even so we’ll be very lucky under remotely ‘normal’ circumstances if our core vote comes to exceed that of Labour and the LibDems and the minorities combined – and, make no mistake, that is what we’re up against.
And since trusting to luck is never a good policy, we are not going to. Over the last few days I have been in frequent and lengthy discussions with a number of our key election experts and organisers. Together we have analysed these elections, worked out how we have been pegged back and why in some places we bucked that trend and won, and begun to design an even better election-winning machine for the future.
More will appear on this subject in the new editions of Identity and Freedom, and much more will be rolled out at training seminars around the country and at the Summer School.
Grass roots upwards
For now it is enough to point to the fact that all our wins - bar one or two where the effort of keeping us out of Ward A simply left Labour unable to stop us in Ward B – came in places where our candidates and a handful of local helpers have been particularly effective at getting involved in real grass-roots community politics, and in using local newsletters to tell everyone in the ward that we are a ‘Good Thing’ for them and their area.
It is now crystal clear from these experimental operations that seeing our people do good and practical things for their community not only reinforces the willingness of our politicised supporters to go out and vote BNP, and undermines the effectiveness of the anti-BNP smear sheets, but also mobilises on our behalf an additional section of the essentially non-political population.
This, then, is where we have to go from here – rolling out the experience from these successful experiments to become the norm for every BNP branch, group and even lone activists.
Perhaps we should not have had to wait until such hard pounding forced us to take a long hard look at the shifting balance of power in the conventional political arms race between us and our opponents over the last year or so. After all, there is nothing new in defeated opponents learning new tactics to turn things around. Neither is there anything new in viewing the role of the organised nationalist movement as a sort of school that moulds first individuals, then groups, then entire communities, remaking them and turning passive, selfish consumers and observers into active citizens building a better future.
But being aware of this point in theory, and setting out to turn it into practice are two different matters. For the last few years we have been fortunate enough to be able to win seats while directly indulging our passion for politics and political argument. Until Brown’s ‘economic miracle’ heads South and other ‘events’ change the political landscape, those days are gone.
Electoral progress can and will be made over the next couple of years, but only by those who model what they do on our winners this time around, and not on what we did to win over the previous few years.
The first step will be raising the profile of, and the value placed upon, community politics work. We are already working on ways to do this, and they will be rolled out in the months ahead. Just to give one example, Martin Wingfield and I have already agreed that, from now on, Freedom will not be carrying reports of internal meetings, except occasionally in new areas or if there is something particularly unusual such as a huge collection for an especially useful cause.
From now on, if you want to see your branch or group’s name in lights and photographs in Freedom or on the regional news pages of the website you will have to press your Organiser to arrange a community clean-up or celebration, or one of a hundred other ostensibly non-political things that can be done to improve the lives of local people and the standing of our future candidate in one of our target wards. If you want to be in our headlines, if you want me to spend a day in your area, then you’d better plan to get me in overalls and high-viz jacket. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and get covered in mud!
The conventional politics won’t go away, of course, indeed it is our aim to step up the internal education process which turns protest vote new recruits (and there are plenty of those to be signed up over the next month or so, provided they are contacted and visited promptly) into fully-fledged and well informed nationalists. It is only what we are going to be doing with those new activists and older ones alike that is going to change:
Less about politics, more about people – for it is by serving the people that we will secure enough extra votes to keep our bandwagon rolling towards the power we need to have a serious impact on politics and the future.
