This innovation did not arrive without fierce discussion and public controversy. Many feared that this new system would discourage people to join the party and that it might allow someone not really involved in the life of the party to determine its policies and its leadership.

The growing membership, however, the huge participation, and the fact that the final result of the vote reflected substantially the internal vote of the members, are the best arguments against these criticisms. They show that it is still possible for a new form of political organisation, which values participation and really empowers citizens in the life of the party.

This article was originally published by The Progressive on the 28th of October 2009.

At the Conservative Conference, in Manchester, David Cameron has used one of the most common argument to attack the European Union, the lack of democracy, but he has only showed his own ignorance.

Talking to the conference he siad: “People who think of themselves as progressives have fallen in love with an institution that no one elects, no one can remove, and that hasn’t signed off its accounts for over a decade”.

Which institution was he talking about? Maybe the directly elected European Parliament? Or was he talking about the European Commission, that has to receive the confidence of the EP and that  (remember about Mr. Santer) can be sacked by the Parliament itself?

Perhaps he was thinking about the European Council of Ministers, where a representative of each EU national government seats and reaches decisions in agreement with the other 26: is it not democratic?
C’mon, Mister Cameron, it is the same institutional framework used by so many international organization (the UN, the G20, the WTO) and you’d never argue they are not democratic….

As Lord Pattern would be happy to explain to you, the European Union is not an institution: it is a process of co-operation and co-ordination that comprises many institutions.
Everyone is aware that its working should be more open and more democratic, and that is the reason behind the new institutional framework called “Lisbon Treaty”. The same treaty you, Mr Cameron, and your fellow European allies don’t want to be ratified and enforced. 

Talking about democracy, by the way, why didn’t you mention in your speech anything about the House of Lord, which has been at the centre of a democratic reform promoted by progressives in the last ten years?
That is an institution that no one elects, that no one can remove, and that has never signed off its accounts for centuries.

Why don’t you stop babbling about democracy and start helping the progressives to make both the European Union and the House of Lord more democratic and accountable?

We will judge you, Mr Cameron, not on your speeches at the Conference, but on your real position on these two issues.
Despite your rhetoric efforts, at the moment you are failing on both of them!

I got a letter from the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin: I have found it last Saturday morning, along with the party’s magazine “Hope & Glory” and a standing order form (just in the case I would like to subscribe to the party).
I do not think they have now started targeting people like me – I have clearly a name that reveals I am not a member of  “this island race” (to put it in their own words) not to mention a red and yellow “Vote Labour” poster on the window. All the material was anonymously put in my letterbox.

If this is a personal relief (I wouldn’t like to be on the BNP database, of course), it raises however more general concerns about their campaign: feeeling the victory more close, and possibly having collected some money, the BNP is not just focusing on its core electorate. They are instead trying to take advantage of the current situation of political disaffection in order to widen their appeal and gain their first ever member elected in a nationwide election (they already have few councilors in England and, since 2008, a member of the Greater London Assembly).

The letter is a mixture of exaltation of alleged traditional values, old fashioned rethoric, and appeal to the pride of a party that claims to be the only true defence of British interest. It very carefully does not mention anything that can be read as an openly racist comment, even if the nuance of some words and the continuous use of military metaphors is not certainly causal and when one finish to read the message is left with a feeling of fear about the future (and the present), the impression that something terrible is going to happen to our society, that external threat menaces our way of life and that it must be stopped, with any mean, violence not excluded.
As it clearly appears by their words: “It is really now or never, my friend and fellow British patriot. Will you come once more with me to the battlefront? Will you give all to free our nation from the traitors’ iron grip? Will you once again sacrifice for your vountry and our people? I need you to be strong to win this fight” or “A BNP victory on June 4th will lead to a massive awakening amongst the British public, which will enwure that our nation is pulled back from the brink of destruction and wipe the smile off the facew of the traitors and corrupt political elite”

Even if they have clearly decided not to show their fascist face any longer, the BNP is  a party promoting violence and a devided society, a party deeply involved in a politic of hate and discrimination, a party that under a new moderate suit covers the same old fascist face.

In the letter there is only one sentence that I can agree with: at the end of a long annoying tirade about “the proud history of our people and nation”, the “sterile, politically correct, inclusive society where evrybody else’s rights are protected” and the declaration that “We are now second class citizens in our own country”, Nick Griffin invites to vote BNP, underlining that “the future of our children and our children’s children depends on what we do now!”

It is undoubtedly true: it depends on our choice on the 4th of June if we will create a more democratic, open, respectful, equal, and inclusive society for the future generations.

To put the BNP out of mainstream politics, by denying them the honour to sit in the European Parliament, will be a good starting point.

These are the central and final parts of the comment:

The BNP has often before hovered around the threshold of electoral breakthrough. The alarm is raised and the threat subsides. It is then argued that needless alarm advances the far-right cause; that the BNP thrives on publicity from panic-stricken liberals; that disapproval from Westminster burnishes their anti-establishment credentials; that they should be left to suffocate in media silence. That is not an option in the digital age. The BNP doesn’t need mainstream media to get its message across. And it doesn’t need any help persuading voters that their interests go unheeded by out-of-touch politicians in Westminster.

The BNP gets much more attention than other fringe parties because the doctrine of extreme nationalism is a nasty virus in the body politic. It cannot be ignored. It must be engaged and defeated.

That means raising the alarm to combat apathy. The proportional representation system in European elections means that tiny parties can do well out of a modest showing in a low overall turnout. Even a small increase in the numbers bothering to vote for other parties can put a cap on the far right’s performance.

But the BNP also needs to be beaten with old-fashioned political argument. Its flimsy policies should be rebutted and its underlying motive – to foment fear and inter-racial tension – should be exposed. The BNP works hard to shed its skinhead image. Rule No 1 of its “language and concepts discipline manual” tells activists not to identify the party as “racist”. Rule No 4 instructs them to obey the law. What kind of organisation needs to remind its members not to be thugs?

The BNP has traditionally submerged its “whites first” agenda in the language of economic opportunity. It has campaigned on crime, housing, education, jobs and links them all to immigration. It projects real policy concerns through a prism of race. That creates a tricky balancing act for local MPs who have to persuade voters that they are concerned about the problems without adopting the BNP’s analysis of their cause.

It is true that many working-class white communities have fared badly under Labour. But that doesn’t mean non-whites are winning at their expense. The idea that there is a fixed pool of success – that one person’s gain is another’s loss – is a basic fallacy in far-right thinking. But the BNP turns the shame of underachievement into an aggrieved sense of ethnic expropriation.

The same approach is now applied to the issue of MPs’ expense claims. The public perception of a Westminster elite on the make allows the BNP to project itself as a party of anti-political outsiders. The race issue is thus submerged even deeper. But it is there. When the BNP claims to speak for “ordinary people” against the establishment, it still means “white people”.

The best antidote to the far right would be a movement that aspires to represent everyone who feels disenfranchised, alienated, excluded, regardless of race; a movement that promotes solidarity among poorer voters instead of dividing them. It would speak with moral authority against a political system that looks, to many voters, grotesquely skewed in the interests of a narrow, wealthy elite.

It is a good sign that, eventually, a major national newspaper focuses on that issue, raising concerns for the first ever possible elected of the BNP in a major representative assembly and calling for people to mobilize in order to avoid this would happen.

The Labour party and the Labour Movement for Europe are doing their part.