When Durham Miners’ Association staged its annual ‘Big Meeting’ – Durham Miners’ Gala – a new banner joined the 80 or so there which keep alive the spirit of the county’s former pit communities and its coal mining industry – the banner of the Women Against Pit Closures movement (WAPC). Accompanying the banner were four of the original activists involved in the epic 1984-85 miners’ strike against closures – Anne Scargill, Betty Cook, Bernadette France and Georgina Chapman.

When the strike started, there were 180 deep coal mines in Britain and 180,000 miners. Today there are five deep coal mines and less than 2,000 miners. Britain has not stopped using coal, it simply buys it from abroad – nearly 50 million tonnes a year, the equivalent of 50 deep mines and 50,000 miners’ jobs.

Britain sits on an estimated 300 years of coal reserves, and the WAPC, like the National Union of Mineworkers, hopes and believes that the development of Clean Coal Technology (CCT) and the world energy crisis will mean the country one day turning again to its natural indigenous fuel supply for its energy needs.

Anne Scargill, one of the WAPC founders who has been an inspiration for the power of women’s action around the world, said: ‘WAPC is as relevant today as it was when it first started. We have an energy crisis and there are millions of tonnes of coal beneath our feet. We have to campaign for the case for coal.’ That is one of the reasons for the continuing existence of Women Against Pit Closures. There are others. Anne’s long-time friend, comrade and fellow-campaigner Betty Cook said: ‘One of the things we do is raise medical aid for Cuba. North Staffordshire WAPC have been working on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees. We fought struggles in the 1984-5 strike and the 1992-3 closures programme. Our relevance today is that we are still fighting struggles for working collieries, and the repeal of anti-union laws.’

The women are active locally and internationally. Betty said: ‘We maintain links with other unions, particularly the Fire Brigades Union.’ WAPC women were in action during a recent FBU strike in South Yorkshire, picketing Barnsley fire station. The group maintains international links including with women coal miners in the United States, and with mineworkers in Australia. The group is also looking for ways to help miners and their families in Spain where a bitter struggle is taking place, with miners pitted against armoured riot police, as they try to defend their industry and their communities. The struggle is reminiscent of 1984-5 for the two women.‘We have to spread,’ said Anne. ‘Women in other countries are struggling like we struggled. We have got to get involved with the women in Spain. We have expertise to pass on.’

Both Anne and Betty are aware of the need for a new generation of women from mining communities to carry on the work. Betty is particularly in touch with the National Union of Mineworkers at Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire, a relatively modern mine. Betty’s link is very personal, as her son Donny was killed at the pit three years ago. ‘We hope there will be another generation of women coming through,’ she said. Anne echoed the feeling. ‘We are getting older,’ she said – Anne is 70 and Betty 74. ‘I would like to see younger women coming along and campaigning, people coming up after us.’

And so to the new banner. It is the work of artist Andrew Turner, son of a miner from West Lothian. His uncle was a founder member of the Scottish Communist Party. While creating trade union and campaign banners is only part of his lifetime’s artistic work (he was born in 1939) he has created two dozen banners, which have caused controversy. His banner for the last new colliery in Britain, North Selby in Yorkshire, was made in the late 1980s. It depicts mounted police forcing down a gravestone on miners, who are resisting. It shows the forces lined up against the miners – politicians, police, judiciary, media.

When the pit’s NUM branch planned to raise it at the colliery’s annual open day management refused to allow it, saying the banner was ‘too provocative.’ Decades ago Turner deliberately broke away from the mainstream, traditional style of British trades union banners. His banners represent the reality of class struggle and conflict. The WAPC banner is one such. It is full of symbolism – Turner says his banners have to be read, not simply looked at. The impact of the banner at Durham appeared in line with his intentions. The banner was welcomed rapturously by the crowds lining the streets. Women from former pit communities were drawn to it the moment it was raised. Many examined its detail.

The banner will next appear on 8 September at the unveiling of a memorial to 86 men and boys killed at Allerton Bywater coal mine in Yorkshire, during the pit’s 110 year existence. The women of WAPC will be taking it there. Their work goes on.

The workers voted by more than 70 per cent to strike, and on Saturday 5 September, the strike began.

Eleven weeks later they marched back to work, celebrating total victory, having enjoyed a level of public support that staggered both them and their council employers.

Neil Derrick is regional officer of the GMB union, which represents the 500 workers together with Unison. ‘Pickets had bucket collections at household waste sites which were open during the strike,’ he says.

‘Members of the public were turning up with their black bags of rubbish, which hadn’t been collected by the men on the picket line. They were dumping their uncollected rubbish, then putting their hands in their pockets and giving the pickets money to support the strike. They were saying, “We couldn’t live with a one-third cut in our wages, and we don’t expect you to.”’

Massive misjudgement

The council’s decision to take on the refuse workers was a massive misjudgement both of the workers’ determination to defend their wages and of the public’s reaction to a strike, which inevitably drew comparisons with the 1978-79 ‘winter of discontent’ as piles of rubbish built up in the streets of Leeds. The background was simple enough. The council sought to comply with Labour government legislation on equal pay – but decided to do it by axing the refuse workers’ pay instead of raising the wages of lower-paid workers. It offered to delay the pay cuts, but that was all. Conflict became inevitable, and the council’s stance united the two unions representing the refuse staff.

The council confidently expected the action to crumble through financial hardship, especially so close to Christmas, and off-the-record media briefings predicted that the strikers would be forced back to work after two weeks. It didn’t happen.

As the action continued, the bosses’ frustration grew and the verbal attacks on the strikers by the council, particularly from councillor Brett, became ever more strident. ‘Striking bin staff putting vulnerable at risk’, the council told the city’s Yorkshire Evening Post, in one of the first indications of the launch of the council propaganda campaign. ‘We’ll privatise them!’ was the next threat.

Agency and contract workers were drafted in, and the council rashly stated that services would be resumed within two weeks. They weren’t – the rubbish piled higher, while support for the refuse workers grew.

‘There’s a general trait of “fair play” in the public’s mind,’ says Neil Derrick. ‘The fact that the pay cuts were so savage, so big, hit a nerve with the public. Even though the public were being hugely inconvenienced, they never took against what they saw were the victims of the council’s swingeing cuts. They felt the bin workers were as much the victims as they themselves were.’

The council spent tens of thousands of pounds on mail shots to residents’ homes, assuring them of swift resumption of services using scab labour. Then hundreds of thousands more was spent on bringing the scabs in.

But the agency and contract workers couldn’t cope. ‘They didn’t know the rounds. They didn’t know the streets. They didn’t know what they were doing,’ says Derrick.

And the more the council’s pledges of ‘resumed service’ were proved to be nonsense, the more the public questioned the rest of the council’s propaganda. ‘People could see with their own eyes that the council was lying,’ Derrick continues. ‘The bins were not getting collected. Because they knew the council was lying about that, they looked very closely at every other statement.’

Then came accusations from councillor Brett that the refuse workers regularly abused overtime and sickness arrangements. ‘He was saying the bin workers were a pack of lazy, sick bastards. People could see this for what it was,’ says Derrick.

Financial support continued to pour in. National Union of Journalists members on the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post sent £750 – and that was just one of the dozens of trade union groups that rallied behind the strikers.

Leeds City Council became increasingly isolated. The fact was that every other council in the country was facing the same dilemma over implementing equal pay policy, but only Leeds found itself involved in a protracted strike with rubbish piling up in the streets.

The council was refusing to negotiate, even appeared unaware that ‘beneath the radar’ talks were going in between union reps and its own officials, according to Neil Derrick.

Total stand-down

When the formal negotiations finally resumed, a settlement was agreed that amounted to an almost total stand-down by the council. The vast majority of the pay cuts were withdrawn in return for ‘efficiency’ improvements that would have been introduced anyway. It had taken 11 weeks of strike action, but the refuse staff returned to work as ebullient as they had been when they walked out, heads held high.

Long-term repercussions are expected. ‘The council has lost the refuse workers,’ says Neil Derrick. ‘It will take years to win them back.’

The effects of the conflict are also expected to be felt at the ballot box. From 1980, Leeds City Council was under Labour control for more than 20 years. The Lib Dem-Tory coalition only took over in 2004. Now the Labour Party in Leeds, which supported the strike, and is still the biggest single group on the council, has a chance to regain control in May.

‘We are going to do everything we can to remind the public of what the Lib Dem-Tory coalition said and did during the dispute,’ warns Neil Derrick. ‘There has to be a day of reckoning. Whatever side you take about the dispute, Leeds was the only local authority which got itself into this position. Other councils all faced the problem of implementing the equal pay policy, but because they were prepared to sit down and seriously negotiate, they avoided disputes. Everywhere else the issue has been resolved.’

–

Bang out of order

‘I’ve been a refuse worker since 1979. I’m a loader on the bins.’ John Eddleston, 57, has completed 31 years as a refuse worker in Leeds. He’s one of the real front-line workers – the member of his team responsible for getting the bins to the back of the truck and emptying them.

‘When I first started it was a lot harder,’ he says. ‘We actually carried the old metal bins out. The wheelie bins are a lot easier. The only thing is they want us to literally run round. Somebody of my age, my body, it won’t take 220 bins an hour. That’s 220 properties, which could be as many as 260 bins because some have two or three bins.’

John is a shop steward with his union, the GMB. He voted for strike action when the council attempted to cut 500 refuse workers’ wages by around one-third, more than £5,000 a year. He says that when the bin workers struck, from day one they enjoyed public support not just on the picket lines, but on the estates and streets where they lived.

‘People came out with chocolates saying “heroes” on it,’ he says. ‘You’d be surprised. That’s what they call us. Heroes. The public have been absolutely fantastic. I walked round my own estate taking my dog for a walk. I saw it.’

The Lib Dem council leader, Richard Brett, targeted the strikers with scathing criticism. The response by one group set up to support the strikers was to dump uncollected bin bags outside his home. ‘They said Brett came over as very arrogant,’ says John Eddlestone. ‘He said we were only educated up to primary school level. That is an insult. He said we all took 30 days a year off sick. People where I live said I never have time off.’

John picketed one of the refuse department’s transport depots, at Cross Green in Leeds. ‘There are 50-plus trucks in there,’ he says. ‘They flooded the yard with 100 agency people. That is still going on. Why are they paying £22 an hour for agency people when they can pay us £6.70 an hour? It’s disgusting.’

When the strike ended in victory for the workforce after 11 weeks, the public still voiced support. ‘When I returned to work the number of people who came out and talked to us – they couldn’t praise us enough. What they were saying was that the council were bang out of order. A lot of them said they want to make sure this lot never get back in again.’

It was deafening. Pickets, up to 100 strong, outside the company’s headquarters on a main arterial road into and out of Leeds. ‘Honk your support’, some of their placards said – and so from morning till night the cacophony of honking horns was non-stop. It came from drivers of cars, taxis, buses, lorries with their booming fog-horn blasts, fire appliances, ambulances – even the occasional police car sounded its siren. Local office workers came out bearing gifts for pickets: a box of chocolates, a tin of biscuits, donations of money.

The journalists, at the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Evening Post and Leeds Weekly News, staged 13 days of sporadic strike action during March and April. Every day, the public expressions of support were the same.
One feature of the strike was the age of those involved. Around 40 per cent of the journalists are at the later end of their working lives, people in their fifties.

But the majority are mainly in their twenties and thirties, with some in their forties. Most of them had never been on strike before, yet they exhibited the enthusiasm and organisational skills of experienced activists. Many were taken aback by the level of public support.

The public and pickets

Richard Edwards, a 33-year-old reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post, was a first-time striker. ‘I was overwhelmed,’ he says. ‘It was moving. We all felt we had right on our side and had to do it. Whether that was going to transmit itself to the public we did not know.

‘The horns started honking from the second we got out there and did not stop until the last day. It was really heartening. It wasn’t just the horns. It was the passers-by, people taking the leaflets and stopping to chat, people from other businesses bringing provisions to the picket line for us.
‘And people stopped buying the paper as well.’

The NUJ estimates that circulation of the biggest-selling paper, the Yorkshire Evening Post, fell by 18 per cent during the dispute, compared to the same period a year earlier. ‘It was as if the readership identified with the staff,’ says Edwards. ‘It also isolated management.’

Some strikers believe that the position the journalists were in was a microcosm of the problems being faced by the public at large.
YPN’s owners, Edinburgh-based Johnston Press, were in great part responsible for their own troubles. Year after year they handed out huge dividends and bonuses to shareholders and directors, while at the same time borrowing hundreds of millions of pounds to buy up other newspapers. When the recession hit, advertising revenues plummeted, and the company’s share value tumbled to £40 million, one-tenth of its debts of £400 million. The company told the workforce they would have to pay with their jobs, and the strike was the result.

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people are being thrown out of work, and thousands are losing their homes, because of an economic crisis not of their making. According to Richard Edwards, ‘People were thinking, “go on, get stuck into the buggers who dragged us into this mess.”‘

Just as the YPN strikers identified management as being responsible for the problem, the public identifies the culprits behind the recession as the financiers and bankers – and the governments who failed to control them.
Since then there has been the scandal of MPs’ expenses. The public is also seeing the restoration of obscene bonuses to the very people responsible for their suffering.

So if the YPN strike was acting as a lightning conductor for public anger, is the anger a sign of a wider rebellion?

There have been the successful occupations staged by the Visteon workers (see Red Pepper, June/July). Refinery and power station construction workers have staged a series of wildcat unofficial strikes in defence of their jobs. And there are rumblings from the steel industry, where thousands more jobs are under threat.

But the situation today is unlike those faced in the financial crises of the 1970s, or the Thatcherite 1980s, when unemployment was deliberately forced up as a means of pushing down wages.

For a start, the trade union movement has changed. Today there are 6.5 million trade union members. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were 13 million. Trade union membership and therefore strength has declined, and workplace organisation has decreased.

Anti-union laws

Unions are still hamstrung by anti-union laws, most of which, to its shame, the Labour government has refused to repeal. To be fair, one change by the 1997 Labour government was re-introduction of the right to union recognition when a majority of a workforce votes for it. However, Britain continues to have the strongest anti-union legislation of any country in the European Union.

Secondary action – action by one group of workers in support of another – is still illegal for unions but not for employers. This was a major factor in the Yorkshire Post Newspapers strike, during which the company employed the Press Association news agency to produce scab newspapers when the journalists were on strike. Any action by other workers in support of the journalists – the printers at Johnston Press’s plant at Dinnington in South Yorkshire, for example – would have been illegal and carried the threat of sequestration of union funds, and of legal action against any local union officials involved.

Yet the laws did not stop the Visteon occupations. When the car components firm, formerly owned by Ford, declared almost 600 redundancies and reneged on redundancy pay, the workers in Belfast and Enfield occupied their factories. As a result they won the severance terms that had been promised when their jobs were transferred from Ford.

Nor did the laws deter the oil refinery and power station construction workers, who used mass texting, among other methods, to win support at power stations and refineries across the country. The action was a protest against the exploitation of cheap, foreign labour to replace British workers that prompted use of the ominous phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’.
But any suggestion of racism was dispelled by the strikers and their unions. Attempts by the British National Party to cash in on the dispute were rebuffed.

Workers at Lindsey oil refinery in north Lincolnshire struck first. The action spread to refineries and power stations in Yorkshire, Cheshire and Wales. It brought a recalcitrant management to the negotiating table, and a settlement amounting to victory for the strikers.

But does the flexing of industrial muscle by power industry construction workers indicate anything more significant?

In the 1970s, power station shop stewards had their own combined committee, which operated outside the official union structure, across union lines, and indeed was feared by some at the top of the union hierarchies. The recent strikes involved sub-contracted construction workers, rather than power production workers. Nevertheless, the existence of a new, ‘unofficial’ network of union activists in the industry capable of organising effective, nationwide wildcat strike action is significant, and even more so if it shows the way ahead for other groups of workers.

The refinery and power station construction workers, like the power workers themselves, have a long history of trade union organisation. Most belong to either the GMB or Unite, with a small number of members of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (Ucatt).

GMB national secretary Phil Davies told Red Pepper: ‘Trade union organisation is very much a tradition in this section of the construction industry. The action they took was self-organised. It has taken years to get their current pay and conditions. They felt their national agreement was under threat and for that to happen was a big thing and they organised themselves.’

No big battalions

But the big battalions of the industrial labour movement are no more. The National Union of Mineworkers, once hailed as the shock troops of the movement, has shrivelled from 200,000 members in the 1970s to fewer than 1,700 today, working at a mere handful of pits. The engineering industry still exists, but in a far smaller form than before. The same applies to once powerful groups of workers such as the dockers.

In the early 1980s, unemployed workers in many areas organised through their unions, such as the very active section of unemployed workers in the Transport and General Workers’ Union in Liverpool, led by jobless dockers. Unemployed workers’ centres – centres of organisation and agitation – opened in many towns and cities, often assisted by Labour-controlled local councils. Workers from Scotland, the north-west, north-east, Yorkshire and the Midlands organised jobless marches on London. This is not currently happening.

One problem is that as Britain’s traditional unionised manufacturing industries have shrunk, non-unionised service industries such as the financial sector have grown. My own city, Leeds, is an example of that development. Where once clothing factories, textile mills and engineering works were the main sources of employment, now call centres, banks, insurance and other financial institutions employ tens of thousands.

The treatment of unemployed people today would have been unthinkable in the days of the trade union movement of the 1970s.

Rob Wood, a 51-year-old joiner from Hebden Bridge, lost his job through long-term illness. On recovering recently he was sent by his local jobcentre to an employer where he was told he would have to work for a week without wages to ‘see how you get on’.

‘I went back to the jobcentre to complain and they said this was “quite acceptable” – those were the words they used,’ he said. ‘They said there had been over 100 applications. Imagine if he got a week’s work out of each of them. There’s something wrong here.’

One of my relatives, a young man in his twenties, worked for several months for no wages fitting satellite dishes and TV systems, on the promise that at the end of the training period he could walk into well-paid work. His ‘trainer’ pocketed thousands of pounds. Neither Rob nor my relative could see any way of fighting back, given rising unemployment and the diminished level of trade union organisation.

The fight next time

So where will the next fightback take place? The railway industry has the potential for effective action, and workers on London’s Underground, members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, recently struck. In Manchester, college teachers voted for strike action against compulsory redundancies. And more than 300 Unison members at London Metropolitan University voted for strike action over job cuts. There have been reactions to other injustices too.

The public has responded to the plight of destitute asylum seekers, motivated by both compassion and rebellion. In Leeds, one group collects food parcels and opened a kitchen in a church hall to provide meals. A system of free legal advice has been established, as well as a centre to provide refugees with access to training and jobs.

Home Office immigration centres are being targeted for regular demonstrations. The TUC recently launched a nationwide campaign to win back the right to work for asylum seekers.

There has also been sustained action by peace campaigners against the EDO-MBM arms manufacturer in Brighton. So other rebellions and actions are taking place.

The public sector might well be the next battleground. The billions of pounds borrowed to bail out the financial institutions will have to be found from somewhere. The government has already made it clear that public spending is the target.

At the annual conference of public service union Unison, general secretary Dave Prentis warned that the union might withdraw funding for Labour MPs who did not commit themselves to defending public services. He says: ‘Freezing public sector pay during the recession is not the way to steer people through it. Let’s be clear, the recession was caused by bankers and speculators, who took advantage of the lack of regulation to make a killing.
‘Yet low-paid public sector workers, who are helping communities deal with the fallout, are being asked to pay the price. At the same time city bonuses are making a comeback with figures that most people can’t even dream of earning in a whole lifetime.’

To return, finally, to the journalists’ strike in Leeds, as local union officials Peter Johnson and Richard Edwards put it: ‘It was a score draw.’ A handful of jobs were saved through redeployment and job-sharing, and the remaining redundancies were implemented. But the strike hurt the business badly. It also sent a message to the employers of how the workforce will respond if more job losses are sought.

Peter Lazenby is a journalist and NUJ activist, chair of the Leeds branch of the NUJ and father of chapel at the Yorkshire Evening Post. This is the first in a series of special reports and analyses of underlying trends in political and social activism of different kinds. We are grateful to the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust for financial support for this project.

Like similar estates across Britain it has suffered years of neglect. In Mixenden’s case the neglect stems partly from the hung Calderdale District Council. It is years since Labour held sway in a district which should naturally be under its control.

Mixenden was the first Yorkshire Council ward to elect a British National Party (BNP) Councillor. That was three years ago. Today there are three BNP Councillors in Calderdale. It would be more but for the efforts of Calderdale Unity Against Racism and Fascism, and Calderdale Communities Against Racism – two organisations with political differences, but working for the same ends: the defeat of the BNP.

Both groups work closely with Searchlight, the organisation with an unequalled record of effective activity against the extreme and neo-Nazi right.

The local campaigners task is made no easier by Michael Howard’s decision to make asylum and immigration a major election issue, and Blair’s response which appears heavily influenced by the appalling coverage of the issue by the tabloid press, notably the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Star and The Sun.

Janet Oosterhuysen is a member of the steering committee of Calderdale Unity. ‘My own feeling is that the main parties have legitimised the BNP stance in quite an abhorrent way,’ she says.
‘It makes it very difficult to argue against because what were very right-wing ideas are now becoming more acceptable.’

She believes there is no real immigration problem ‘but because of the focus on immigration people begin to believe there is one. The number of asylum seekers in Calderdale is tiny, less than one-fifth of one per cent of the population. The BNP campaigns on the basis that there is a big local population of asylum seekers. Our leaflets tell people it’s a lie – we give them the true figures. Then along come Blair and Howard with statements suggesting asylum is an enormous problem needing tough measures, which give credibility to the BNP’s lies. It doesn’t help.’

In addition to the problems caused by the aggressive statements on asylum and immigration from Labour and Tory leaders, the Government’s actual treatment of asylum seekers is also causing growing concerns in West Yorkshire. In neighbouring Leeds, asylum seekers are being thrown onto the streets, quite literally. Once an asylum seeker has been refused permission to stay he or she is given two weeks to leave freely. After that they face enforced removal, but it can be weeks before this takes place. In the meantime the person’s benefits have been stopped, so the landlords, private or housing association, who are housing the asylum seeker receive no rent. They send in the bailiffs and the victim is homeless and penniless.

Evicted asylum seekers are turning to local churches for shelter. Witnessing the effects of Government policies on asylum seekers, leaders of the Anglican Church in Leeds organised an emergency debate of their Synod. It called for more humane treatment of asylum seekers by the Government.

‘Recent legislation has made it increasingly difficult for those seeking asylum to access appropriate legal services leading to poor decisions being made,’ said the Rev Canon Kathryn Fitzsimons, Urban Officer of the Church in Leeds. ‘As the General Election draws nearer it is vital that these vulnerable people are not used as a political football.’

The anti-BNP campaigners, meanwhile, are getting on with the job of combating the BNP in the wards and constituencies where the fascists are strongest, and threats and intimidation are constant.
Calderdale Labour Councillor Linda Riordan is Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary candidate in Halifax. ‘Campaigning in my ward, where we managed to defeat the BNP, quite often we will be followed round by BNP members shouting abuse at us and being told they will get us next time, so you’re not dealing with your normal political parties,’ she said. ‘The main concerns residents are telling us they have is immigration – which in Calderdale is surprising to say the least – and crime, and again our crime figures are falling.’

Janet Oosterhuysen said: ‘In the wards where the BNP is most active, few people feel openly able to give anti-racist ideas any support. All know that there are BNP supporters in their neighbourhood who intimidate them on a daily basis and would do worse if it was known that they were against them. Two middle aged women leafleters for the Labour Party were followed around by a shouting mob in one ward.’ On another occasion, 20 anti-racism leafleters were confronted by 50 thugs (led by Calderdale BNP Councillor Adrian Marsden) who said they would prevent the anti-racists from delivering a single leaflet. Police observed from nearby, and did nothing.

The campaigners are undeterred. They have organised mass days of action in which anti-fascist groups from surrounding districts join forces and swamp areas where the BNP is strong. In one past effort in Calderdale 120 people turned out, delivering 18,000 copies of Searchlight’s tabloid newspaper in a single day. The operation was planned with precision, with a central headquarters sending out teams of never less than a dozen leafleters who were moved in by mini-bus and moved out minutes after the drop was completed. Half a dozen teams would be in operation at any one time. Another team staffed a kitchen. An Asian caterer donated food. Similar days of action are to be held across Yorkshire – and in every constituency where the BNP hopes to expand its support.

The BNP is standing candidates in over 100 constituencies nationwide. It has little, if any, hope of winning a seat, but that is not its declared intention. It is laying foundations for its next big electoral assault, the local elections in 2006.

BNP leader Nick Griffin is standing in nearby Keighley, which has a significant Asian community. The BNP there has made allegations that young Asian men have recruited young white girls for prostitution. It’s an issue which is being investigated, but for the BNP it’s just a golden opportunity to drive a wedge into the community and spread its racism.

Griffin gave a media conference on the Keighley issue before the local elections last year using a pub in Calderdale, ironically named The Friendly, for the event. Journalists were given a preview of an election video made by the BNP in Keighley, with interviews with ‘ordinary’ local people, expressing their concerns. The ordinary people were well-known to anti-fascist campaigners: they were experienced BNP activists and officers. Keighley is partly in the Bradford district. Four BNP candidates were elected to Bradford District Council in local elections last year, giving Griffin the foothold he wanted.

The anti-BNP campaigners face a tough battle. They need all the help they can get. For information on your nearest group, find their website by searching for stopthebnp.com