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Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on November 13, 2008
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(3):377-398; doi:10.1093/pa/gsn043
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© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Canary in a Coalmine? Explaining the Emergence of the British National Party in English Local Politics

Stuart Wilks-Heeg

School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Liverpool
Eleanor Rathbone Building
Bedford Street South
Liverpool L69 7ZA
UK

Correspondence: swilks{at}liv.ac.uk

The election of more than 60 British National Party (BNP) councillors across England from 2002–2007 does not sit easily with the conventional analysis of far-right parties in the UK, which has tended to dismiss the extreme right as an insignificant political force. Building on a recent Democratic Audit report on the BNP by Peter John et al. (The BNP – The Roots of its Appeal, University of Essex: Democratic Audit, 2006), this paper examines the dynamics of local party competition in the localities where the BNP has achieved greatest local representation. Through this analysis, the paper challenges the dominant view of the BNP, arguing that the BNP's breakthrough in English local elections must be understood as a warning signal about the state of local democracy in England and, in particular, an indicator of the advanced decay of local political parties.


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