Maurice Cousins: What the Conservatives must do to ensure the BNP is wiped off the electoral map

Maurice Cousins is Editor of the Nothingbritish.com blog. He has worked as a Research Assistant at Conservative Friends of Israel and previously worked for Douglas Carswell MP and the Centre for Social Cohesion. He is interested in Islamic and far-Right extremism, US-UK special relationship and the Middle East.

There’s a moment in some taxi journeys when the driver starts banging on about “them immigrants” when you decide whether you’re going to wade in or zone out. When it comes to the BNP and the General Election, many politicians have decided to sit back in their seat and hide behind their newspapers.

It is the same message I get from many (though not all) Westminster politicians, including some top Tories. That is, we should not tackle the BNP because no one in the country is under any doubt about which party would be tough on immigration and a row just gives the BNP the oxygen of publicity.

One example (of many I could relate) was David Cameron's comments earlier this week to London’s Metro newspaper: that it is counter-productive to confront the BNP and their issues directly:

“The one thing you must not do with the BNP is run towards them. Don’t play their game. You’ve got to show people that you care and listen – don’t change your policies and react to the BNP.”

Which is a shame because Conservative politicians are missing a political opportunity that I would have thought they would instinctively understand.

Let’s first quickly update ourselves. Tackling the BNP is no longer about a crass policy bidding war and the distasteful "dog-whistle" politics that set a nasty tone in the 2005 election. No reasonable campaigner is suggesting that.

Tackling the BNP is about recognising that there are hundreds of thousands of hard-working families in northern mill-towns, the once-smokey bits of the Midlands, blue collar estates in the Thames estuary and pockets of post-industrial Britain around the country who feel let down by the Establishment and are turning to the only party that talks about their concerns (Incidentally, they aren’t necessarily core Labour voters, they are mostly long-standing, fed-up non-voters).

Maurice Cousins: We must prevail in Afghanistan

Maurice was a research assistant at Conservative Friends of Israel. He has previously worked for Douglas Carswell MP and interned for Douglas Murray at the Centre for Social Cohesion. His interests are in foreign affairs, Islamism and the US-UK special relationship. You can find more of his writings on the Henry Jackson Society's web-blog “Britain in the World”.

While yesterday morning’s speech made by the Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth MP, must be welcomed for its honesty and the stating of the implications for Britain’s domestic security if we fail to make Afghanistan secure, it is unfortunate that the Government feels it even necessary to remind us as to why we are there in the first place.

As the British presence in Iraq is now formally over, the British public’s attention on our activities in Afghanistan is sharpening, particularly as the number of British troops killed increases.

According to a BBC/ ICM poll, taken in November last year, more than two-thirds of the UK’s adults want Britain to leave Afghanistan.

Even before the financial crisis, most Britons believed that the intervention in Afghanistan was a waste of money. They thought that the liberation of Taliban controlled Afghanistan was not our fight and that our interference in a “Muslim country” made Britain less safe because it made us a target for Islamist terror. But, if people are thinking this, it means that they are ignoring the historical build up to the conflict and misunderstand the threat posed to Britain by Islamist inspired terrorism.

So, why are the British armed forces in Afghanistan? On the 11th September 2001, nearly three thousand people (including sixty seven Britons) were murdered by nineteen Wahhabbi inspired Islamist terrorists from Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda. Ever since 1996, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Bin Laden (who had been expelled from Sudan in the same year) had been a client of the Taliban. Al-Qaeda, with the blessing of the Taliban, were allowed to train and prepare for the 9/11 attacks whilst residing in Afghanistan.