Why our opponents inflate our prospects

YESTERDAY in the News of the World, Peter Hain followed the line previously taken by Labour MEP Glynn Ford a couple of weeks ago and warned that the British National Party could win SEVEN seats in the European Parliament on June 4th.

Our opponents are using this strategy of inflating the BNP's prospects for two reasons. Firstly, it is to motivate those who oppose the BNP to pull out all the stops to combat this proposed threat of seven MEPS. This of course means raising huge sums of money to fund the anti-BNP campaign and there's nothing like a bit of scaremongering to make people cough up more cash.

But the strategy of inflating our prospects is also targeted at the British National Party's own membership, in particular those members who are relatively new to our cause. By keeping talking about the BNP winning seven seats, they hope that it will become embedded in our members thinking. Then when the BNP just gets one MEP elected, our members will be disappointed and disillusioned instead of celebrating the huge breakthrough that we have just made. The hope is that this will ferment trouble within our ranks which will scupper our General Election effort the following year.

To the likes of Hain and Ford this might seem a good strategy, but there are many within the Labour Party calling it a much too dangerous game to play. That's because of the very nature of the European Elections. In the past, both the Greens and UKIP have made short term breakthroughs thanks to the proportional representation system used and that was because the chances of both parties were talked up in the media just prior to the elections.

Now Labour Party activists are warning that whenever the European Elections are discussed, the BNP's chances are always mentioned and that the two are becoming intrinsically linked. They are worried that scaremongering stories such as the one in the News of the World will actually help cement this BNP and European Election link and this could become set in the public's mind and lead to a BNP breakthrough.

Our advantage is that we aren't effected by what strategy our opponents decide on. We have a job to do and we must just keep our heads down and get on with it.

Thanks to the incredible hard work put in by our Battle for Britain roadshow, funding for our European Election campaign is rolling in and if the momentum is maintained we should just about be on target.

Thanks to the incredible hard work put in by those election teams who have contested local council elections this year, our results have put us on course to be in with a chance of winning a seat in the European Parliament in a number of regions.

And it's got to be more of the same for the next ten weeks, with no distractions engineered by our opponents, just hard work focused on getting the maximum BNP vote on June 4th.