Whistling past the graveyard
Over at Comment is Free, Daniel Davies has an interesting piece on why the BNP are unlikely to win a seat at the European elections in the North-West.
Daniel's argument is that, while the BNP got 13% in the council wards they contested at the 2008 local elections, this is unlikely to reflect their support across the country, since they will have put up candidates in the seats where their potential support was highest. It is only because their weaker areas had no BNP candidate to include in the average that the figure appears so high.
Daniel is almost certainly right on this front, albeit, probably that that right. My impression is that fringe parties don't necessarily target the wards they contest that well, it's often just the wards where they happen to have a keen activist willing to stand. Notwithstanding that, the swathes of rural Cumbria and Lancashire where there weren't BNP candidates are not going to be as fertile territory as the white working class urban areas they did fight. The problem comes with trying to translate that into the level of support that the BNP will get at the European elections. Daniel looks at the share of the vote in each district that had elections in 2008, sees there are only Burnley, Bury and Tameside where they got over 7.5%, and concludes that even with their name on the ballot paper in every ward, there is no way they will match that support in all the other districts.
On the surface that sounds like pretty sound logic and a good reason to think that the BNP will only get around 3% or 4%. The problem is that if we go back to the 2004 European elections, the BNP received 6.4% of the vote in the North-West. If we look at the local elections in the North West for 2003, they in no way foreshadowed that.
Back in 2003, which had much wider local elections than 2008, the BNP only got over 6.4% in local elections in 4 districts: Burnley, Tameside, Pendle and Ribble Valley (which is, it's worth noting, just the sort of nice rural Tory area we are assuming they can't do well in). They barely showed their face elsewhere, and didn't put a single candidate up in Cumbria. The point is, if we had done the same thing then as Daniel is doing now, we would have said their was no way they would get as high as 6.4%. The only thing we can conclude by comparing the BNP's local election results in the North-West in 2008 with those of 2004, is they appear to be a lot more organised now.
How well will they do then, what can we look at that will give us a reliable guide? Well, the sad truth is not much. BNP support in opinion polls is difficult to measure because people are reluctant to admit to voting for racist or extremist parties. We can see some evidence of this by comparing telephone polls, where people give their answers to a live interviewer, and online polls, where they type them into a website. Back in 2006 after Margaret Hodge made some comments about how much support she was seeing for the BNP on the doorstep their support went up to 7% in YouGov polls, but ICM and Populus showed far smaller increases in their support, only putting them up to 3%. I suspect there is even some social acceptability bias in online polls, so even that might not necessarily give us a good guide to the level of support they'll actually get (and that's before we get to the issue of whether to prompt or not minor parties, which is a whole extra can of worms).
