Would a quarter of Londoners vote BNP?

Following Margaret Hodge's comments on the BNP on Sunday, the BBC has been giving great play to a new report for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust warning that almost a quarter of Londoners might vote for the BNP.

The figures really needs to be put in some context if not to be alarmist - 24% of people in London told ICM in the JRRT's "State of the Nation" poll 2004 that they "might vote" BNP as opposed to the 68% who said they could never vote BNP (similar figures came from exit polls in 2004). In comparison, 47% said they might vote Labour, 48% said they might vote Conservative and 50% said they might vote Liberal Democrat. So, to put it bluntly, the BNP getting a quarter of the vote in London is as likely as one of the main parties getting almost 50%. The significance of the finding is not that 24% of people in London are likely to vote BNP, but that 24% of people do not consider them beyond the pale. (It's also worth pointing out that London is not typical - across the country as a whole only 18% said they might vote for the BNP. Some of the BBC reporting of the study has claimed that it says that almost 25% of people would vote BNP - in fact the finding only applies to London).

In the same survey ICM asked people to say if they liked or disliked political parties on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "dislike a lot", 4 being neutral and 7 being "like a lot". The BNP were still easily the most disliked party - 35% of people in London disliked them a lot and 65% had negative views of them. Only 16% of Londoners viewed them positively in any sense, only 4% liked them a lot.

The

JRRT report does contain some interesting research about who actually votes BNP. In the London elections a high BNP vote correllated with a high proportion of skilled or semi-skilled manual workers (C2 and D social classes), especially C2 voters. Wards with a larger number of older voters tended to have a higher BNP vote, as did wards with a low average level of education. There was, however no link between ward with a high number of benefit claimants and support for the BNP. The study suggests that the BNP gain their support from older, poorly educated people, but that their support comes not not from the very poorest, the unemployed and those reliant upon benefits, but from the skilled working class. The study also looked for links between the BNP vote and the ethnic make up or number of asylum seekers in a ward, but found no correlation (though they pointed out the difficulties of drawing any conclusions on this given that you cannot separate out the "white vote" and some boroughs with high numbers of asylum seekers actually house them in other boroughs).