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Maryam Khan |
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Election of BNP in the North West |
The BNP win in the North West is nothing more than a stain on democracy. For all the people that have strived to make our region the place it is today and stood shoulder to shoulder against racists it was sad to see the results. Whilst there are some people in our communities feeling alienated; others are feeling vulnerable. We all have a collective responsibility to reach out to one another and not allow the BNP to divide us.
In the North West the BNP have got 132,094 votes too many. We have to unite mobilise a mass movement across every walk of life to make the BNP irrelevant. I found it ironic that on the 65th anniversary of D-day celebrating the heroism of those who fought the same hatred, fascism and racism we are being subjected to in our region.
Nick Griffin is a man whose party only accepts white members. A man whose last general election manifesto expressed a desire to push Asian and Black Britons out of their homeland. They have a slogan, ‘if they are black – send them back’. Yet the BNP claims to be a normal political party but in history wherever the far right wins elections, racist attacks increase. Nobody should use the BNP result as an excuse to capitulate to racism. That is exactly the approach which has helped them get this far and it would help to get them further. We have to ensure that every single incident big or small needs to be reported to the police.
There are many people from different backgrounds who worked hard to inform us of this danger, yet there are 62% who failed to vote. If they had, this result would have been much different. Also the voting system which allows person with 8% support to win, needs to be seriously scrutinised.
We can only hope that this will serve as a wake-up call. That people will realise exactly why our vote is so precious; why people fought and died to secure it. We can only hope that Griffin, given such a platform, will expose himself and his party for what they really are. There is no guarantee that will happen. We had our chance to act; we did not. Now we can only watch and wait for our next opportunity to get him.
We have to respect the result, this is democracy, but we need not respect BNP, and the fight to remove the BNP from our region starts now. Lets use this result as a wake up call and for the majority who did not vote a big lessen for our apathy. As Edmund Burke famously said, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." Abstaining is doing just that: nothing. It served no purpose but to open the back door to Griffin and his ilk.
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