"Unlikes attract, but...."

Yesterday Daniel Hannan, in his Telegraph Blog, raised the question of why certain prominent members of the Labour Party are regularly telling people not to vote for the BNP. After all, he points out, the BNP has no Westminster seats and only a handful of council seats across the country. Whenever the Labour leaders speak, the BNP gets free publicity.

I am sure that he is right about their present number of seats, but in a number of recent council by-elections the BNP has increased its vote, seemingly at a cost of reduced Labour vote. This may be the motivation which Daniel has missed.

Otherwise I could not better his suggestions that the two parties are not polar extremes but really at one extreme. (Do the far right and the far left almost merge to form a circle? Nazi Germany was called the party of National Socialism.) Certainly they share attitudes such as nationalisation, subsidies for industry and trade tariffs to protect British jobs.

Above all, I suspect that they share a dislike of liberalism, of the market and decentralisation, and they share a belief in strong central control to achieve planned objectives.

The Labour left call the BNP Fascists or Nazis, as they do any group which opposes. The name is emotional, and goes back to their dim youth

The names do not matter, they are slogans of their own party with which to beat others. In terms of attitudes the two parties have much in common at the extreme, so it could be that the supposed hatred is really a loathing of competition.