Burnley's never been famous, or even well-known. It's notable only for its industrious past and its football team; all Burnley’s finer points passed into cliche not long after cobbled streets and cloth caps were replaced by tarmac and baseball caps. I'm surprised when anyone from outside Lancashire has ever had cause to stop there, especially since they steamrollered the motorway bypass from Colne at one end (first town in England with streetlights) to Blackburn at the other, demolishing along the way the house where I was born.
So it's with utter dejection that my unremarkable home town has suddenly become remarkable, as the Racist Capital of England. On the 2nd May, the British National Party gained three seats in the town in the biggest electoral victory for British neo-Nazis for two decades. And along with the photographs of fascist leader Nick Griffin, grinning and flashing victory salutes around Burnley town centre, there are debates and editorials and phone-ins and questions in the House and interviews and commentaries and they’re suddenly all using the word Burnley.

Funnily enough the BNP councillors were not elected in districts riven by last year’s race riots - surprisingly, the council seat won by ex-Burnley Grammar School pupil and full-time racist David Edwards was won in the village of Worsthorne, commonly seen as Burnley’s retirement home for middle-classes. The image of Nick Griffin doing victory laps around the village green there - as he did after the election results - is as peculiar as it is sickening.

The easiest conclusion to draw from the BNP’s success in Burnley is that poverty is breeding fear. Why, then, the successes amongst the village green preservation societies? The people interviewed who admitted boldly that they had voted for the BNP stated reasons like:

They own all the shops as well.
The French have changed our money.
They live together and never mix.
I just want us to look after our own.
Now it’s all metric instead of yards.
We have nothing, and they have everything.

These are the voices of a town sheltered by hills and cut off from a changing country - a town whose people feel spat out and rejected by all the major political parties. The traditional working class vote - solidly Labour, the voice of the working man and woman - has seen Blairite capitalism spinning off over the horizon, has seen a Labour Party ditch its roots and jump into bed with the boss. At the same time, old school Conservative voters have seen their leadership crumble to a befuddled, tongue-tied nothing. The void, the huge black hole that is the central Lancashire mill towns, is being filled by the flotsam and jetsom of democracy - and the BNP, to their credit, have learnt how to float with the most effluent of tides.

So Burnley, never famous, is now infamous. I can't believe that it’s the BNP putting Burnley on the map and not my beloved Burnley Football Club. Ironically, the final count in the local elections - which saw a third and final BNP councillor elected in Gannow ward - was held at Turf Moor, home of Burnley FC, a club committed to the ‘Kick Racism Out of Football' campaign. I've seen very little to suggest that the football club has much of a racist following; the few idiots who a couple of seasons ago used to chant "No surrender to the IRA!" during matches have either shut up or wandered off.

Alastair Campbell, Blair's press secretary, is a renowned Burnley FC supporter and was loudly condemning the BNP before the elections; all very well, but New Labour’s agenda is all about international diplomacy and big business handshakes and has little time for the people left in limbo by political and cultural change. Campbell referred to Le Pen’s rise in popularity in France as "a wake-up call" and called on the people of Burnley to heed the warning; instead he saw the BNP and the more stupid voters of Burnley giving New Labour a wake-up call he didn't expect.

The real problem - considering the inneffectiveness of 3 councillors in a council of 45 - is that this legitimises the BNP; normalises neo-fascism as part of British democracy; and encourages extremists to wriggle out of the woodwork. No-one can doubt that Combat 18 - the National Front's thug wing - will be rubbing their grubby hands at the groundbreaking work being done by the BNP. And with that extremism comes the overwhelming threat of more racist attacks on Asians and yet another bout of race riots on the streets of Burnley.

Burnley's Labour leader, Stuart Caddy, followed the election results by announcing to the BBC that he "wouldn’t work with the BNP councillors". Free and fair elections for all, but when our townsfolk decide to vote for the wrong lot we’ll just refuse to work with them. What kind of response is that? Burnley has become a test case instead of a town, a newspaper headline where it was once a footnote. And the problem is that before these 80,000 people, failed by Tories and shunned by Labour, come to the conclusion that the BNP are as unable to solve their problems as the rest of the political parties, we’ll be forced to watch Burnley going up in flames this summer. And sadly, the cliche which rendered Burnley a town of empty mills and cobblestones will be replaced by a cliche wherein Burnley becomes a townful of ignorant racists.

Boff

Chumbawamba to perform in Burnley June 27th at Mechanics

Burnley, Lancashire England (birthplace of Alice, Lou, Boff and Danbert) ... The gig at Burnley Mechanics is timed to occur a couple of days before the said councillors attempt to take their seats on the council for the first time.
other bands playing are:
Miss Black America
Kismet