Labour urged to take action to stop the BNP winning Euro seats... hello, is there anybody out there?

According to today's Independent, 'senior Labour figures' are said to have told Gordon Brown that the BNP are likely to win two seats in June's European elections. Oh dear, are we to see another attempt by Labour to hype the threat from the BNP so as to drive voters back to the shelter of the Labour Party?

It is true that the BNP have has a series of good by-election results, and this week's result in Swanley, where the Labour vote collapsed to allow the BNP to win, has highlighted what they are capable of in a small, highly targeted one-off campaign. What we haven't seen is any evidence that they have the capacity to fight anything larger against meaningful, engaged opposition.

It takes a lot of money to fight a Region-wide election. You need a pretty big bankroll even to put out an election address across the entire North West, for example, and given the media's tendancy to focus on the political big beasts, and their general lack of interest in European elections anyway, the ability to raise awareness in their policies might be limited.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they are not a threat. Their message is easy to articulate and requires a response which is more multi-layered. However, they tend to do best where local democracy is fairly moribund, where one party is dominant to the exclusion of others, and where the black and minority ethnic community is comparatively small.

From the perspective of the major parties, the best form of defence is attack. Not an attack on the BNP, per se, but an attack on the sense of alienation from politics and the authorities. Voters who feel isolated from the decisions that impact on their day to day lives are more likely to vote for someone who comes along and says, "We know how you feel, we agree that your local politicians don't care about you, vote for us for something different.". It only needs to work once.

The challenge to Labour, the Conservatives and ourselves is to find ways of giving people a sense of personal involvement and a stake in what happens to their communities, their counties, their country. Technology potentially helps us to do that, but without an honesty of intent, it will take more than better PR to convince those who have given up on voting, or who vote for fringe, extremist parties of the left or right, to engage in the more complex debates that stem from genuine large-scale participation in our democracy.

Duncan Borrowman has noted the importance on running candidates everywhere - we failed to run one in Swanley for reasons unknown - and he is absolutely right to do so. If you don't give voters a choice, you risk having them vote for an option they're not so keen on as a means of expressing their disapproval of other parties. That sounds a bit negative, but there are plenty of voters who will vote on that basis. Some of them will vote for us.

Unfortunately, Labour just don't get that. They argue that the BNP are vile racists and that we, the established parties, must work together to stop them. There is a core of BNP support that is overtly racist, it is true, and there are others whose view of the world is guided by fear of difference. However, many of those now voting for them have been conditioned to do so by the stream of inaccurate reports from the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, implying that immigrants get priority for housing, that all new jobs are being taken by foreigners, and that if only we could achieve Gordon Brown's 'nirvana' of 'British jobs for British workers' and throw off the yoke of Brussels, we would all live happily ever after.

No, in order to defeat the BNP, we have to win the argument, making our case, campaigning in the community and addressing the day to day issues that affect it. Politicians talking in glib terms and implying easy solutions don't help that. Promising the Earth and delivering little visible change doesn't help either. And emphasising the threat from the BNP without addressing the root causes behind their support certainly won't help...