By a local correspondent IF WE ARE to believe the bourgeois press -and Jack Straw MP - the BNP won the Millwall by-election because of a massive protest vote from white residents encouraged by racist leaflets from the Liberal Democrats to vote BNP.
This analysis is superficially correct: but it is a year out of date.
Yes, since they won control of Tower Hamlets Council in 1986, the Liberal Democrats have played the race card. Council policies, notably on housing, have sought to scapegoat black people, and particularly Bangladeshis (23 per cent of the Borough's population) for cuts in Council services.
Tabloid-style Liberal Democrat Party leaflets have screamed racist slogans around the Borough for years, and the number of racist attacks has sky-rocketed - and the BNP has begun to organise.
Where the Liberals raised the slogan Island homes for Island people, the BNP popularised the blatant slogan Rights for Whites' The Liberal Democrats were warned that their active racism was playing into the hands of the fascists. The prompt action of Paddy Ashdown and Simon Hughes last month in calling an inquiry into the local party is contemptuous - given the number of times Mildred Gordon, the local MP, has sent them copies of racist Liberal Demo crat leaflets over several years.
Racist Liberals In the October 1992 by-election, the Liberals fought their most overtly racist campaign yet. The Labour candidate, a prominent local activist who promised anti-racism at Bengali meetings and appeasement to white meetings, scraped home. The BNP secured 657 votes - 20 per cent.
The Liberal Democrats learned the lesson of this result. Their racist campaigning had mobilised a racist vote - but not for them. Last month saw the Liberal Democrats' least racist campaign FIGHTING FASCISM ever. They fought on traditional territory: counting broken lifts and droughty windows, with just enough racism to put them in context.
But the Labour Party did not learn the lesson. Their cold calculation was that the BNP had taken votes from the Liberal Democrats and thus had enabled Labour to win.
They rejected out of hand left demands to put out anti-racist propaganda and began a process of systematic appeasement to racist demands - "to reflect more accurately people's real concerns'.
By the time of last month's campaign, the Labour Party was more or less explicitly occupying the old racist territory of the Liberal Demo crats. Still working on its analysis of the vote the previous year, Labour Party members leaked falsified canvass returns showing huge support for the BNP to the local paper in an aim to keep up the BP's electoral support and thus keep the Liberal vote down.
T DAY CHEMIST The local paper obliged with a banner headline: "serious chance of first BNP Councillor being elected'. As an attempt to keep the fascist vote up, of course this worked brilliantly.
Labour's campaign provoked mass abstention from Bengali voters, who clearly could have affected the result. This subtlety is likely to be lost Last month's vote was not a simple protest vote about the state of affordable housing on the Isle of Dogs. It was the vote of an electorate which has been told to see Bangladeshis as the cause of all their problems, which has been offered no political alternative for a very long time and is now solidifying behind the racist slogans.
Jack Straw is unlikely to learn the real lesson of the September 1993 result. At a fringe meeting at Labour Party Conference he answered calls from black Party members for an inquiry saying: 'I'm damned if I am going to be party to establishing an inquiry with non-existent allegations [sic].... There is no racialism in our leaflets' and "no one tolerates racism in the Labour Party'.
Post mortem
The Regional Labour Party however, is mounting a 'post mortem'. But the results of this are more likely to lead to local individuals being scapegoated than in a wholesale change in policies by the Labour Party in the area.
This vote should be a warning to the whole of the left: that where racism is allowed to go unchallenged, fascism can grow and flourish. If anyone needed any more good reasons for fighting racism - fighting it seriously, on the streets and in the labour movement - this is it.
With the fascists promising to field candidates for all three seats in Millwall and seats in other parts of Tower Hamlets when the Council is up for election next May, it is vital that this lesson is learned very quickly.