I remember discussions in editorial meetings with Tristan Davies, the former editor of The Independent on Sunday, when he would say, as story ideas were suggested, "That's all part of X", where X was the big running story of the moment. Eventually he would conclude, "It's all one big story," as if the whole of the British and world news agenda should start with a headline on page one and run through to the Comment section.

Politics seems like that now. Brown's leadership is the "one big story" in which every other story becomes subsumed.

One of those separate stories was the likely British National Party surge at the European elections next month, about which I have been meaning to write for weeks. I've kept putting it off because of more pressing Brown leadership matters, but now the two have converged, according to Jackie Ashley at The Guardian: 


I hadn't noticed that it had become such a slogan. I had noticed the opposite: that it had become the one rallying cry remaining to anyone in the Labour Party vaguely interested in holding the party together.

The point I wanted to make is that it is, in fact, scaremongering. The BNP is most unlikely to win a seat in the European Parliament. It is not like the UK Independence Party five years ago or the Greens in 1989. The BNP will never be a fashionable protest vote. Yes, it won a seat on the London Assembly last year. That was under a proportional representation system that guaranteed a seat to any party that won 5 per cent. Richard Barnbrook only just did.

But in the European elections the threshold is higher. It varies from region to region, but the lowest is 10 per cent in the South East mega constituency, where the BNP polled 2.9 per cent five years ago. The best the BNP polled in 2004 was 8 per cent in Yorks and Humber, where they would need 17 per cent this year.

The BNP Euro-scare is based on the idea that UKIP, which polled 16 per cent of the vote five years ago, will lose votes, some of which will end up with the even-farther-right. I don't see why. Support for the BNP in opinion polls remains stubbornly low. The latest ComRes (pdf: go to table 6) has them at 1.6 per cent. True, UKIP are even less popular, mustering only two respondents or 0.3 per cent of the total. But if people want to make a nationalist protest, they might go to UKIP first and hesitate before voting for racists (read the BNP constitution, pdf, on how its membership is defined). 

Yes, the BNP can get into double figures in percentage share of the vote in council by-elections and has in living memory won council seats. But Euro constituencies are vast and I do not believe that the British people are ready to vote in large numbers for a racist party.

Update (Tues): I have been taken to task on the ConservativeHome website and by email for my defective understanding of the d'Hondt quota system of proportional representation. I plead guilty and proud of it. I think I am right to say that, if there are six seats in a region, a party needs 17 per cent of the votes to guarantee winning a seat. But it is possible to win a seat with fewer votes, depending on how other parties do. It has taken me more than five minutes on the internet to try to find out what the minimum share of the vote that could gain a seat would be. There are three possibilities: (a) I am uniquely incompetent; (b) I am hopelessly impatient; (c) the system is hard to understand, badly explained and undemocratic.