Tonight the British National Party won its first-ever seat in the European Parliament* - thanks in no small part to people from the place I call my own.
I know little about the European Parliament, but I am nevertheless ashamed that the far right claimed one of the six seats in the Yorkshire and Humber region, with voters in my own Barnsley increasing the BNP vote by nine per cent compared to the last election.
It strikes me that there are ways to do politics, but always within accepted parameters: tax-and-spend, or cut to the bone? Big state or small? Integration with Europe or not? Devolution or not? but politics is not science. That is, even when there are revolutions, our understanding of the world is not turned on its head forever. Politicians, even those who operate the buttons of power, are not on the shoulders of giants in the same manner that Stephen Hawking stands on the shoulders of Isaac Newton, and somebody yet to come will one day stand on the shoulders of Hawking.
If science has its crises which lead to dominant paradigms being overthrown, then politics too has its moments of tension and conflict - but when they are finished, the process continues in much the same way as it did before. A new leader, perhaps, with a fresh fiscal policy or a desire to decrease civil liberties, but in the lives of ordinary people, politicians nevertheless operate very much in the background.
In the last hours, however, places like Barnsley have sown the seeds of a dangerous anti-politics, where manifesto and debate are replaced by a series of binary opposites: British good, non-British bad; white good, non-white bad. The political process ceases to float quietly in the distance, but instead kicks the door down in the early hours and dishes out a beating based on skin colour or nationality.
Barnsley has nodded its head to the politics of fear, loathing and intimidation. I visited there over the weekend, and, as I walked up the quiet street leading from the train station, I saw for myself the British National Party's message, adhered to the window of a house: People like you vote BNP.
People like you. It's a simple message, tapping into the common bond which unites us all, the umbrella under which we each carry out our daily struggles. People like you in towns like Barnsley turn the clock back and vote for the machine of terror and hatred to chew up and spit out everything else which doesn't conform to a specific list of parameters.
And its teeth are sharpened with unemployment, with the mass hysteria over members of parliament and their expenses, with the misery of a wet summer. People like you vote to lash out blindly, to apportion blame where there is none, to endorse racism, and to pull the cord from a town's life support machine.
This isn't politics - it's intimidation. And I can't believe so many of you fell for it. Oh, Barnsley - what have you done?
*The BNP later won their second seat, again in a less-than-affluent northern area.
