Forever a False Dawn? Explaining the Electoral Collapse of the British National Party (BNP)

On 3 May 2012, voters went to the polls to elect councillors in 131 local authorities in England, members of the Greater London Assembly and mayors in London, Liverpool and Salford. Coverage of the elections focused on the performance of an increasingly unpopular coalition government and an upsurge of support in the polls for the radical right UK Independence Party. One quieter story of the campaign concerned the extreme right British National Party (BNP), and the question of whether the 30-year old party would prove able to stem an electoral decline that followed a failed breakthrough attempt at the 2010 general election.1 Assessing the performance of the BNP at the 2012 elections, and the extreme right more generally, this article charts the decline of the former and examines the increasing fragmentation of the latter. After providing an agency-based explanation for why the BNP—once the most successful extreme right party in British history—returned to the electoral wildness and changed strategy, the article concludes by considering the implications of the party's decline for an increasingly chaotic and diverse extreme right scene.