Is it democratic to ban rival parties?

Robert Winnett
David Leppard

Far Right Party Members Face Purge
From The Civil Service

Sunday Times
19 September 2004

The government is drawing up plans to bar members of the British National party (BNP) from the Civil Service.
The move -- disclosed in confidential Home Office documents -- reflects ministerial concern about the growing influence of the BNP, which won almost 900,000 votes at the European and local elections in June. It would be the first time that members of any political party have been banned from working for the government. Civil service rules currently allow officials to be members of any legally recognised political party, providing it does not affect their work.

Officials say a new law would be needed to enforce the ban, which is being devised by Sir Andrew Turnbull, head of the civil service, and Martin Narey, a Home Office permanent secretary.
Ministers are known to support moves to ban BNP members from public office. Last week Peter Hain, leader of the Commons, said: "I don't think members of the BNP are fit to stand in any public position. Their racism and neo-Nazism makes them unfit for office."

Last year David Blunkett, the home secretary, said that he was opposed to members of the BNP joining the police. Whitehall unions confirmed this weekend they had already been consulted. Charles Cochrane, secretary of the Council of Civil Service Unions, which represents 400,000 of the 550,000 central government civil servants, said there was "an inescapable logic" for its introduction.

A leaked letter sent by Cochrane to Narey this month reveals that the purpose of the ban is to prevent racist civil servants discriminating against ethnic minority members of the public. But it is likely to be challenged by the BNP under human rights legislation which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and belief.

The government also faces criticism from free-speech campaigners, who fear it could set a dangerous precedent. They say the BNP, led by Nick Griffin, is legally allowed to stand for election and in a democratic society workers should be free to support whom they wish.

Under the proposals civil servants would have to disclose whether they were members of the BNP. Those who are will be told membership is not consistent with the "diversity requirements" of the civil service. It would also be a sackable offence not to reveal membership. Last night the Home Office said: "This is an issue we are considering, but no decision has been made yet."

So, for the first time ever in Britain, the present government -- which has already made it clear that the Civil Service is no longer to nominally serve the Crown, and thereby be politically neutral, but must serve their ruling Party, and thereby become de facto political apparachiks -- is seriously considering banning members (and, by inevitable extension of accusatory logic, probably supporters and voters as well) of a political party from working for the British State. Councils will doubtless follow. This move would effectively amount to a properly constituted, legally registered and quite strongly supported political party being partially outlawed by another, rival, party. Whatever one may think of the BNP, it is nonetheless a legitimate political organisation which, it must be said, differs profoundly from its would-be prohibitors in that, unlike them, it has not waged unlawful war against non-belligerent countries on five -- or if Blair's latest megalomanic excuse is to be swallowed, six -- occasions.
Behind such measures are Trade Union leaderships affiliated to the Searchlight organisation, led by an ex-Communist former tabloid journalist and working closely with Trotskyites of the SWP, a party so popular with the general public that it seldom bothers to run candidates under its own name -- and which itself is thought by some other left-wing organisations to be a provocateur and intelligence-gathering front for the Police State. Since those running Searchlight also operate as "consultants" for the Home Office and EU's more shadowy policing and social-engineering departments, such fears may well be justified.
There is reason to believe that such exclusion and eventual outlawing of the BNP may be just one of the as yet largely undisclosed conditions upon which these Union bosses gave the ruling Labour Party large sums of campaign money this month. It also sets a longer-term precedent, whereby anyone who will not actually and actively promote these Union bosses' undemocratically dictated and incrementally applied extremist political agenda -- which ranges from social and economic matters, through immigration, to foreign policy and beyond -- is at serious risk of being witch-hunted.
We await with interest the response of the Conservative, UKIP and LibDem party leaderships. Suffice to say the Conservatives were suspected of conspiracy against UKIP in the recent European elections, and smeared the BNP in phrasing that seemed surprisingly similar to that issued for such use by the aforementioned Searchlight organisation. That senior Conservatives had, beforehand, attended an establishment-parties meeting arranged by Searchlight and others to co-ordinate an anti-BNP (and anti-UKIP?) campaign is of course purely coincidental.
As for UKIP, it must be careful to avoid becoming little better than a compliant satellite of the very same Conservative Party that lied and weaselled Britain ever deeper into the EEC and EU, an alliance which is certainly not what the vast majority of the UKIP membership would want.