Can a member of the British National Party provide public services to all members of society without discriminating? Or is a ban on public servants joining a legal political party itself discriminatory? Ruth Keeling reports

The British National Party (BNP) had a disappointing election, failing to win any parliamentary seats and losing all their recent gains on Barking council. However, this is not a party on the run: the BNP quadrupled its votes between the 2001 and 2005 general elections and won six per cent of the national vote in the 2009 European elections, picking up two seats. In the 2010 election its candidates’ individual vote shares fell slightly, from 4.2 to 3.7 per cent, but the party fielded nearly three times as many candidates and saw its total number of votes rise by 150 per cent, to 1.9 per cent of votes cast. The party retains 28 council seats and a place on the London Assembly, and last October BNP leader Nick Griffin appeared on BBC’s Question Time; the party had “demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level”, a BBC spokesman explained.

These successes have not gone unchallenged. Most recently, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has questioned the legality of the party’s constitution under the Race Relations Act, and the party is in the process of amending its constitution (see box). Trade unions – long-time opponents of the BNP and similar organisations such as its precursor, the National Front – have also joined the fray. In 2001, the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) was instrumental in persuading National Offender Management Service (NOMS) bosses that their prison staff should be banned from being members of any group considered racist by the service. In 2004, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) followed suit, barring police from BNP membership.

The argument for the ban is, says PCS NOMS group secretary Peter Olech, simply that civil and public servants have a duty to provide all members of the public with a service, while organisations such as the BNP seek to limit certain people’s access to public services. “It is incompatible to be a public sector worker and to have racist views; it’s as simple as that,” he argues.

The counter-argument is that members of the BNP, a legal political party, have as much right to go into policing or nursing as members of the Labour Party. But Olech dismisses this “bizarre civil liberties argument”, and Mike Nolan, the PCS NOMS group president, says the union would actually like to see the BNP banned from politics. Even if the party amended its constitution so that it complies with the Race Relations Act, Nolan believes the union would maintain its position. “It’s about the constitution, but it’s also about the statements they make; what they’re saying and doing in practice,” he explains.

The BNP, unsurprisingly, opposes any ban on its members working in the public sector. Andrew Brons, the party’s MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, says the prison and police ban is “anti-democratic and it is based on the notion that people should be judged on [the] basis of who they are and not on what they do”.

Brons, a university lecturer for 40 years, argues that it is entirely possible for a BNP member to carry out their job without discriminating against public service users. “This ban seems to be based on the assumption that BNP members are as biased, intolerant and as likely to misuse positions of authority as members of the Labour Party,” he says. “They are not.” He also argues that a ban would fail to penalise people who are deeply racist but haven’t joined the BNP, instead singling out BNP members no matter how careful they are to perform their work according to their employers’ requirements. The real reason for the ban, Brons argues, is to “deprive the British National Party of members with drive, ability or prestigious occupations”.
Nonetheless, a number of unions are pushing to have the membership ban extended to other areas of the public sector; Unison members, for example, passed a motion at their 2009 annual conference calling for a similar ban to be applied in the nursing profession. Yet there have been no further bans introduced since 2004. In fact, the union campaign for a more widespread ban was dealt a blow earlier this year when a government-commissioned review into whether BNP members should be allowed to teach decided that they should.

The inconsistency of approach across the public sector is even reflected inside some organisations; within NOMS, for example, the ban covers prison staff but not probation officers. Meanwhile, police are covered, but not courts staff. Nolan says that the refusal by the Home Office – and later the Ministry of Justice – to make the policy department-wide was both “frustrating” and a “disappointment”.

The PCS’s success within NOMS, says Nolan, owes a lot to the support of outgoing NOMS director general Phil Wheatley – who was at the time a director of the prison service. “He was the only person who entertained [the idea],” says Nolan. “He wouldn’t say so, but I suspect that he was pressing the then management to adopt that stance.” The police ban had similar high-level support: a full year before it was introduced, the then-home secretary David Blunkett let it be known that he would like to see a ban.

The probation officers’ union, Napo, has spent the last year lobbying for a ban on BNP membership among probation officers. National chair Tim Wilson argues that there is a “clear anomaly” between a probation officer being asked to challenge an offender’s racist or homophobic views or behaviour, and allowing officers to be members of an organisation with such views. However, Wilson adds that Wheatley – who retired at the beginning of this month – has told him that NOMS can’t impose a ban because the probation officers are employed by 35 regional trust bodies (Wheatley turned down CSW’s bid for an interview). While some of these trusts have indicated their support for a ban, Wilson says many are “weaker of spirit” and keen “to avoid the political limelight” at a time when the BNP constitution’s (il)legality is already a hot topic.

Unions have struggled to win the argument on banning BNP members from public sector jobs. Where they’ve won out, it’s been within the justice system – where many clients and staff are ethnic minorities, and where issues of fairness loom large – and in fields where senior politicians and officials have backed a ban.

In the current battleground of teaching, former education secretary Ed Balls accepted the review decision that a ban would be unhelpful. However, the new education secretary, Michael Gove, has been more outspoken in his opposition to BNP members teaching, and a Department for Education spokesman sounds robust on the issue. Gove and David Cameron, he says, “found it quite difficult to understand how a member of the BNP could be a teacher. The secretary of state will look at this in detail. The review [of measures to prevent the promotion of racism in schools] by Maurice Smith found that it was difficult to ban BNP members from teaching, but obviously that was under the previous admininstration. The new secretary of state has his own views.”

So the BNP may come under threat again on this front. And meanwhile, the EHRC – fresh from a purdah period spent considering how far the BNP has moved – is beginning to rattle its sabres. No final decision on whether to take the party back to court has been made, says a spokesman, but “our view is that they’re in contempt of court”. The BNP is still licking its wounds after a poor election performance, but its latest round of battles may not be over yet.

Court out: the EHRC v the BNP

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has launched a legal challenge against the BNP’s constitution, arguing that its requirement that membership be restricted to ‘indigenous Caucasian’ people was in contravention of the Race Relations Act.

The BNP was ordered to decline applications for membership while the court case, which began last year, was heard; party leader Nick Griffin soon agreed to rewrite the constitution in consultation with his members. However, the new constitution was also challenged by the EHRC, on the grounds that clauses requiring prospective members to be against mixed-race relationships and to support the relocation of ethnic minorities were indirectly discriminatory, because very few members of ethnic minorities would be able to sign up to these principles.

Written by Ruth Keeling