A False Dawn in Tower Hamlets: The British National Party in the 1990s

Abstract

In September 1993, as the British National Party won its first council seat in Tower Hamlets, the optimism with which the BNP had greeted the 1990s looked surprisingly prescient. Heralded by a triumphant John Tyndall as a political earthquake, ‘the tremors of which are likely to reverberate for many months, even years’,¹ this electoral victory was the first election success for the extreme right since the heady days of the 1970s when a National Front offshoot — the National Party — had won two seats on Blackburn council. All but a political non-entity during the 1980s, Tyndall’s BNP now seized upon this result. It might have only been the election of just one representative to one local borough council, but for Tyndall it was ‘the most tremendous step forward the party has ever made’.² However, soon enough, the BNP found its electoral progress cut short. At its peak, in 1994, the average vote for BNP candidates in its fiefdom of Tower Hamlets had been 8.9 per cent; four years later, its average share of the poll across this district had fallen to just 4.53 per cent.³ If the first part of the decade had showed all the signs of promise, the remainder of the 1990s belied expectations. Without doubt, September 1993 proved a false dawn and what lay in store for Tyndall from the mid-1990s onwards were the closing moments of his reign — a period that saw diminishing electoral rewards, continued disappointment, and in the end, his ejection from office as party leader.