Local and European Elections.

Tomorrow is local election and European Elections day in the UK and a worse time could not be imagined. Many MP's have been caught with their noses in the trough and the home counties gravy train has been spilling the jus of finest Dexter beef at every bend. Enough of the food analogies. There is a great amount of national and local resentment to the mainstream parties, particularly Labour and to a slightly lesser extent the Tories. The Conservative party has been playing to the prejudices of the gallery by claiming money from the public purse to clean their moats and furnish ducks with 20K floating houses but it is Labour who have been claiming by wholesale, rather than the more rarefied claims of the Tory grandees, many of whom I am willing to gloss over because I care for our heritage and would see our ancient buildings kept in good condition and lived in rather than becoming the ubiquitous storage depot for older people. The Liberal Democrats seem to have less of these traits, but then there are less of them.

What happens when the public are feeling angry and disenfranchised and an election comes up? We are not at Wiemar Germany yet, but it is very likely that people will register a 'protest' vote against the main parties and elect fringe parties to local seats in the council. This election will not decide who governs the nation - although surely that is not far off - and with our rejection of proportional representation we need not fear for the economy if fringe parties are elected to local council seats, but it decides the moral timbre of the nation. It matters if fringe parties hold local seats - sure, a Lord Sutch or a Monkey Mayor here and there adds grist to the wheel of democracy, but how would you feel if they were YOUR mayor, YOUR councillor? How well represented would you feel and how able would you feel to approach them in real time of need? How would you feel if a significant number of people in your small local area voted for a candidate from a nationalist party? The fact that this is mainly the European elections is not to denigrate the process, who we say we are to the wider community is vital. Are we a nation of bigots or a nation of tolerant, fair minded people - the definition of Britishness for hundreds of years.

The British National Party, for some years a disorganised rabble with political hobbyists, is fielding candidates in many wards tomorrow and it is likely that they will win quite a few seats. They have been campaigning strongly in Churches - and getting much coverage by their being stopped doing this - their website has comments about the CofE stopping 'God's holy will' being done by the BNP. They have been writing to every pub landlord in the country pledging that they will stop the decline in pubs and these landlords who are scared for their livelihoods will respond to this, they have been underlining their support for capital and corporal sentences in court, a return to 'traditional' education, including training children for industry, rather than being sentient beings. They also want 'immigrants' sent home, of course, as do UKIP, who will stop any further immigration to this country which is made up genetically of immigrants going back thousands of years.

We accept that the vast majority of the policies of the BNP are not enforceable if they ever rose to power and we also accept that their economic policies seem to be lifted out of the pages of Jeeves and Wooster, if you recall the character 'Spode' who would turn over the whole of East Anglia to the production of potatos and the North East to bicycles. They would destroy this nation by setting people against each other and by forcing our economy into the situation of Zimbabwe's, the President of which they resemble in all but skin colour. There are, also, a close network of Continental Nationalists (if you will forgive the comical, impossible, collection of words therein) with whom they have seemingly close ties who. like the BNP, are exploiting opposition to the EU with promises of jobs tomorrow. This worries us as it worries all sentient British people, for it is easy for these groups to grow across national boundaries through the internet, without which they would find it very hard to exist in more than a local fanzine-extremist network.

And then there are the other candidates, leaving aside the BNP for a while, one of who's candidates recently declared rape to be something which women probably enjoy. Candidates from the Green Party and the Respect party and all the other one horse wonders who, if in power, would, just like the BNP, be incapable of running the nation. They all know this, I am sure. A reading of the BNP website offers no clue as to how they would govern the nation or the economy other than a few populist and to some idealist statements about 'right' and 'wrong', from their own seriously misjudged angle. None of these parties will ever gain power, but that does not mean that we can dismiss them at local level. If you wish to be represented by people who understand the global need for reform in the economic sphere, by people who can represent us globally, by people who see the need to maintain and improve the environment, by people who are answerable to the nation and have been for generations, for God's sake vote tomorrow for a mainstream party. Vote Lib Dem if you like, or Conservative, or Labour or even, maybe Green Party, but a vote for the BNP or UKIP, or a decision not to vote at all, would be a sin for which we will be answerable to almighty God.

In Christ there is no black or white, no slave or free, He died that all may have life, if they so choose. To vote for a party which discriminates against His children by the colour of their skin, or who would close the boundaries of one isle against another rock of His own making, is to evade our responsibility to all His creation. When our souls are demanded of us and the Lord asks us how we furthered His Kingdom of justice and how we told of His word, we do not want to stand accused of causing division and hatred. Whatever mess our politicians have got into now, a vote for extremists is a vote for hatred and will turn us away from the Lord. A protest vote for a seemingly innocent fringe party is to vote for someone with no chance of power or governance. To not vote will leave people in certain areas with a BNP councillor to represent them, which is intolerable, to God and to man.