In what was the heart of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, one in six people voted for the British National Party in the European elections. Kieron Hunt, 51, was one of them.
“I’m not racist in any way,” Mr Hunt, 51, said, as he packed away the shoe stall that he runs in Barnsley town centre. “But there are too many foreigners. They are not good for the local economy. Even if they are working they are not spending; they are sending the money back home. A lot of people are fed up with the situation: they think they get treated better than others — they get houses and phones and cars. Whether they do or not I don’t know, but that seems to be the general opinion.”
Mr Hunt admits that the BNP “are extreme. A couple of their policies are racist, but a lot of what they are saying is common sense: British jobs for British workers.
“Barnsley is pretty bad now. We’ve got no big industry round here. We used to have the pits and the steelworks, now we are left with warehouses and supermarkets and that carry-on. It’s all basic wages; there are no well-paid jobs.”
He is not surprised that the BNP attracted a following locally.“ Barnsley has always been an old-fashioned Yorkshire town. People have never had foreigners living next to them. It is probably a backlash.”
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The two brash lads walking down the precinct in their T-shirts had voted BNP and didn’t care who knew it. “About 40 of us went and voted BNP,” said Shane Redford, 19, a bricklayer. “All our mates wanted to vote. Get ’em out.” Who? “Foreigners. They’re dangerous. They’re too horrible.”
“You can’t get a job because of all the Polish,” said his mate Jamie Oddie, who was made redundant from his warehouse job a month ago. “It’s cheap labour. Give Britain back to the British.”
As many people are appalled by the drift to the far Right. “I am disgusted with it,” said one middle-aged shopper. She is old-fashioned Barnsley: she voted for Arthur Scargill. “They had a woman on TV saying she voted BNP because her grandson couldn’t get a job. But that is not true. There are jobs out there but they are jobs people born and bred here won’t look at. Most hospitals would shut down if there were no foreign workers.
“This weekend we had 65 years after D-Day — my dad fought in the war to crush such as these. Yet the same weekend they are voted in. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”
If there is a worrying message for the Government on the streets of Barnsley, though, it is not in the number of BNP supporters, it is the utter disillusion with the Labour Party. Of the first half-dozen people to whom The Times spoke, there was one BNP voter, one for Mr Scargill, one Lib Dem, one for UKIP, one Green and one non-voter. None voted Labour.
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Even those who could not bring themselves to support the BNP nevertheless echoed their rhetoric. Outside a betting shop Christopher Ferguson, 53, said: “Labour has lost it. They don’t connect with working-class people any more. I am on incapacity benefit, but there are a lot of people out there without work getting £64 a week jobseeker’s allowance. It is such a struggle to survive. I didn’t vote — if I didn’t vote Labour I didn’t know who to vote for.”
Like many others in Barnsley he blames much of the unemployment situation on foreign workers. “There’s a hell of a lot now — from all over; we’re absolutely flooded out. People feel the foreigners are looked on more favourably than our people.”