Abhorrent though the BNP is, however, should the government seek to ban civil servants from being members? That is being considered at the highest levels and it is worrying. Ministers and mandarins apparently think everybody working for the government from senior advisers to the lowliest clerks should have their employment contracts rewritten to prohibit them from belonging to the BNP. If it happens, the party will have succeeded where more extreme factions of the far right and left failed in the past, making themselves victims of a political crackdown.
Countries with a dreadful totalitarian past, and democracies under threat of civil or external war, clamp down on extremists. But a peacetime British government has to consider very carefully the consequences of a ban on membership by public employees. Those who sympathised with the BNP’s views would support it anyway, albeit unofficially. Others might be drawn to the party by its notoriety. And why not a ban on membership of the far left parties, too? A dangerous precedent would be set.
What would stop some future administration banning civil servants from being members of any party it did not like? Labour should defeat the BNP by political means, not by resorting to bans.