Personality and Politics

British National Party: Personality and Politics

Personality traits are not in themselves political issues but can have political consequences. One of the fundamental problems the British National Party faced during the time when it was represented in the London Assembly was the difficult interaction between Richard Barnbrook as Assembly Member and members of his team including Chris Roberts, Tess Culnane and others.

When you have people with strong political convictions and strong personalities working together that not very often see eye to eye, you are bound to face all sorts of problems on top of the expected problems of having to defend and promote the policies of the British National Party.

Despite the fact that every political organisation faces the same kind of internal difficulties, the lack of proper communications infrastructure and discipline made what could have been a wonderful and vital opportunity to transform the entire London Region into an absolute disaster that affected the entire organisation at national level.

When we ran the 2012 GLA campaign, the obvious question we were going to face was ‘why should we vote for you after what happened with your representation in the London Assembly?’ Such question would be raised before we could even try to talk about future policies. This is the sort of thing we should keep in mind when running any other electoral campaign and we have plenty of elections in the horizon including local elections in 2013 and European elections in 2014.

The London Region is as important as any other region of the United Kingdom but the London Region is even more important because it is highly visible and very often used as an example of what is happening in other parts of the United Kingdom. So it comes as no surprise that what happened in the GLA and what happened in Barking will be forever used as examples at every available opportunity.