Far-right political parties have often been regarded in Britain as more clownish than chilling — goose-stepping goons who somehow failed to notice that Britain, unlike its more volatile, susceptible continental neighbours, simply wasn’t that kind of place. That complacent view has been tested, if not quite subverted, by the performance of the racist British National Party (BNP) in the European elections.

The BNP won two seats, in the North West and in Yorkshire and the Humber, for its leader Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, a former chairman of the National Front. The party secured one place in the London Assembly in 2008, but neither it nor its ideological predecessors have ever won in a national poll, even in the 1930s.

True, the circumstances were extraordinarily propitious. A long unequal boom, which induced mass immigration, has ended in a slump. Meanwhile, mainstream parties have been savagely discredited by the scandal over parliamentary expenses. In this atmosphere the BNP, posing as unsullied avengers, might have been expected to do even better. Yet the party flopped in London (a failure Mr Griffin attributes to Labour activists “ferrying Africans who can’t even speak English” to polling stations). It won fewer voters in the two Euro-regions it now represents than it did in 2004 — but low turnout and a poor showing by others, particularly Labour, enabled it to creep across the proportional system’s threshold. Far-right parties in Austria, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere were much more successful.

But all that is only limited comfort to those who regard the BNP’s breakthrough as distressing and shaming. It would be rash to assume that the big parties will recover to squeeze out the BNP in future contests. Its national vote rose, to 943,600 or 6.2 per cent of the total (see map): a modest boost, perhaps, but from a base that was already worryingly high. It has performed relatively strongly in assorted elections since 2002.

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