More widely, and more worryingly, there is a very sparse evidence base on community-arts projects & outcomes. The Arts Council's comprehensive 2001 report, Measuring the economic and social impact of the arts surveys the literature and finds that arts managers make....

"simplistic and naive explanations for attributing positive outcomes to arts projects" [and that...] "There are further issues concerning to what extent the impacts of short-term arts and cultural interventions are sustained over a longer period" [and that, amazingly,...] "there has been no research to date comparing the outcomes of community-arts projects against other arts interventions" [and] "there have been no attempts to test the impacts produced by arts projects or programmes against other types of interventions, both in or outside the sector."

Intuition: In this project I also want to openly accept the possibility that intuition might play a part in this sort of research....

"... intuition is now finding support from a rich emerging field of scientific inquiry brilliantly summarized by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale University Press, 2002). I confess to having been skeptical when I first picked up the book, but as Myers demonstrates through numerous well-replicated experiments, intuition -- "our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason" -- is as much a component of our thinking as analytical logic. [...] Intellect and intuition are complementary, not competitive. Without intellect, our intuition may drive us unchecked into emotional chaos. Without intuition, we risk failing to resolve complex social dynamics and moral dilemmas." -- Michael Shermer in Scientific American magazine, December 2002.

More practically: I need to start somewhere and so I want to do some initial "sounding out" interviews with local people. As face-to-face encounters might elicit skewed responses, I'll try to use phone interviews initially. This will shield some of the visual racial clues which might cause some respondents to try to "please the interviewer" - by saying what they think he wants to hear. It's also easy and quick in terms of time and effort.

Tuesday 6th August 2002

My sketch-book is filling up with sketches, doodled ideas, spider-diagrams and a budget list.

In the press: the BNP's planned annual outdoor 'Red White & Blue' festival is to be held in the countryside, ten miles from their new 'heartland' of Burnley. Burnley was where the party had several councillors elected in the local elections, including one in an affluent area that they hadn't expected to win in. The Festival is touted as a showcase for the new family-friendly "kids 'n bouncy castles" BNP, after completing its post-1993 'makeover', policy changes and abandonment of street marches in favour of a commitment to the ballot box.

In the press: Through looking at a full-page local press report on the sentencing of a black rapist, it occurs to me that the way the press reports the activities of some criminals may have much to do with tilling a seedbed in which the overtly ideological appeals of the BNP can flower, albeit perhaps after a dose of fertiliser from certain tabloid columnists. There are also certainly overtly racist web-sites which do little else but correlate UK press reports with their own worldview. I hope that elements of my site don't mimic such sites; the quotes and bibliography I present are items which illustrate a changing national mood, or throw light on aspects of the artwork & research. The mere fact that I list or quote from a press item does not mean I recommend its ideas.

In the press: The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph - both papers of the right, but both anti-BNP - have front-page headlines about the research done by Migration Watch UK. Leading the Daily Mail to claim that 240,000 immigrants a year (includes illegal arrivals and overstayers) are "flooding in". This sort of alarmist reporting is exactly the sort of fuel that BNP supporters need - and it again makes me wonder about the role of the British press in building the current situation. So one of my initial assumptions, to state it plainly is: the press have a big part to play in why people support the BNP.

Wednesday 7th August 2002

Having already ordered some articles using the inter-library loan system, I can now start to do some serious reading. I'm also using the web, which is amazingly useful for getting the publications of obscure political grouplets. I'm trying to winkle out the reasons given by each of the participants and commentators for 'the recent success of the BNP'. These explanations will all go onto a single chart so they can be seen "all in one go".

It strikes me also, in relation to the historic linkage between Englishness and landscape [Scruton, 2000; Corbett et al, 2002; Ackroyd, 2002; Mellor, 1987; Corbett et al, 2002], and my interest in environmental public art, that there may be something to be gained from keeping in mind that many immigrants to the UK have been / are from deeply rural areas, but come mainly to the heart of industrial cities. I'm not sure where this observation might lead, but I think it's a demographically valid one.

In the press: there's press condemnation of the Migration Watch UK figures [see Diary, 6th Aug] in the Guardian and the Independent. However, because of the class-based division of newspaper readership in this country, this is very much "preaching to the converted".

Thursday 8th August 2002

More reading. I'm also re-reading parts of Scruton's England again. I'm also formulating the questions I want to ask in the initial telephone survey of opinions.

Friday 9th August 2002

Amazingly, yesterday's observation about the rural/city divide is echoed in the press today. Today's main editorial in The Economist magazine says, in the context of the lack of the Muslim community's integration into British life....

"Many [Muslim immigrants] grew up in rural areas in Bangladesh and Pakistan, a far cry from urban England, and they were unskilled. Moreover, some brought their feudalism with them, and also the loyalty to the clan associated with it. This means that today an extended family of up to 500 people may vote as one."

This serves as a partial confirmation of one of the table explanations collected so far, given by the anti-fascist Red Action group, who say...

[BNP support due in part to...] "Labour's tactic of courting the Asian population over all others, rather than addressing the essential needs of the community as a whole." [which leaves a gap for the BNP to exploit, vis grassroots 'helping hand' politics.] -- Bob Martin, Red Action Bulletin; Volume 4, Issue 7, June/July 2000.

Saturday 10th August 2002

I go down to the Black Country by train; past miles of beautiful English countryside. I fleetingly wonder what would have happened if large numbers of rural Muslims had gone to the countryside & farming, instead of being forced by poverty to go to the inner-cities?

Just after the town of Stone (or perhaps Pekridge?) there's a huge Cross of St. George flag flying in a back garden from a proper flag-pole. It's been there since the Queen Mother's Funeral, which I would say was the seminal event in the recent re-emergence of a truculent English pride. Someone said to me it.... "gave us the opportunity to remind ourselves who we [the British] are", in terms of the tradition of 'service', of orderly good manners, of subdued ceremony, of respect, and of what we owe to the generation of grandparents who are now passing away. Tony Parsons in the Mirror was especially eloquent on this. [The Daily Mirror, 31st March 2002.]

1940 was a defining moment in Englishness, because we suddenly awoke to the awesome magnitude of the cultural loss should there be a successful invasion - and even hearing an echo of that historic possibility-of-loss can still stir the nation today. Some of the BNP's current rhetorical appeals -- those which are based on population demographics in Britain [put crudely to me in a pub thus: 'immigrant groups breed 15 times faster than whites' + 'asylum seekers pouring in at 500,000 a year' + 'the low birth-rate of whites' = 'white extinction within four generations'], -- could be seen as reflecting these same wartime fears of invasion and the subsequent cultural obliteration of England. This sort of rhetoric may go some way to explaining the BNP's apparent appeal to pensioners.

Then, just before the train arrived at Stafford, I spotted a new rail-side symbol. Someone has hung a large sign over a back fence; "It's a beautiful country; fight to keep it beautiful". I didn't quite catch who it was promoting; there was a short web site address which may have been the Countryside Alliance's, or even the BNP's. I think this trip illustrates what a friend was saying to me recently; about the ways in which legitimate patriotism and pride, if ignored or despised by those in power, can be swayed into the camp of political causes. I also think that there may be some way in which the BNP may try to jump onto the coat-tails of the Countryside Alliance as it grows in strength; since 1900 throughout Europe the issues of landscape, conservation and rural traditions have historically been the Right's [Olsen, 1999]. The organisations of the Left which took up these issues during the 1970s and 80s (Greenpeace, FoE, etc) are fast loosing support and membership, according to a recent report. It also seems that the Green parties in Europe have been shifting strongly to the right in recent years.

All this "rural" speculation is interesting - as I am thinking along the lines of "environmental art" for some of the artworks. Perhaps situated beside a railway line? I mainly make digital art. This is in a "public realm" - the Net as public open space - but is not really what the arts world calls "public art", unless it's then projected onto the side of a building.

The presence of an artwork beside a rail line would catch people when they were receptive, and also link to ideas around travel, landscape and the tolerance/ignore-ance of others that rail travel requires; which could also be seen as echoing similar issues around economic migrants.

Tipton is, as usual, Tipton. No better and no worse since I moved away. I go to the pub & the barbers, talk with locals, and try to steer the conversation around to certain pertinent topics. This works reasonably well, and I get a good grounding in people's current fears and concerns - although nothing that I hadn't already anticipated. It seems the BNP's May election results and the Tipton Taliban 'thing' [Taliban/al-Qaida terrorists were allegedly recruited at a Tipton mosque] has gone off-the-boil since May. Issues are now focussed on more local concerns; the Council's plan to close and demolish the Tipton swimming baths, the Council's regulatory destruction of Tipton's traditional horse-keeping culture.

Sunday 11th August 2002

The domain name and web-space, at www.peoplelikeyou.org.uk is now paid for, live and configured. The name echoes the posters used by the BNP in the May 2002 local elections; "People Like You - Voting BNP", and also chimes with this project's stated aim of understanding the linkages between "people, identity, and place". It is also also an ambigious phrase, meaning variously...

people like [are fond of] you

people like [are similar to] you

or an implied insult - [huh!] people like you [ ...make me sick]

This afternoon I did the phone interviews. Sunday afternoon was a good time to catch some people in, and in a reasonably relaxed summer mood. I had productive conversations with eight people from Tipton. Two with "jobs [to protect]" were particularly defensive and evasive, but were nevertheless willing to talk generally. If the participant was hesitant I suggested that people might talk about "their friends" attitudes rather than their own personal opinions. To get the eight people I had to call thirty, so twenty-two were either out or unwilling to talk. Only four were abusive.

No participant said they voted BNP, but all were familiar with the party's image and some of the "broad brush" issues it's associated with; anti-immigration, zero-tolerance of crime, pro-white issues. No participant was known to be from an ethnic minority or had anti-fascist beliefs, and all said they felt their identity to be British or English. Two older people mentioned the MP Enoch Powell, who was from the Birmingham / Black Country conurbation, and his opposition to immigration in the 60s and 70s as MP for Wolverhampton. Four of the people said they knew others who had read one of the BNP's publications (Identity and Freedom or their web-site), but only one knew others to be party members; one had an uncle who had recently retired and who had joined the party. I asked about the English flag (Cross of St. George); six felt it was fine to fly it anywhere, one said "well, you wouldn't want to fly it outside a mosque", and another said that in sticker form (on lampposts etc) it might scare "ethnics", but was fine if it was "a proper flag" on a pole. No-one used abusive racial terms, but "'ethnics", "coloureds", "immigrants" and "blacks" were used; unprompted, six said they were personally "not racist", one responded "if you're looking for outright racism, look at the blacks and asians, they hate each other", and another said he "didn't want to discuss that". I finished up with a question about 'white flight'; five knew someone who had moved to an area which, on visiting, they could tell (or were told) was a "white area" with few or no ethnic minorities.

DIARY: WEEK TWO

In the press: There's an interesting report in the Guardian, which doesn't actually mention mass immigration & 'white flight', but which details a recent Home Office study which forecasts a mass exodus from London by 2010.

In the press: A headline in the local paper... "STAFF LAUNCH OFFENSIVE AGAINST ASIAN INVADERS". On reading into the article it turns out that.... "Japanese Knotweed is swamping native species of flora" in a Midlands river valley. Once again my initial idea about press coverage & a linkage to the zeitgeist seems to be confirmed, although this time in a way which links to landscape and identity. Much of the coverage of domestic ecological issues does seem to me to be deliberately 'coded' (eg: the choice here of the Blunkett word "swamping") in ways which lay it open to accusations of provocation.

In the press: "Anti Nazi League protesters yesterday denounced as "outrageous" a police ban on their demonstrating at a British National Party festival in Lancashire this weekend."

Saturday 17th August 2002

I've been canvassing suggestions from contacts about what form the artwork(s) might take. One of the ideas which has arisen is about making some kind of symbol which encapsulates 'white flight':

A piece of very neglected public art was put up in Tipton around 1990. It's a metal cut-out of a black horse running alongside the railway line at Tipton. This is ideally situated, given my musings on landscape and rail travel (see above). It would have an instant audience. And being black it has instant resonances with issues around race and skin colour. I would need to measure it, photograph it. Repair and repaint it, allow it to dry. Then I would have to come back another day to paint something on it. Perhaps just the words....

This is ambiguous enough to convey multiple meanings and interpretations, which in my view aids the depth which meaningful art should have. Few people are familiar with "white flight" as a sociological term. It also references an insinuation that was once made towards me. Because the Potteries has a very low proportion of ethnic minorities - about two percent when Newcastle-under-Lyme is counted in - someone implied that something more than cheap house prices may have been a force behind my move from Tipton to Stoke. That isn't the case, but I felt that I had to think hard before I could be sure that I wasn't taking part in a "white flight" myself.

Sunday 18th August 2002

The girl who writes one of my favourite weblogs has posted a rant against illegal immigrants and in favour of a white Britain; apparently her father feels the same way and has been instrumental in swaying her views on this. It's an interesting example of 'family influence' as a factor in support for the BNP. I hadn't considered that as a factor before. But perhaps I am getting a research "tunnel vision" effect; where a researcher starts to find confirming evidence for initial (wrong) assumptions, purely because he's become acutely sensitive and attuned to the topic.

In the press: There's extensive coverage of the BNP 'Red White & Blue' Festival held over the weekend in the Lancashire coutryside, provocatively near to Burnley. Apparently it was officially announced there that the BNP will stand a candidate in Stoke-on-Trent for the Mayoral election. This is to be a Mayor who is more of a New York style 'city boss' than the normal ceremonial post. BNP West Midlands Organiser Simon Darby - who is to be responsible for running the campaign - told Stoke's newspaper The Sentinel...

"There is a lot of working class Labour people here who have deserted the traditional Labour Party because of the way they have been abandoned." -- 'POTTERIES RIPE FOR US SAYS BNP', The Sentinel newspaper.

I watched one of the streaming videos on the BNP's site, of Nick Griffin giving a rambling keynote speech at the festival. Terrible sound quality, but what he was saying could just about be heard. He quoted from several newspaper articles, which again set me thinking about the way the British press can so often be used by some of its readers to reinforce existing prejudices. Both the Right and the Left agree that fashionable political correctness is under heavy fire from the big guns of the broadsheet press....

"One of the very encouraging developments of recent times is the emergence of a school of writers in the 'establishment' newspapers prepared to take up the cudgels against many, if not yet all, of the fashionable liberal pieties of the post-1945 world." -- Spearhead (publication of ex-BNP leader John Tyndall, 2000)

"Even before Oldham, Burnley or Bradford erupted [with race riots...] it was noticeable that an increasing number of [high-status broadsheet] journalists and columists, among them, Ros Coward, Alibhai-Brown, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Minette Marin, Darcus Howe, and even Faisal Bodi were prepared to openly question and challenge the logic behind certain anti-racist orthodoxies. Julie Burchill can now be added to the list." Red Action Bulletin (anti-fascist newsletter, July 2002)

It was also interesting to hear Griffin complaining about how mainstream politicians are "stealing the BNP's clothes", and for me to ponder on the ways that this might be legitimising the BNP's political platform.

Update: There is also some interesting empirical evidence of a long-term, pre- Sept 11th, shift among broadsheet readers towards "the Daily Mail view of the world"...

In the period 1996 to 2001, AB readership of the Daily Telegraph declined by 9.1 per cent, while the Times fell by 6.5 per cent in the same category. The Guardian's AB readership [ie: affluent & educated] was down by 17.9 per cent, while that of the Independent fell by a whopping 26.5 per cent. [...] All in all, some 450,000 AB readers deserted the broadsheet newspapers between 1996 and 2001. Where have they gone? No one knows for sure. Some may have defected to the Daily Mail [a right-wing tabloid], whose AB readership has risen by about half this amount over the same period, though that may include readers from other sources." -- Stephen Glover, Media Studies, The Spectator.

I've compiled a draft version of the table of "why people support the BNP", to help with the coming Focus Group meeting. I worry that I am summarising all the thinking here and it will stifle discussion. I decide to use it to 'sum up' any ideas that arise in the conversation but which are poorly expressed. I've also set down a ground rule; no drinking before or while we're having the discussion. I've learned from some informal chats with people before in pubs, on this topic, that booze can make some people descend into abusive language (and incoherence).

Saturday 24th August 2002

Today I did the first real Focus Group meeting. If I wanted to get obsessive I could have spent the next year documenting the covert and overt 'interviews' I'd done (just asking people I meet every day about why they think people support the BNP; many had 'no real thoughts' on the issue) and people's evasions and mannerisms; but obviously this isn't feasible. I need to build/challenge what I've gathered and learned so far, and I'm hoping that a more focussed group should help with that. It's a small Focus Group of self-declared 'ordinary white people' that gather - not (so they say) card-carrying BNP, and not from the Left either. Some are the phone respondents and some are their friends and relatives plus a couple of other Tipton people I've invited.

Eleven people turned up, and considering it was a Saturday in August this was rather impressive. They were happy to be listened to, but mostly seemed to feel discomforted by my initial suggestion that they might help with physically making an art work, which wasn't the reaction I had expected. Perhaps I broached this too early. The attitude seemed to be that I am being paid well to deliver it (even though an artwork isn't necessarily required by the PA-WM contract), and so I should do that side of things. "You're the artist, not us!". But I sense also that for the men it's also covertly something along the lines of 'doing art is for women'. I suspect that a fully paid-up Community Artist would proceed to browbeat at least some of them into 'partipating'. But in a way they're right - while I "get something out of it", they get nothing much and don't really want to give up more than a few hours on a Saturday afternoon in a (smoky) back room. They felt primed to talk about what they and their communities feel; but were not ready to consider more than that at this time. I feel I should "give something back" to the people involved in this research, but what? Money? And would that compromise the research? Probably. Given some of the opinions I was about to hear, giving money to them would certainly open up the funders to accusations that they were somehow "funding racists".

Anyway, apart from this the discussions flowed well, although at one point they veered off into discussions of football that I didn't feel able to follow closely. I was made aware that there there is a whole subculture of football-based "abuse from a few young idiots" and "ordinary national/local pride" which I & my research were not going to be privy to (not being a football fan). So there's a knock for my 'the newspapers contribute greatly' theory. Most didn't feel they were greatly influenced by the tabloids, more by family and friends and personal experience. "Some residents on my estate don't even read" one woman said, at one point. By which she meant, I think (I was too polite to ask), "can't read".

I was also made aware that people generally thought women were more racially-prejudiced than men, and especially older women. This is interesting in relation to how anti-fascists so often present/imagine BNP supporters as being butch young skinheads - and I remember that playwright Harold Pinter said something interesting in an interview recently, about 'the sexuality of the dance between fascism and anti-fascism'.

There was general nodding at the sentiment that [I paraphrase] the state's anti-racist messages in the media and leaflets were crass and went against people's everyday experiences. I paraphrase one man's response to this: "You see 'em in the Council leaflets [ie: use of photographs of smiling successful Afro-Caribbeans] and I'd be happy to have one like that as a neighbour [he helps his Asian neighbours fill in forms]; if he's got an office job, wife, a nice kid. But the ones you see hanging around in [the centre of town], they're not like that. I don't see any I'd want living up my street." Someone told him [I paraphrase] "a lot of blacks hanging around in [that town] are illegal immigrants from Jamaica" - and the discussion veered over to the current immigration problem. The tones of voice changed as members of the group expressed huge resentment at the way "they're flooding in", and the perception that they get 'special treatment, benefits, are never deported etc'. One participant said he wasn't against immigration per se, but said [I paraphrase] "I can see how some might be needed, like the [local hospital's] nurses from the Philippines. But we're getting the scum of the earth now; we could have had hard-working educated family people like the Hong Kongers (sic) and the Ukrainians. Instead we're getting dole-ies and criminals, most of 'em are Muslim - they'll never integrate".

I eventually steered the discussion round to what put people off getting involved with the BNP, if they felt this way. "They don't like the Monarchy", said one woman, a Royalist who had obviously investigated BNP publications to find this out; as they don't advertise this fact. "I'd be risking my job" said a man. The women didn't like the macho / violence / confrontational aura that she perceived as attaching to the party's image, either. One man was the only member of the group to have been along to a BNP meeting - in another part of the country some years ago - but he didn't like the "jumped-up little Hitlers and sad buggers" who seemed to be the local branch, and had never been back. However, over half the group were prepared to say they would vote for the BNP, "if we had a proper local candidate" added one, to nods - in some of the press coverage before the May elections, the criminal convictions of some party members had been detailed. The reason they would vote in that case seemed to be largely that they despaired of the other parties.

By now I was feeling rather comfortable with the idea that perhaps I wouldn't have this particular Focus Group helping with actually making art works. I managed to steer the discussion around to "general Britishness" and activities and hobbies which their communities felt comfortable with. There was resentment that arts funding seemed to them to be [I paraphrase] "never about our culture", and "always funding stuff which gives us British a good kicking, all that politically correct stuff".

Sunday 25th August 2002

Well, I'm mulling over and digesting the Focus Group findings. An academic friend suggested that I need to keep in mind that.... [I paraphrase]

"...these are the 'left behind' people; neither articulate nor educated enough to catch the wave of 'white flight'", and that.... "you shouldn't expect too much sophistication from them".

In some way that's been compensated for in the selection process. They are articulate and logical/rational, according to their own life experiences and communities. Without subscribing to their views I can see why they feel their culture and opinions are being overlooked, and even actively denigrated by [I paraphrase]....

"trendy lefties" in power who "can afford to live in a posh all-white village, they never see a black face, and leave us to live with all the shit".

In the 'educated press', here's a quote from an article by American academic Camille Paglia in last week's Times, saying something rather similar to the above sentiment....

"Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege." -- Camille Paglia, The Left has lost its way and lost its voice. The Times, 17th August 2002.

Anyway; do I want to work with this Focus Group as an artist as well as a researcher? It seems I'm not likely to get a chance to find that out. I wonder if I might do better to shift the project to Stoke, and get a second Focus Group there who could be more art focussed?

*

In the press: A BNP spokesman is interviewed on BBC Radio 4's The Westminster Hour, in the context of minority political parties and how they 'keep their hopes up' while in the wilderness. Apparently the BNP are hoping for breakthroughs in 2004 (European elections, London elections, and "whole councils up for grabs" in local elections, including Oldham where they already have councillors). Judging by my first Focus Group their hopes may be justified. Although the party does have some serious weak spots (criminal records, lack of good-quality candidates, membership = lost job, hostile media, the lurking loony Jews/Holocaust/Hitler fixation), which it appears potential supporters are aware of - and which the party will probably have a great deal of trouble changing.

Something was said by a Westminster Hour commentator (Matthew Parris?) which was a more subtle variation on the 'it's just a protest vote'. [I paraphrase]... "BNP 'success' allows both their members and the Leftists to play out their fantasy ideologies, divorced from any real strategic considerations or connection with working people." After nearly the first month I'm finding that "it is, and it isn't" a protest vote. There's a tension in the research between things, facts, events - and the more nebulous "evidences" of feeling, intuitions, prejudices and 'felt meanings' which have to be divined as lying underneath PC speech-codes; the latter being the sort of things which action research doesn't really seek to address.

It would be easy (but wrong) to pinpoint a single meta-cause for BNP support; there are probably many causes which feed into the creation of each BNP supporter, and which then intermingle and change over time.

DIARY: WEEK FOUR

"Support for the BNP is not just a working class phenomenon. Reading some of Britain's newspapers you might reach a different conclusion. Some commentators are guilty of perpetuating stereotypes of the 'uneducated reactionary racist' versus the 'educated' broad-minded, tolerant liberal." -- Sam Wilson in The Rise Of The British National Party in Scoop, 24th May 2002.

"...the social basis of individual [fascist] movements is highly heterogeneous [ie: varied], and by no means restricted to the lower middle or capitalist classes, despite a persistent assumption to the contrary which still prevails among Marxists." ['Fascism' entry in the Second Edition of The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Thought].

Now this is interesting; it brings the class dimension to the fore. I'm also reminded here of sociologist John Gabriel's comment about the BNP as a "lightning rod" which distracts the media from attending to wider racial prejudice.

It strikes me that some of the middle/upper class rhetoric about the BNP may be a disguised & unconscious attempt to flag up 'class' and then link it covertly to the assumed racist attitudes of the working-class or 'the underclass'. And thereby to slur working-class communities as a whole, and distract attention from middle-class racisms and affluent "white flight". And while I know from the Focus Group that racism does exist in working-class communities in a crude form, the Group was selected to try to include non-member supporters of the BNP, so I should have expected no less. The majority of working people are not like that. I would say that some of the ideological "heavy earth-moving" being done around the BNP in the media is actually class-based and is directed at covertly policing the actual processes of inclusion and exclusion in 'society' along class lines. This is made all the more pernicious because 'class', although obviously still with us, is largely derided as an analytical-rhetorical category these days.

"In seeking to suppress attitudes we dislike, we forget that the enemies of progress are not those who want to confront each other but those - on both sides of the community - who would rather maintain their power through a strategy of consenting apartheid." -- Matthew Taylor in The Guardian, quoted by Kevin Hind ('Summer Of Hate' in Out of The Cube, 2001.)

This process may be aided by the way that British political culture has historically contained a deep element of racist populism. This is reflected most clearly in the press, and is premised on the "fact" that the politicians and press are "merely reflecting" what the mass of "ordinary people" feel. But I wonder; does the everyday reporting of crime not have a wider and more corrosive effect than the speeches of politicians or the "Hop off, you frogs!" tabloid headlines? Certainly we know from studies of the media & crime that people feel far more threatened by news which reports incidents happening on their doorstep.

I don't know, I think that's really a seperate research topic; what I do know is that there are a multitude of factors that are at work simultaneously. If BNP support is "just simple racism", then there are certainly many other powerful forces working underneath and alongside that, and the press may play a key role.

*

I'm doing a lot of reading - but now its books about Englishness, books about how to do politically-sensitive research (a little late!), books on the history of the landscape, books on Palaeolithic [ie: pre-historic] art.

*

What is this national character of which we speak? Well, here is a summary of characteristics gleaned from my reading....

CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISHNESS:

- a high consciousness of class divisions and class-based markers

- reticence, understatement, small-talk, unwillingness to complain

- politeness, embarrassment & willingness to apologise

- self-depreciating, the cult of 'the amateur' and 'the ordinary', sense of decorum

- sense of 'home land' overrides patriotisms based on tribe or race

- tolerance of eccentrics & odd hobbyists / 'cheering the underdog'

- reliance on law and due process, but derisive of pompous petty officials and corruption

- ethic of unpaid 'service to others' and stewardship, outside of state control

- love of subdued ceremony

- factual and commonsensical; sceptical about 'big/new ideas' and rigid ideologies

- individualists; know the value of privacy and fences, home-ownership

- honest instinct for justice and fair play

- a view that there is nothing wrong with money in itself - but there is 'good' money, earned by hard work, and 'bad' money gained through greed or dishonesty

- a lack of Puritanism - acceptance of ribald humour, of booze & gambling

- a love of nonsense, irony, absurd humour and double-entendre

- calm stoicism in the everyday, steely determination in adversity

- regional diversity, loyalty to locality - but distrust of the state at the local level

- a deep nostalgia for the past, love of the pastoral and the local

- acceptance that creators of English popular culture can influence the national self-image just as much as high-culture, and that the barriers between the two forms are permeable

- a general view that 'growing things takes time' - gardens, values and institutions

- love of the marvellous, of the other-worldly (especially if it serves to combines "the past & a place" - eg, ghosts)

Finished with wording (close-up). Note the choice of Kabel Book as the font gave the starting 'W' a somewhat 30s look to the lettering.

I felt that painting & paint were most suitable mediums for this "first paid artwork". Even if it gets scrawled over or obliterated in a few weeks - which in itself will be interesting, a kind of "action".

Here are some musings on what this work "does", and what an expanded/larger version of the work might do in the future:

1) It references the intellectual/sociological approach to race; social science (of which action research purports to be a part) and its rationalisation and quantification of emotional reactions about race. 'White flight' is the term used when a neighbourhood reaches a certain proportion of 'non white' residents & a certain level of crime and anti-social behaviour, causing the white residents to start moving out of that area, slowly at first and then in ever larger numbers. There is also a certain irony that 'White Flight' is painted on an all-black horse.

2) It also references the naturalisation of the term 'White Flight' in the broadsheet press - which many travellers will have in front of them. It strikes me that the press often offer up a mesh of other 'ways of naming' which often serve to net the readers' inchoate feelings and doubts about 'race issues'. In relation to the 'action' of action research this is interesting; in that the 'action' may be very subtle, in the realm of thoughts or intuitions only.

3) It also references something a Tipton barber told me about how "Asians are moving in to my previously all-white estate, ten or twelve families now." It was apparently a worry to the barber that the other white estate families might start a 'white flight' - and the last to go would see lower house prices on their sales as a result. This chimes with a reference to 'white flight' from a BNP supporter... "Most people vote BNP - but most of them vote with their feet rather than at the ballot box." By this he meant 'white flight'. Several of my ex-neighbours in Tipton felt that this was already in the process of happening in the Dudley Port area.

4) The work also references issues of the "dereliction of regeneration". No local resident seems to have "felt ownership" of the products of the £120m regeneration that Tipton had between 1990 and 1996. Because of this the fabric of Tipton's regeneration is starting to fray significantly, because the regeneration was accomplished by outsiders who created a dependency culture and who left as soon as the money ran out. The reclamation of this public artwork took merely a pot of paint, a stencil made from photocopies of lettering stuck onto old wallpaper and cut out, plus some of my time. DIY - the great English passion, could have saved and maintained the horse at any time during the last ten years; but it didn't. How might we harness this DIY spirit for the community as well as for the front room?

5) Some may see a simplistic racial symbolism in the use of black and white, white on black. There is also the ambiguity of my being "out in the field" while working on it, full of wild-flowers, in the midst of what is supposed to be a heavily industrial area. Roger Scruton's book England - an elegy shows quite strongly how deeply the sense of Englishness is rooted in a certain set of landscapes and localities and a set of 'paths' through those landscapes - both physical and cultural 'paths'.

6) It also references an insinuation that was once made towards me. Because the Potteries has a very low proportion of ethnic minorities - about 2 percent when Stoke and Newcastle-under-Lyme are counted as a single conurbation - someone once implied that something more than cheap house prices may have been a force behind my move from Tipton to Stoke. That isn't the case, but I felt that I had to think hard before I could be sure that I wasn't taking part in a "white flight" myself.

7) Locals may see some reference to the long-standing tradition of keeping and grazing horses in Tipton. This was done on and around public land such as the Cracker - the site of the artwork. But the Tipton horses have recently been removed by the Council. There is widespread resentment at this in Tipton. This rusting metal horse had therefore had its meanings subtly changed by this state "clearance". Perhaps its forlorn rusty state could have proved a cruel barb of remembrance. In its rusty state it evoked for me something of the historical agricultural clearances which drove many Tipton people from the countryside to the industrial Black Country to work in the 19th century, where they strove to transplant old customs and virtues to the new situation.

8) The horse is from a local artist's 1930s design, writ large by a metal artist in 1990, and then appropriated by graffiti, and then taken on by me in the new Millennium. Perhaps there's a metaphor there for the way in which England has been appropriated and "changed to suit" by successive waves of peoples, but has remained England.

9) Finally, it is also easy to misread. A trick of the light or of the mind's eye as a train zips past could lead one to see "White Flight" as "White Fight" or even "White Shit". Some may misunderstand the work totally - perhaps as a reference to a non-existent Tipton racehorse called "White Flight", for instance. Perhaps this fast & transient mode of 'viewing the work' references the random and unexpected avenues down which 'action' might hurl us.

The work goes without a hitch. The stencil fits perfectly. There is a strong wind but that just helps the paint dry quickly before any rain falls.

Saturday & Sunday / 7th & 8th September 2002

I work more on the development of a prototype of an interactive new-media artwork (speakers/headphones required / Flash & Koan plug-ins required). This will eventually be done in the form of a British flag, and the music which drives the animation will be some form of classic British tune.

DIARY: WEEK SIX

In the press: the BNP sponsor a Tipton football team; it's obviously a publicity stunt. [And one that, as it happens, misfires a few days later when an Asian businessman apparently sponsors the team instead, through making a bigger offer. This conclusion probably confirms the view that supporting the BNP is just a "protest vote" with little ideological underpinning.]

DIARY: WEEK SEVEN

I go to "Sleepless in the Saddle", the largest mountain-bike race in the country, held two miles from the centre of Stoke-on-Trent. It's interesting that of the 2500 people there I spot no non-white faces. Not one, despite the very relaxed and friendly mood of the event. I'm reminded again of "white flight", and get to thinking that it's perhaps not only about moving house, but can also be about the kind of activities and hobbies one chooses.

*

A useful quote in this week's London Review of Books by Marxist Terry Eagleton succinctly delineates the difference between traditional British Conservative beliefs and the core of the continental fascist ideology - albiet followed by a subsequent paragraph which puts the boot into Conservative quietism by trying to draw out some rather tenous 'affinities' with Nazism...

"Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. ... Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian. In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with [T.S.] Eliot's benignly land-owning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal.

Even so, there are affinities as well as contrasts between Fascism and [British] conservative reaction. If the former touts a demonic version of blood and soil, the latter promotes an angelic one. Both are elitist, authoritarian creeds that sacrifice freedom to organic order; both are hostile to liberal democracy and unbridled market-place economics; both invoke myth and symbol, elevating intuition over analytical reason." -- Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No. 18; 19th September 2002.

*

I am thinking now about a second artwork which would complement the first. This second one might only be a prototype, but would nevertheless be quite major. I like the idea of linking to my swan photos - a swan hill figure? The duality of the black horse and a white swan would be interesting, and would be an interesting transmutation of 'white flight' into a meaning not previously considered. If it was done as 'environmental art' there could also be an interesting link between its inevitable erosion and the erosion of Englishness.

DIARY: WEEK EIGHT

.... and I think I will use this site. It's part of the area that I've recently written a history of, and it relates to my swan photos. This history of a neglected "nowhere" bit of Stoke reveals an unexpected link to the swan photos I've been taking.

Read the history.

*

An interesting quote from a letter, sent to Andrew Sullivan's weblog (26th Sept), highlights my intuition that the press may play a key role in the way that more educated & articulate people move toward the right of the political spectrum....

"I have always described myself as a liberal or progressive. I am a gay man living in Manhattan, I am pro-choice [on abortion], a registered Democrat [Left-Liberal] and have been active in gay organisations from ACT UP [dynamic and theatrical 90s street protest group] to HRCF. However since 9/11 I find myself growing more and more estranged from the left. They just seem clueless and adrift, bitter and angry. The immediate reaction of some on the left to 9/11 [attack on New York] was appalling. The creeping anti-Semitism of the left is especially shocking and hypocritical. This one question of the Middle East has led me to examine all my left leaning beliefs. And I am not alone, particularly here in New York. People who would normally be described as left are taking tentative steps in the same direction-rightward. We feel guilty about it and are afraid to discuss our new found politics with our friends. Indeed one friend who describes himself as a dedicated Marxist (read hypocrite) has written me off. My old ACT UP friends, with whom I have been arrested, are shocked at my center right views. My response is that ACT UP was actually founded on very conservative libertarian principles. At times it was even reactionary and displayed some fascist tendencies. Nowadays you can find me reading downloaded and printed articles from National Review, Weekly Standard and, happily, Slate at my favorite cafes in Manhattan. I still am a little embarrassed if anyone were to look over my shoulder and see me reading these publications but I am ready for any pithy comment that may come my way."

Talking with a key correspondent; about American patriotism and its legitimated public expression, he said that [I paraphrase]....

"The [British] Left keeps on dogmatically conflating two things - a largely historic militarist imperialism abroad, and a present-day humble English cultural pride at home, and it wilfully refuses to see the big difference between the two."

His point was (I think) that those thinking people who see through the dogmas of the Left can find no political space to quietly and positively celebrate English culture without also stepping into the arena of the populist Right. Many would formerly have been drawn toward to the Conservatives, but that option now seems closed. We went on to talk about the way that 'Right' and 'Left' are increasingly meaningless labels. Which is a pity, since I've been talking about them in a fairly hard-edged way in my previous diary writing. :-( But I suspect he is correct; outside of the explicitly ideology-driven grouplets, the 'Right' and the 'Left' are increasingly blurred categories.

Saturday 28th September 2002

I found another succinct explanation of fascism. I should really get a copy of something like The Beginner's Guide to Fascism but I can't find a copy anywhere. The web does well enough. Apparently this is a summary of the latest academic consensus among researchers....

"There is now a growing consensus that fascism is best seen as a revolutionary form of populist nationalism which emerged in the inter-war period at a time when a systemic crisis seemed to many within the Europeanised world to be affecting not only national life, but civilisation as a whole. A necessary precondition for the rise of fascism was a cultural climate saturated with apocalyptic forebodings and hopes for imminent or eventual renewal captured in such works as Spengler's Decline of the West and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. It articulated, fomented, and channelled inchoate but extraordinarily widespread longings for a new type of political system, a new elite, a new type of human being, a new relationship between the individual and society, for a more planned economy, for a revolutionary change in the values of modern life, for a new experience of time itself. The mobilising myth at the definitional core of fascism (the 'fascist minimum') is that through the intervention of a heroic elite the whole national community is capable of resurrecting itself Phoenix-like from the ashes of the decadent old order. It is this myth which informs the obsessive preoccupation with national/ethnic decadence and regeneration in a post-liberal new order which is now widely acknowledged to be the hall-mark of all fascism." -- Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University, "Interregnum or Endgame? Radical Right Thought in the ‘Post-fascist’ Era" posted on InfoShop News [anarcho-left], 28th September 2002.

Take out the words "fascism" & "nationalism" here, and how is this much different from a description of the Leninist/Trotskyist vanguardism of the revolutionary Left? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd say 'not much'. Griffin's piece was followed by an interesting web comment from a reader...

"Nationalism is an emotional and mythic seduction. If you want to challenge it you have to recognise its power."

This is veeerrry interesting - because the Artist (big 'A') also engages in "emotional and mythic seduction", and is also increasingly perceived by the modern state as being able to help "the whole national community" to "resurrect itself" (or else, what was the pouring of billions of Lottery and Millennium and regeneration money into the arts for, exactly?). I can't say I've done more than skim the surface of the character and practice of fascist aesthetics (the BNP seems to prefer blandness of 'design' and they seem entirely unconcerned about 'art' unless it's some commercialised 1970s version of Celtic knotwork), but this may be an interesting avenue of thought to follow, post-commission. It also makes me half remember an Elizabeth Wilson quote from years ago - about the way that the creative process is akin to fascism; absolute self-discipline, ruthless discarding of 'weak' ideas in favour of the strong, disregard of other's opinions, willingness to seduce an audience using myth, symbolism and rhetoric.

*

In terms of national patriotism, one can legitimately ask "which nation?". There are various ways it has been historically conceptualised....

A single nation of the British (Imperialist and Unionist)

A dual nation of the English (Saxons) and the Celtic fringes

A dual nation of the English (Home Counties southerners) and "the North"

A dual nation of the English (Saxons & Celtic) and a Norman land-owning aristocracy

A dual nation of the English cities vs. "the shires" (aka town & country)

A single nation, but triply divided by the three social classes

Four nation-states; England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (with perhaps Cornwall, Eire, Northumbria, Ulster, and Manx lurking in the mists).

*

More reading....

"... in Stoke and Hull there is little current evidence of far-right involvement [in racial football violence]." -- 'Racial violence mars World Cup progress', Searchlight, July 2002.

The rest of the Midlands teams are not mentioned in the article in this anti-fascist magazine. So perhaps football culture doesn't play as big a part in BNP support as some say it does?

DIARY: WEEK NINE

A half-dozen anti-BNP flyposters have gone up in Stoke city centre - they deploy exactly the same ersatz-Soviet design, sentiment ('Unite & Fight!') and typography which the far-Left were using twenty years ago. To me it just confirms the sentiments of many; that the anti-fascist rhetoric of the far-Left is dangerously out of touch with the situation on the ground. They are not putting up their own candidate for Mayor, they are not seeking to (as Trotsky advised) "acquaint the fascists' heads with the pavement", they are not seeking to get their hands dirty in hard grassroots campaigns in working-class communities, they are not even seeking to demolish the BNP's policies and arguments through rational debate. All they seem to offer is empty rhetorical posturing.

No doubt they will get angry at this sort of criticism. But in researching the contested ground fought over by inflexible ideologies (left, right or religious) it may be that a researcher has to simply resign himself to being inevitably "shot by both sides" for telling hard truths. Pertinently, a new book on George Orwell has just appeared [Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens] - Orwell was a deep thinker of the Left who was cynically labelled a 'fascist' for decades merely because he started to question the bullying methods of the Stalinist Left. The author of Animal Farm and 1984 died in illness and poverty at 46. All the recordings of his voice and all his appearances on film were destroyed. I'm reminded to pull out this quote from earlier this year....

"What the Left today characterises as fascist or racist simply cannot be taken at face value. 'Fascist' is the adjective of first choice by the Left for anyone who disagrees with any aspect of their policies." -- Barbara Amiel in The Daily Telegraph, 29th April 2002.

In this and other respects I am very lucky; my research had considerable autonomy and I am "answerable to no group", except in various ethical ways to the Focus Group and other participants. And I don't have to publicly reveal the results of my work until the project is concluded. So any "shot by both sides" criticism is at least delayed until the project is over. I fully expect that my personal affection for the more benign aspects of Englishness, my willingness to listen to intelligent centre-right commentators such as Matthew Parris et al, allied with my refusal to be boxed in by the orthodoxies of either the Right or the Left, will all be wilfully misinterpreted by some leftist in order to score a cheap political point. So be it.

*

In the press: The Government spin-machine seems to have chosen to simply ignore the huge 400,000-strong Countryside Alliance march [pro-countryside traditions and economy, in the wake of foot & mouth disease, and the post- Sept 11th decline in tourism]. This is sure to be seen by some as more evidence that Englishness - so deeply associated with country landscapes - is being ignored by the state and by the Guardian-reading classes. The BNP distributed a special newspaper on the march, and have launched a new web-site, presumably hoping to piggy-back on the march's success, called Land & People. There's also a new article on the main BNP web-site which is relevant to my art's concerns around landscape and national/local identity. It explicitly links the destruction of British landscape in new housing programmes to 'white flight'...

"As everyone in the building trade knows, the current boom in the industry is due to two main factors; continued immigration and the subsequent, but very infrequently discussed, phenomenon of 'white flight' from the cities to the countryside. This being, and somewhat sadly, the 'very British thing' to do."

This has an uncanny synchronicity with my ideas around 'white flight', landscape and identity. And it seems their comments are not just hearsay & vapid rhetoric - my interest in facts on "white flight" (which pre-dates the BNP suddenly latching on to the term in their publications) located a study by the Population and Housing Research Group at Anglia University. They estimate that even on an annual inflow of immigrants of just 65,000 people (about one-third of the Government's own estimate for 2002), the UK would have to build 2 million new houses over the next 20 years. There is also a Cabinet Office report which suggests that extensive flight from London will have taken place by 2020. Because of this (implied white) flight...

"London's ethnic composition will become even more distinct from the rest of England's." (July 27th 2002. The Guardian).

So it seems that 'white flight' is a political/infrastructure issue that's 'bubbling under', and perhaps one which should scare the Government far more than the BNP vote. Ironically, given my siting of work next to railway lines, Regeneration magazine reports that the planned improvement of rail services may hasten this flight.

My musings on this also suggest a problem with the left's approach to the BNP - that they appear to hold the dogmatic position that "the BNP's claims are always wrong, all of the time, whatever they say". But increasingly the BNP seem able to make sophisticated use of 'neutral' official statistics and findings to bloster their ideologically-driven claims.

Thursday 3rd October 2002

I had an interesting discussion with a local arts manager. We were talking generally in a group about local arts festivals and she happened to say, with something of a sneer in her voice, that she wouldn't want to have anything to do with providing artists for or funding the local (white) community's form of cultural celebrations ("bunting and drum majorettes" seemed to sum up her idea of what it was about).

I suggested her approach was tantamount to justifying and accepting a compartmentalised city culture, where neither the white working-class nor the Muslim communities (the majority of Stoke's ethnic minority communities are Muslim, according to published Council statistics) are encouraged to encounter each other in any meaningful way. Certainly the Community Pride, Not Prejudice report on Bradford by the black peer Sir Herman Ouseley ('the Ouseley report') showed that there is a 'virtual apartheid' in places like Bradford, which is effectively supported by the local state. One of the report's recommendations was that...

"Community project funding would no longer service single community groups only - instead, the aim of a project would be 'to get their communities, clients and service users to interact with different cultural groups'."

"The multicultural slogans of 'different but equal', 'tolerance and diversity' [...] has allowed the racism of 'separate development' in through the front door." Hassan Mahamadallie in International Socialism (Socialist Worker's Party journal), Summer 2002.

Friday 4th October 2002

My 'White Flight' artwork in Tipton [White Flight I - Horse] has been destroyed by someone. They have over-painted the lettering, blacking it out. and seem to have bent back one of the horse's legs too. It's ironic that the previous graffiti that had adorned the horse - including a swastika and the word 'paki' - had remained untouched for years. I suppose it's a tribute of some kind, an 'action', that the work was felt to be powerful enough by someone that they felt the need to get a pot of paint, locate the horse in its field (not easy) and overpaint it. Still, for the two weeks it was up it will have been seen by several thousand people a day using the express and the local trains; each time they see the line of not-quite-black paint across the horse, they may remember that they once saw something else there.

Did its power come partly from my, unknowingly, anticipating the way the zeitgeist was moving?

*

I've discovered another possible reason for BNP support. Talking to someone today, I was made aware of the extent to which drugs may play a part in support for the BNP. Families torn apart by heroin and other hard-drugs apparently find it very easy to blame the dealers & suppliers - who they believe are in many instances from the ethnic minorities - and so move to a more generalised loathing of those groups. They also detest the Government and the 'liberal elites' for decriminalising 'gateway' drugs like cannabis, and fear they are now also preparing to decriminalise possession of heroin.

*

I'm finding that many people have a paranoia that some sinister use might be made of any information collected. It seems to be partly the nature of the project (although that is rarely revealed in full by me) and partly a general suspicion of anyone connected with any forms of local state officialdom, even Public Art - West Midlands. Partly I think it's also a fear of my "doing a web-site"; that the information will be available to far more people than if I were merely "making a booklet of poems" or just "making a sculpture".

*

In the press: The Guardian reports...

Home Office set to rewrite Geneva refugee agreement.

"The government is to revive its plans to rewrite Britain's commitment to the 1951 Geneva convention on refugees in an attempt to reduce the number of unfounded asylum seekers reaching Britain. [...] The renewed interest in the plan follows political anxieties raised at the highest levels; nearly every centre-left government around Europe that has faced re-election in the past 12 months has hit a political storm over asylum and immigration during the campaign. There are fears that a similar 'asylum squall' coming out of nowhere in Britain could boost those campaigning against all immigration."

Sunday 6th October 2002

I attended an anti-BNP rally in Stoke today. I had written to the organisers about six weeks ago telling them I was a researcher and would like to talk at some point, but had had no reply. By chance I happened to read this week's SchNews [anarcho-green newsletter] event-listings page the day before the rally happened, so decided to go along without an invite. The rally was not, so far as I know, advertised in the local media, but nevertheless it saw about 150 attendees (the socialist Weekly Worker later reported it "saw just under 130") by the end of the rally, sitting facing a panel of seven (which included well-known extreme left-winger and former MP Dave Nellist). Nearly all attendees seemed to be involved in the trades union movement or else were students. Most seemed to be from the north-west of England rather than Stoke, although there were some local trades union officials and a handful of members from the Stoke Socialist Party. Apparently the Left tradition of splits is still alive and well; I was told that the Socialist Alliance [big UK socialist umbrella, and the new name for the old Trotskyite 'Militant' organisation] was abandoned by the Socialist Party [the rally organisers] last Christmas. I read later that... "In Stoke-on-Trent there is no active Socialist Alliance ... just a handful of students in nearby Keele University." ('Opposing BNP with lesser evil', Weekly Worker, October 10th 2002).

The meeting started with deafening taped music, followed by about twenty minutes of potentious drumming by a group of white musicians - and ended with attendees being forced to pass a tight phalanx of Socialist Party newspaper sellers. Pamphlets with pictures of Trotsky on the cover were also being hawked from stalls. Only about ten people listening to the speeches were black or asian - which seemed to confirm John Gabriel's academic research into the ethnic profiles of anti-racist groups.

I wasn't expecting the crude level of some of the rhetoric used from the platform; "loathsome creatures", "vile", "scum", "vermin", "pigs in suits" etc, and a joke about a BNP candidate & a road accident (Anti-fascist Red Action reports BNP Mayoral candidate for Mansfield... "withdrew his candidature after being rammed off his motorcycle by a heavily armoured Range Rover"). There was also an uncomfortable level of paranoia in the room; a platform speaker talked about the BNP "infiltrating trades unions" in Stoke, another bizarrely explained that the absence of any local Asians in the room was because "Council community liaison officers had dissuaded them from coming along". One woman from the audience stood up and declared that "the BNP is here today", and when asked to identify them said "oh, they've left now". It all felt disappointingly cultist and defensive, and sent me back to thinking about one of Matthew Parris's ideas - about the way the far-left and the far-right are both locked into playing out their own interdependent "fantasy ideologies" which arise from personal / psychological needs.

This was obviously not a rally in which I was going to find a deep and nuanced analysis of why the BNP has its current level of support. I got the "party line" on this question; it's because the workers live in terrible social conditions, and when they look for someone to blame then "racism is the easy option". Although simplistic this was nevertheless interesting; this was the first place I had found an explanation for my table which put plain & simple race-hate at the forefront. Later I tried again with a smaller group; but got the "party line" response again, and then a suggestion that if I "joined the struggle" then I could access some deeper explanations at a later date.

Ironically, the rally was held in a civic hall dripping with the finely-crafted regalia of the British national identity. It's interesting to remember how often totemic animals feature as heralds of national pride. I've found a book called from the 1970s called The Blood of a Britishman, which examines national traits. One of the chapters is 'Animals as Gods', which points up the veneration of horses from hill-figures to pony clubs and hobby-horse fertility rites, and the refusal to eat horsemeat. A hill-figure was one of my first vague ideas for the commission's artwork. And now it seems the swan photos I've been taking lately are not so unrelated to the project after all. Swans are 'royal' birds, protected by the Crown - only The Queen may dine on swan meat. So my swan hill-figure idea not only fits with the recent historical research at the local level, but also links with the national political level too.

*

Later I find that the BNP has chosen today to add a link for a new 'Stoke site' to its web-site. This contains printable PDF's of a rather crude election leaflet (wild unreferenced and highly doubtful claims like "16,000 jobs lost in Stoke in the last three months"), and a special Stoke edition of the BNP's Freedom newspaper, which mainly rants against asylum seekers. Interestingly, the BNP are putting emphasis on a small number of specific issues, and promoting them in a very tabloid manner, rather than presenting their whole manifesto. The style of their approach seems to be implying something about the kind of people they expect to vote for them in Stoke.

DIARY: WEEK TEN

The siting of the work could also be seen as being about the "hidden nature of England"; criss-crossed by paths known only to locals, who know how to tread the line between trespass & permissible paths, because they have invested time in investigating the locality. Only locals or those who have visited the web site will know that the words "White Flight" relates to the swans and their relationship with the history of the valley.

"Places, like persons, have biographies in as much as they are formed, used, and transformed in relation to practice [...] stories acquire part of their mythic value and historical relevance if they are rooted in the concrete details of locales in the landscape, acquiring material reference points that can be visited, seen and touched." (Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments).

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot - from Four Quartets, 1943.

I think the swan hill-figure will have beneath it the word LAND. This is triply poetic....

i) it references the earlier "White Flight", transmuting it from a fearful sociological exodus to the 'white flight' of swans, peacefully being invited to 'land'. To some this might suggest that white British identity could celebrate itself in positive ways which don't evoke hate and fear.

ii) it is the last four letters of the word Eng-LAND, ironically referencing the British art tradition of titling artworks The Last of England (Pre-Raphaelites, poets, Derek Jarman, etc)

iii) it queries the way that the work was made on 'marginal' land which may soon be redeveloped in a huge £100m project. Who gets to determine what happens on this land? The community, the capitalists, the wildlife, history? What is the human worth of a parcel of land if its traditions and history are forgotten - as this one's has been until now - and go uncelebrated? [See: Brody, 2001]

While undertaking the project I have also been making a series of non-documentary photos of swans. In the end these have contributed to the nature and end result of the project itself far more than I had expected; the metaphor of "white flight" has been softened from its sociological and racial meaning (and from the Tipton to the Stoke incarnation) into something more akin to respect for ancestors. Although not 'public art' these photos could be made into some kind of public art in the future, via projection onto the sides of the nearby derelict steelworks, for instance.

I rough out a list of the materials needed to make the prototype hill-figure artwork (White Flight II - Swan), on my way down to Birmingham by train, the countryside flashing past.

Saturday 12th October 2002

I order the needed materials, for delivery Monday. I make a start on finding a route to the site, then on clearing the undergrowth and laying out the main target site. The slope gets hit directly by the full force of the sunset, so the white will gleam brightly.

The untouched site.

There are small mounds of white pottery waste near the site; it seems fitting to try to integrate bits of this 20th Century worker's heritage into the work.

Pottery fragments being used to sketch out the circle

On site, I realise that the shape in which the swan will be enclosed needs to be a circle, not a square as previously envisaged. A nearly-round Autumn moon rises in the clear afternoon sky. The round shape also echoes the round clay burial urns which sparked my interest in the site.

Sunday 13th October 2002

A long private talk with John, his wife and friends this afternoon; about the project, approaches to Englishness and their lived experiences.

DIARY: WEEK ELEVEN

Thus the Swan photo series is completed.

Wednesday 16th October 2002

Finally it's dry enough to get out and carry some of the bags of gravel over to the site. They just about fit into rucksacks, albeit very very heavy ones, and a wheelbarrow. John is very useful here! He's unemployed so can be called on at short notice. The site has dried out reasonably well since last night. The advantage of working on a steep slope is the the rain runs off fairly quickly!

The main circle is marked out and we can start to sketch out the pattern, using nails and string (as a grid) and bits of pottery fragments from the site. It all looks like an archaeological excavation, which it is in a way. I was going to cut into the grass and plants and try to do a quite precise reconstruction of a photo's outline). But talking about it with John, it's probably best if it's more archaic, given the site's history. Something that looks like it might have come from a Saxon wall frieze in one of the first Christian churches in Mercia.

Mercian archaic, anyone?

Once we can see the head we know that it's working fine, and that everything will be ok. In future, when making larger versions, this small-scale prototyping is going to be incredibly useful and time-saving.

*

In the press:

"More than 27,000 people [of 183,500 eligible in Stoke] have already responded to the first ever postal voting election in Stoke-on-Trent's history." (The Sentinel)

Turnout in the May council elections and referendum, generally considered the most important for generations and which finally unseated the arrogant ruling Labour Party, was 28%. The election closes 9pm Thursday and the result is due Friday morning. In relation to this, I find an interesting quote in The Times archive....

"According to Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, directors of the elections unit at Plymouth University, there is no evidence of systematic differences in turnout between wards that have a far-right candidate and those that do not." -- The Times, 28th April 2002.

So the BNP must be drawing away voters from other parties, rather than bringing new groups into the political process for the first time. It also suggests that a BNP candidate doesn't trigger a large increase in ethnic minority voters going to the polls to oppose the BNP.

Thursday 17th October 2002

The main body of the swan prototype is completed. I finish the design alone as John had to go with his wife to the doctor's. I went for something quite simple and rather runic for the wing - it's meant to be viewed from the opposite side of the valley and it would have been without any of the archaic quality when seen from there, if it had been a simple filled outline. Also, it had already consumed four bags of gravel and only three were left and those are needed for the LAND lettering. Seeing it like this, it seems that the circle might be interpreted as a pool on which the swan floats.

I like to think that one of the things this prototype hill-figure will reference is the tension between European fascism's ersatz attempts at nature-worship and the early English Christian tradition's profoundly spiritual relationship with the natural world.

Afterwards I find a small fragment of a ceramic marque which contains the lion and the Crown. Another totemic national animal.

Friday 18th October 2002

Well, the mayoral contest was very close run. The BNP gained just under 19% of the vote (3rd place, behind the winner with 21%), and they were a clear 4,000 votes ahead of the Conservative candidate. It's interesting that winner Mike Wolfe (a gay man & CEO of the Citizen's Advice, standing as an Independent) is reported in The Sentinel as saying he will now 'take on board' concerns about the level of illegal immigration. Worryingly, the BNP result was obtained by a lacklustre unemployed candidate who seems to have done almost no campaigning apart from a few media interviews.

*

I see a shop window display in Corporation St., Birmingham, which interests. Note the way that the typeface echoes the choice of Kabel Book for my Tipton 'White Flight' work, and the use of the appeal to 'origins' which anchors the image of the oak trees.

I buy Peter Ackroyd's new book Albion. I had assumed it was another novel like his English Music (boring, I left it unfinished). But it's not, it's a non-fiction historical study of Englishness in the arts.

John said to me today that, through reading some of what I've written & the quotes, he can now see that there could be ways that people he knows could be proud of being British but "without hating others". I'd like to think this counts as some kind of 'action'.

Sunday 20th October 2002

In the press: The Sunday Sentinel leads with a front-page story headlined BNP success 'a springboard for future'. It reports the BNP is planning to field three new local election candidates, one of which will be in adjacent Newcastle-under-Lyme (the middle-class town which abutts Stoke). The broadsheet paper devotes several pages to the election, but manages to avoid any analysis of why people might have voted BNP. 'Because they are anti illegal-immigrants' and 'what on earth were they thinking of?' seems to be seen as sufficient analysis.

DIARY: WEEK TWELVE

In the press: The Guardian reports that Dr Martens are closing all its British factories and moving boot production to China.

Sunday 27th October 2002

The weather gets worse, will I ever get a chance to put the finishing touches to the artwork before the 31st? This is when the project & contract finish, and which is an important date in the history the swan hill-figure prototype engages with. A highly symbolic time to get it finished, and hopefully to have a chance to show it to a wider selection of local people. The other problem is that the only access to the opposite side of the valley (best for viewing) is policed by the flooding of the Fowlea; after heavy rain this site-access is quite impossible for those not wearing full-length rubber waders.

In the press: The Sunday Times Magazine opens with a long cover story, which profiles Mark Collett the leader of the Young BNP, the BNP's "outdoors-sports 'n ideology" youth group, and trails a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary. [Update: the BNP leadership then sacked Mark Collett, for his comments about Nazi Germany].

Monday 28th October 2002

More work on tidying up the web-site ready for launch. The violent storm has abated but there's still no real possibility of getting the LAND lettering done for the hill-figure.

In the press: the letters page of The Sentinel continues to reverberate with rumblings from BNP supporters and opponents.

Tuesday 29th October 2002

This web-site is now spell-checked, is live, and has been submitted to Google. Expect further minor burnishings, but no major changes.

*

Uncanny; I read in Peter Ackroyd's new book Albion...

"The opening encomia [preface] in the [Anglo-Saxon] histories of Britain describe a [pre-historic] landscape of springs and snow-white gravelled streams..."

Snow white gravel. Which is what the swan hill-figure is made of. Sitting above a stream. Uncanny.

Wednesday 30th October 2002

*

Thursday 31st October 2002

Strange co-incidences in the week when the project finishes: 1) I realise that the nearest local pub to the Swan artwork is called 'The White Swan' and that Burslem town centre has a Swan Square and a Swan Bank. 2) In the University library, on the 'new books' shelves, I happen to see a British Museum book which contains a chapter on Celtic swan mythology. 3) By chance I meet an Intervention artist who's researching Tipton's horse-keeping culture and who is interested in how the black steel horses relate to this. 4) I find that the British Academy have commissioned an academic fascism-specialist who is also an artist, to look at why people vote BNP.

DIARY: BEYOND

 "WHY DO PEOPLE SUPPORT
 & VOTE FOR THE
 BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY?"

 An artist's investigation into
 people, identity, and place.

Project supported by: PUBLIC ART WEST MIDLANDS, c/PLEX and JUBILEE ARTS.