Why the Church was wrong to call for a boycott of the BNP

The latest poll for the European elections has put the Conservatives at the top with over 29% and the British National Party (BNP) at the bottom with just 5%. Yet following a recent call from the Archbishops Sentamu and Williams of York and Canterbury respectively to boycott the BNP, you’d think they were up there with the Conservatives. Consequently, much has been said of whether the nationalists are actually a threat to our democracy, but very little about what kind of threat is posed by the Church telling people who to vote for two weeks before an election.

It is one thing for a political organisation to take sides in an election, but as the officially recognised religion of the United Kingdom, the position of the Anglican Church is particularly tenuous. After all, its Archbishops are handpicked by the government, its Bishops sit in Parliament and, most importantly, the Head of the Church is also the Head of State, the Queen.

In the nineteenth century its power was so immense that anyone who refused to swear an oath to the faith itself was barred from holding any public office. In 1926, they attempted to intervene in the coal miners' strike, prompting then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to ask how they would like it if he referred the revision of the Athanasian Creed to the trade unions. Even as recently as two years ago, they attempted to de-rail the Equality Act, outlawing the discrimination and harassment of homosexuals.

If the Church continues to undermine the sovereignty of the people by taking sides in political debates and challenging laws drawn up by their elected representatives, they will risk dividing the loyalties of their own followers, whose numbers are already dwindling. In the best case scenario, they will render themselves irrelevant and undo the funding and support for all their charitable works from which society derives a great benefit. In the worst case scenario, they will trigger a constitutional crisis normally only the stuff of die-hard republicans’ dreams.

Perhaps the single most important reason not to boycott the BNP, however, is that it doesn’t work, as Labour minister Margaret Hodge would surely testify. In 2006, she publicly declared that 8 out of 10 white voters in Barking might support BNP council candidates, after which 11 of them were duly elected. Rather, the way you beat the BNP is not by raising their public profile through needless scaremongering, but by giving the electorate a good reason to vote for somebody else instead.