Liverpool. It’s the home of: the Beatles; two world class soccer teams; the internationally famous dockers’ strike of 1995; and a socialist city council that had the courage to stand up to Margaret Thatcher and a Conservative government intent on kicking the city when it was down (close to 30 per cent of the city was unemployed in the mid-80s).

Yet times change: only Paul and Ringo are left in the land of the mortal; Liverpool Football Club are top class but their local rivals, Everton, are shadows of their former selves; the docks remain, but the dockers do not, replaced by cranes and containers; and as for the city council, it neither has the political will nor the way to make a stand against Tony Blair’s Thatcherism-with-a-human-face which has done so little for the city’s working class.

For some residents of the city, things are looking up. The European Union selected Liverpool as the 2008 Capital of Culture (a bit like the Olympic blessing when it comes to bringing positive attention to a forgotten place). Investment has poured into a rejuvenating city centre. And empty warehouses that once stock piled England’s sugar and tea are being reborn as chic condos and urban lofts.

But for many working class residents of Liverpool, Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia has left them in the cold. Along with much of England’s North, Liverpool has been hit by waves of deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. Well-paid, blue-collar union jobs have been replaced by a flexible labour market awash with temporary positions and service sector McJobs.

Union density has plummeted and the city’s outer districts — places like Speke, Kirkby and Huyton — are ravaged by unemployment, underemployment and increasing socio-economic marginalization. Racial tensions have risen: the number of racist attacks in one of the city’s most deprived boroughs, Knowsley, has increased three-fold since 2003.

For all its Capital of Culture hype, it’s in this last respect that Liverpool most sadly resembles other northern towns like Bradford, Burnley and Oldham where tensions between Asian and white youth (stoked by British Nationalist Party activists) in 2001 led to the worst rioting the UK has seen since the urban unrest of Thatcher’s early days in power.

Liverpool doesn’t have a large Asian population, but long-time Black residents, recent African immigrants, and asylum seekers are all increasingly targets of racial violence. Last July, Anthony Walker, a young Black man with dreams of law school, was viciously murdered by two white youths in the city’s Huyton district. While waiting for their bus, Walker, his girlfriend and his cousin were subject to a torrent of racial abuse from the two youths. When one of the assailants pulled out an axe, Walker’s cousin and girlfriend ran for help. Upon their return they discovered Walker collapsed on the sidewalk with an axe embedded in his skull.

Less than a year since Walker’s murder, the British National Party has decided to run a candidate in Huyton in the upcoming council elections. These elections will decide the political make-up of municipal governments across the UK. Formerly the BNP was only a threat in the most racially segregated of England’s cities, those most ravaged by racial tensions and economic inequality. But as the British newspaper The Independent recently reported, close to one quarter of Britons are considering voting BNP in the upcoming elections. This would unquestionably be the highest level of popular support the party has ever received.

Gary Aronsson, an unemployed factory worker and life-long resident of the area, is the BNP’s man in Huyton. He is also a former Labour Party activist and member of the Fabian Society (the socialist society founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb which counted H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw amongst its early members). The history of European fascism tells us that an alienated and desperate white working class with a convenient scapegoat for their ills — whether it’s Jews in 1930s Germany or South Asians, Blacks and asylum seekers in 2006 Britain — is an ominous prospect.

Traditionally reliant on the Labour Party to deliver the goods, the white working class is turning to the BNP or simply not voting. Former Labour Party strongholds have seen upsurges in BNP support as well as record levels of abstention. These trends run parallel to the popularity of Jean Marie Le Pen in France or Jorge Haider in Austria where sections of the white working class have shifted their support from the radical left to the far-right.

As French President Jacques Chirac does, Tony Blair only adds fuel to the fire with his party’s xenophobic rhetoric around immigration and the racially coded discourse of assimilation and in particular, Muslim, integration. By not putting its full weight behind national anti-racism initiatives and local campaigns, New Labour stands complicit with the rise of Britain’s hard right. The Party’s political response to the BNPs popularity is abysmal as Blair has put cuts to council taxes and eliminating “anti-social behaviour” among Labour’s top three priorities in its election platform.

The results of the UK’s council elections — especially in places like Liverpool’s Huyton district — should be watched with a wary eye by the Left in the UK and abroad.