"I don't suggest that everyone who votes BNP is racist," said the Conservative shadow minister for communities Eric Pickles in 2009, the day after Griffin and Brons were elected to the European parliament. "If we do that, the BNP benefits." In one sense, Pickles was right: blanket condemnation of BNP voters by mainstream politicians would have been a strategic mistake. For peripheral supporters, tempted to vote for the BNP because of their dismay at a lack of housing or a feeling of being ignored by the three big parties, this would merely have confirmed their suspicion that politics was run by an uncaring elite.  But the best available information on the attitudes of BNP voters speaks for itself. According to a study by the academics Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford, a significant proportion (between 31% and 45% of those surveyed) shared the BNP's biological racism – that black people, for instance, were intellectually inferior to white people. A greater number still (81%) held strongly hostile attitudes to Islam. The immigrants who most exercised BNP voters, and whom the BNP targeted most often with its propaganda, were non-white. 
The BNP gained support by exploiting racism in combination with economic resentment. It targeted people who felt they had been passed over for housing, or for regeneration money, and resented the presence of "Africans" in their borough, or felt it was unfair for Asians to be given resources, even when they were demonstrably in greater need. When the BNP was defeated, it was by campaigners who offered voters a positive, non-racist alternative. "I'm not racist, but I don't think these Asians should get houses before us white people," is a racist statement – but kick away the economic grievance that underpins it, and you undermine the racism on which parties such as the BNP thrive.