THE strangest story in a very strange week in politics was the news that David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, had been trampled by a stampeding cow.

A spooky portent, surely, that everything, including the animal kingdom, is now against Labour.

It's strange also that the second biggest share of the poll in the European elections - almost one in six of those who could be bothered to write an X - went to a party, UKIP, which doesn't want us to be in the European Union at all.

Gordon Brown now clings to the premiership only by dint of being so horrendously unpopular that to unseat him would almost certainly precipitate a catastrophic general election.

In among all this, the gloomiest news - and the best argument yet against proportional representation - was the election of two British National Party MEPs in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber.

I hate the notion of the BNP being given the legitimacy and extravagant funding which comes with a place in European politics. But rather than being diligent champions of ordinary folk, those BNP MEPs will probably prove themselves oddball conspiracy theorists with such a warped view of the world that they will be rejected by the same democratic process by which they were elected.

Fascism in the British political landscape is like herpes - it's always there but it only flares up from time to time and never proves fatal.

In July 1978, I marched through Manchester to a free concert in Alexandra Park with 35,000 people as part of Rock Against Racism. The National Front was gathering ground, there were frequent racist assaults and, then as now, it seemed as if the politics of racial hatred was crossing over into the mainstream.

Since then, we have seen dismal events such as the Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side riots in 1981, the 2001 riots in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley - all with their own racial components - racist murders such as that of Stephen Lawrence, and an ugly, festering suspicion about asylum seekers and possible terrorists in our midst.

But the National Front never did become a potent force in politics, any more than the BNP will now. And Britain is much more welcoming and racially tolerant today than in 1978. But I have lived all my life in Oldham and, in a pubful of white people, you will still occasionally hear an unguarded remark which assumes a shared resentment of the town's Asian community.

But it is too easy to say that the BNP tapped into this kind of latent racism. Certainly they tapped into frustration, and some of the frustration in multi-cultural northern towns may have had a racial component. But it is more a story of have-nots seeking a reason for their lot in life.

Even before the Euro elections, we saw the BNP polling 815 votes to Labour's 1,353 in the council by-election in Moston, Manchester. It is a poor working class area with more than its share of social problems and some reason to wonder what it has gained from the boom years of New Labour.

Long before the by-election, a blogger calling himself Moston Martyr posted a grim film on the web showing street after street of boarded-up slums and shops. He told how rapacious private landlords had brought a shifting population of problem families and drug addicts through these slums, ruining the community of Moston. But he also made caustic, offensive references to the influx of African immigrants.

In truth, Moston, like pockets of poverty and resentment all over the north west, was a victim not of immigration but of economic circumstance. Moston Martyr - who said he was a disenchanted Labour voter rather than a BNP supporter - offered what some Mostonians may consider a valid argument: that their neighbourhood became a failed experiment in social engineering. But few politicians - except, unfortunately, the BNP - want to listen to such arguments if immigration is part of the discussion.