Thanks to somebody getting hold of the BNP's membership list and posting it on the Internet, we now know something about the probably levels of their membership. Posting lists of individuals' personal details on the web is of dubious morality and legality so we are not linking to it, nor reproducing any of the personal information here, but we will do a bit of statistical analysis.  (Anybody who really wants to see the list could probably find it easily enough without our help anyway.  They may even find the spreadsheet version that we used for this analysis)

It looks like the list produced is fairly accurate and quite up-to-date.  Certainly everybody who we know of appears on the list, although it appears from comments elsewhere that the list also contains non-members - those who have left the party, those who never joined but made donations, children of party members who may not even know they are on the list, etc.  The point is that this list probably represents the maximum membership and real figures could well be lower.

In the RH10 and RH11 postcode areas there are 53 names.  Three of them live in places like Crawley Down and Copthorne so there are 50 'members' in Crawley itself.   Of those 50, 14 are tagged as activists.

The spread of members is as follows:

So, Furnace Green supplies 22% of the BNP's membership in Crawley.  Looking in a bit more detail we see that 8 of those names come from just two households -so there are only five houses containing BNP members in Furnace Green.

Looking further afield we can see that just four families represent nearly a third of the BNP membership in town (32%= 16 people).  Apart from Furnace Green no neighbourhood contains more than half a dozen members, and there is not a single member in the whole of Maidenbower.

That is the good news: the British National Party do not actually have the level of support they would like us to think that they have.  Through a combination of fanaticism and hard work by a few of those members,  imported literature in large amounts, and possibly help from neighbouring towns they do try, and largely succeed in making it look as if they have more support than they actually do.

And that is the bad news.  They may have fewer members than any of the three main parties in the town, but those few are extremely efficient, extremely committed, extremely effectiv…  and just extreme really.

The rest of us can take some comfort in the confirmation that BNP membership is a lot lower than they would want us to think, but we must not let that be an excuse for complacency: what they lack in numbers they make up for with effort.

Some similar analysis of other parts of the Wealden area to follow.