The National Front and the BNP in Leicester and Leicestershire

In the twenty first century Leicester has a hard-won reputation as a harmonious city with positive race relations and strong social cohesion. However, this status took a knock during the Covid 19 pandemic and the local Leicester lockdown with constant low-level attempts to attribute blame for the spread of the disease in the city to sweat-shop factory owners and ethnic minority communities. The re-emergence of this latent racism has its roots in the rapid growth of South Asian communities in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972 during the Uganda Asian crisis Leicester was regarded in the national press as ‘the most racist city’ in Britain. This paper will analyse the rise of extreme right wing political parties and campaign groups in Leicester in the context of the impact of immigration to show how they both grew and declined rapidly.