The leaking of the British National Party membership list this week has provoked a wide-ranging debate on racism in Britain.More than 12,800 individual members are named in the dossier, which lists their addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and occupations.

The database also details other “interesting notes” such as hobbies, with one member noted as being a pig farmer, mistletoe grower and rune maker while there are several amateur radio enthusiasts and even one member who goes “church crawling”.

Several entries also have the rather chilling words “proof of entitlement” written by them - presumably something to do with wannabe members of the whites-only party proving their Aryan roots.

Teachers, doctors, nurses and many other public sector workers are among those listed, alongside several former police officers and more than a dozen former or present servicemen.

Most worryingly of all, however, is the revelation that at least one serving police officer - now under investigation by Merseyside Police - is a BNP member.

Another disturbing point is the number of children signed up by the Fascist militia, who have reportedly been using inducements to lure whole families on board.

Though there are many BNP-free areas of the country, the data reveals several hotspots, most notably in the North, with Lancashire and Yorkshire accounting for 2,500 members alone - nearly 20% of the entire membership.

In the south, Essex, and in particular Romford, has a large BNP presence, with more than 670 members, with a further 500 in London, while in the Midlands, Leicestershire tops the list with 400 members.

As interesting as, and perhaps more important than, the geographical breakdown of the figures is the socio-economic profiling of the membership: 80% male, predominantly C1 lower middle-class and unskilled working-class.

Unsurprisingly, most are classed as traditionalists: averse to change with a misguided approach to applying traditional values; or as disconnected: detached, resentful, embittered and tending to live in the ever-present past.

Part of the BNP’s success has undoubtedly come from preying on the fears of working-class males, bombarding them with lies, searching for the hair-trigger of crime, unemployment or anything else they can twist to suit their needs.

The established parties must also take their share of the blame, with disgruntled Labour voters being most at risk from being tapped-up by the racists, while the Tories would do well to ease up on the anti-European, anti-asylum, anti-immigration rhetoric so beloved of the blue rinse brigade.

Though their aren’t any blindingly obvious celebrities on the list, save for National Ballet dancer Simone Clarke, who was outed as a BNP supporter two years ago, there remain many in positions of responsibility, both in this country and abroad, who hold deeply abhorrent prejudices.

Only last week a presenter on BBC Radio Bristol was sacked for demanding a white taxi driver for her daughter, telling the mini-cab firm that “a guy with a turban on is going to freak her out”.

Sam Mason was dismissed after a recording of her racist outburst was leaked to The Sun newspaper.

“I know this sounds really racist, but I’m not being, please, don’t send anyone like, you know what I mean. An English person would be great,” Mason was recorded as telling the operator.

“She [Mason’s daughter] is not used to Asians.”

It’s difficult to know where to begin as far as Mason is concerned, the most telling fact being that the daughter of this supposedly educated woman was “not used to Asians” and that Mason somehow believed a man in a turban would “freak her out”.

Having never been to Bristol, one cannot definitively debunk Mason’s claims that her daughter isn’t used to Asians, though it seems implausible that having lived 14 years in a city of only 480,000 she wouldn’t have bumped into any of the 11,000 Desis or 20,000 other non-whites living there.

It would be interesting to see if Mason were to refuse to let an Asian doctor treat her or her family if their lives were at risk…

Further afield, several east European politicians have reacted with barely concealed no-holds-barred outrage at the election of Barack Obama as President of the US.

“This marks the end of the white man’s civilisation,” said Polish MP Artur Górski, while his countryman, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, joked that Obama’s grandfather was a cannibal.

Austrian journalist Klaus Emmerich, meanwhile, said that Americans would regret sending “a black man with a black, very good-looking and clever woman” to the White House, adding that he wouldn’t want the western world to be “directed by a black man”.

And in Germany Jürgen Gansel, assembly member in the state of Saxony, bemoaned Obama’s victory as “the American alliance of Jews and Negroes” in an article written under the headline “Africa conquers the White House”.

But fear not, it isn’t all doom and gloom, for it’s not just the leaking of the BNP membership list that would have got the racists’ blood pressure up, they can’t have been too enamoured with the nation’s national team line-ups either.

Last night, no fewer than seven black players took part in England’s 2-1 win over Germany - with a further three on the bench - while on Tuesday, three Asians played in the second one-day international against India.

David James, Glen Johnson, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Jermain Defoe, Darren Bent, Gabriel Agbonlahor, Ashley Young, Samit Patel, Ravi Bopara and Owais Shah: we salute you!

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