The British National Party suffered a major setback in the local elections, losing six council seats.

Lord Heseltine said yesterday he was braced for low turn-outs in ten referendums today on creating a new wave of elected city mayors as he admitted there was very little interest in the issue among the public.

Support for the far right in the French presidential election – and here in Britain – is more about disillusion than dogma

If the far left and far right were as distinctively different as we are given to believe, then Nicolas Sarkozy would now be short odds to retain the French presidency when he goes head-to-head in the second round of the election against the Socialist candidate François Hollande. If you add the first-round votes gained by the Front National candidate Marine Le Pen to those for Sarkozy, the total would put him six points ahead of the aggregate of Hollande's first-round votes combined with those of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left candidate backed by the Communists.

In the febrile politics of the 1970s the National Front (NF) ruthlessly exploited working-class fears over immigration to create a far-right threat unseen in Britain since Sir Oswald Mosley.

Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in the Seventies, the decade that brought us, among other things, male perms, flared trousers, the Winter of Discontent and Abigail's Party. But it's not all so innocent. Another Seventies phenomenon that most people will recall with less nostalgia was the National Front, which, as we report today, is also attempting a revival of sorts, fielding 35 mayoral and local election candidates in May, the largest number it has put up for election since 1983.

In next month's elections, the far-right party of Britain's past is contesting its highest number of seats since 1982. Jonathan Brown investigates how it re-emerged from the demise of the BNP

Ken Livingstone has pulled out of a BBC mayoral election debate after it emerged a British National Party candidate would be taking part.

Labour easily held off a BNP come-back challenge at Barking and Dagenham, East London in the latest council by-elections.

Seven candidates have thrown their hats into the ring in the May 3 fight to be mayor of London, it was announced today.

If we want to pillory Stuart Pearce over the racist abuse he allegedly once threw at Paul Ince we might as well take a thousand other old crimes out of the embalming fluid and expose them to the mores of today.

England's new caretaker manager alleged to have abused United's Paul Ince during 1994 game... and his brother stood for the BNP

A property tycoon and a former investment fund manager have been named as the driving forces behind a plan to create a new force on the far-right of British politics.

British archetypes go through the emotions of the immigration question...but we already know what happens next