Racism, according to the New Labour communities secretary John Denham, is on the decline. The government’s progress in promoting racial equality in the last decade is, he argues, substantially responsible for this state of affairs. Denham’s claim is astonishing in light of a documented rise in the incidence of racism in the UK, the growth of support for the far right BNP, the emergence of violent street gangs under the rubric of the English Defence League (whom Denham himself has compared to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists), the reappearance of anti-immigrant politics in labour disputes such as at the Lindsey oil refinery, and the extraordinary increase in media-led hostility towards Muslims. Anti-racists are not as sanguine as Denham. The Guardian journalist Gary Younge argues that the last decade has witnessed a sharp regression, as “the shift in emphasis from race to religion and from colour to creed and culture” has grafted “old views on to new scapegoats”. Younge’s analysis is much more convincing than Denham’s, though the shift to creed and culture can be traced back further to the New Right’s agenda on race relations, a major inspiration in the career of Enoch Powell. As we shal see, racist ideologies have always had a concern with creed and culture.
Yet the acceleration of this shift, and the novelties of racism in contemporary Britain, need to be registered if anti-racists are to be effective. A number of important transformations are taking place in terms of the intellectual justifications for racism, and its targets. If creed and culture have come to the fore, so have ideas of nationality and citizenship that do not neatly correspond to older ideas of race concerned with biology and skin colour. The targets of anti-immigrant hostility are not necessarily black, and those engaged in racism towards Muslims are not automatically hostile to all black Britons. That fact alone confuses the discussions of racism and gives racists an important alibi. Many of those vilifying Muslims will earnestly explain that they hold no brief for racists, and that they only intend to defend human rights or “British values” from a culture that violates them. They will often add that Muslims aren’t a “race”, as if this resolved the controversy. The “war on terror” is a proximate cause of much of this racism. However, the temptation to reduce the question of Islamophobia to a sub-narrative of the “war on terror” is one that must be avoided. Racism towards Muslims pre-dates 9/11 and the ensuing warmongering, and is not necessarily tied to pro-war opinion. It has far more to do with domestic social processes than a singular focus on the “war on terror” would allow.
In fact, if socialists are to resist the far right, they will have to come to terms with the way in which they articulate a right wing anti-war sentiment in seeming opposition to their traditionally imperialist ideology. This is related to a displacement within racist ideas in the post-colonial era in which aggressive global white supremacism was replaced by defensive white nationalism. Nor does cultural chauvinism towards Muslims stop at the boundaries of Islam. Anindya Bhattacharyya has usefully characterised Islamophobia as the “cutting edge” of contemporary racism in that it carves out a path for older forms of racism to once again emerge in mainstream culture. Segments of liberal opinion have adopted the New Right’s agenda on race relations, often swallowing wholesale the culturalist arguments on immigration and citizenship that were crafted in opposition to multiculturalism. The centre-left has also increasingly embraced the idea of a progressive nationalism. In a way that mirrors the New Right, they hold that social solidarity and cultural diversity are opposing aims. Following the lead set by Gordon Brown, they have set out to develop a liberal account of “British values” that could underpin social solidarity. This has all too often led to a prosecutorial attitude to Muslims, the rationale being that “Britishness” includes respect for feminism, human rights and “Enlightenment values”, all of which are supposedly at odds with Islam, or at least with immoderate manifestations of it. Again liberal complicity in such cultural chauvinism is not as outlandish as it may appear.
As conventional forms of racism are revived on the basis of Islamophobic cultural essentialism, there has been a notable attempt to revive old racist terms of abuse. Strictly Come Dancing presenter Bruce Forsyth defended the use of the word “Paki” by contestant Anton Du Beke, averring that “at one time the Americans used to call us limeys, which doesn’t sound very nice, but we used to laugh about it. Everybody has a nickname.” Again, when Ron Atkinson referred to black Chelsea player Marcel Desailly as a “lazy thick nigger”, he was defended by sports commentator Jimmy Hill who said that such comments were just “fun”. It is probably no coincidence that such terms, whose function is to normalise racist behaviour, should be so aggressively championed just as the recorded incidents of racist harassment and violence increase. The statistics are damning. In 2005 it was reported that racial incidents had more than quadrupled in England and Wales from 13,151 in 1996-7 to 52,694 in 2003-4. Of the latter figure, more than 35,000 were characterised as “serious” and included wounding, assault and harassment. And the rise has continued. In 2003-5 the number of racist incidents in England and Wales rose by 12 percent. In 2005-7 the number rose again by 28 percent. In Scotland the number of racial incidents recorded per year rose from 4,519 in 2004-5 to 5,243 in 2007-8. The Crown Prosecution Service reports that the number of defendants received for racist incidents in England and Wales has risen year on year since 1999-2000. The number of defendants in 2006-7 was almost four times the number in 1999-2000.
The climate of racism engendering such behaviour has all too often been abetted by the government, and has led to a surge in support for the far right which is currently outperforming its last high point in the 1970s. It has also led to the development of street-fighting gangs of racists, football casuals and far right activists known as the English Defence League (EDL) and their associates. Purporting merely to oppose Islamists such as Anjem Choudary the EDL also claims to oppose racism and welcome non-Muslims, whatever their “race”. Yet protests by the EDL have often degenerated into racist chanting, sieg heils, and attacks on Asian pedestrians and businesses. All of this represents the culmination of the “new racism”, a trend described by the philosopher Martin Barker in 1981. Shorn of explicit commitment to biological determinism, or an express belief in the supremacy of “the white race”, its core axioms centre on the cultural practices of ethnic minorities and their supposed incompatibility with “mainstream” culture. Its advocates, originally only hard-line followers of Enoch Powell but now embracing sectors of the centre left, rely on common misunderstandings about the nature of racism in order to ring-fence their culturalist discourse as a neatly distinct matter from racism proper.
Those advocating oppressive and exclusionary practices today offer a number of claims to ward off accusations of racism. One such is that they believe in the existence and importance of racial differences but do not hold that any race is innately superior to others. Another is that they do not accept that races exist, and therefore consider the idea of racial supremacy to be incoherent, but they do believe in cultures (or civilisations) which are emphatically unequal. This claim is especially prominent in liberal attacks on “multiculturalism”. For example, Martin Amis defends his intemperate and usually indiscriminate verbal attacks on Muslims against charges of racism in the following terms: “I adore multiracialism. There can’t be enough immigrants in this country for my taste. I’d like to see immigrants from Mars or Jupiter. But multiculturalism, I believe, is a fraud. We cannot justify these things because they’re traditional. The tradition has to go”. By “tradition” he means such practices as “honour killing”, which he understands to be uncomplicatedly “Islamic” behaviour. That unspoken hypothesis is incorrect—”honour killing” is a form of patriarchal violence that does not respect such cultural boundaries. According to Human Rights Watch, such violence “goes across cultures and across religions”. It is practised under various names—dowry killings, crimes of passion, etc—in Latin America, India, Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Great Britain. Nor is it at all true that “multiculturalism” entails tolerating the murder of women whether by appeal to tradition or cultural sensibility. Nonetheless, Amis’s argument confirms that in attacking such practices he means to impugn a supposedly undifferentiated culture known as Islam.
Another attack on multiculturalism came in a widely denounced provocation by Rod Liddle, the former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, in which he ascribed the “overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London” to “young men from the African-Caribbean community”. Liddle was slightly less cautiously expressing the same views that Tony Blair had in 2007 when he blamed a spate of knife and gun crimes on a distinctive black culture, specifically on failing black families. But Liddle’s statistical claims were simply false. And in his broader conclusions he reproduced verbatim a commonplace of racist ideology since the first arrival of substantial numbers of Commonwealth migrants to the UK in the 1950s. However, he justified himself by saying that he was not speaking of race but of culture. “The creed of multiculturalism is largely to blame, the notion that cultures, no matter how antithetical to the norm, or anti-social, should be allowed to develop unhindered, without criticism”. To say that this mis-states the “creed of multiculturalism” would be unnecessarily diplomatic: it is a flimsy straw man. Multiculturalism has its origins in a state-led attempt to domesticate politically rebellious black and Asian minorities in 1980s Britain. Its basic thrust was defined before the fact by Roy Jenkins who, as home secretary in 1966, declared the aim of achieving “equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”.
Multiculturalism, though challenging spurious conceptions of an ethnically “pure” nationhood, has its weaknesses as a response to racism. It fails seriously to address the systemic roots of racial discrimination. And in attempting to “celebrate” diverse cultures in a depoliticised fashion, it transforms culture from a process in which one might participate into a static object to be passively observed and enjoyed. Liddle’s defence indicates several prominent features of contemporary Islamophobia. These include the claim that there are such things as discrete, largely impervious cultures and that there is therefore a cultural “norm” that a problematic minority is violating on behalf of its own alien cultural tenets. A constant theme of the anti-Muslim animus today is that its conspicuous symbols such as the hijab or even the burqa indicate a hostility to “mainstream culture” and a desire to separate from it. That such ideas should then become the basis of an attack on an older scapegoat—young black men in this instance—belies the complacent view that official hostility to Islam has no broader implications for race relations. A third example of such defensive pleading is that, in advocating racist practices, one merely seeks to conserve a valuable social and cultural order that is endangered by cross-cultural penetration.
These confusions are possible in part because of the exaggerated importance attached to “scientific” racism. Racism, in this sense, entails a belief that the variation in physical human appearance is arranged according to a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. As the anthropologist C Loring Brace puts it, “race” is a concept that has “no coherent biological validity”. Variations in physical characteristics such as skin colour, tooth length, blood type, nose length, the presence or absence of haemoglobin S are not distributed in a way that conforms to notions of race. The margin for biological racism in respectable opinion has been squeezed (though it still has its defenders among devotees of The Bell Curve, which argues that black people are inherently less intelligent than their white counterparts). Were it the case that racism amounted to a discredited belief in a non-existent entity, further discussion would be futile. It would be aimed at correcting a mistake that few are likely to make. But such a view of racism is highly misleading. Racist narratives do not begin and end with the body, and the present-day emphasis on cultural difference is not as anomalous as it might at first appear. “Race” overlaps with a range of other discourses such as nationality and ethnicity that are not strictly to do with biological variation. The everyday language of racism draws on a “common sense”, a series of stereotypes and generalisations, about groups of people—be they a nationality, a faith group or an ethnicity. These stereotypes invariably focus on ostensible cultural traits.
Ali Rattansi points out that when alleged cultural traits become stereotypes they are naturalised and made to seem inherent to the group that is so characterised. “Thus the supposed avariciousness of Jews, the alleged aggressiveness of Africans and African Americans, the criminality of Afro-Caribbeans or the slyness of ‘Orientals’, become traits that are invariably attached to these groups over extremely long periods of time”. It is this essentialising gesture that has become known as “cultural racism”. As for the supposed novelty of cultural racism, it has been with us from the inception of modern racism. Enlightenment philosophers, encountering (and sometimes complicit with) the realities of the slave trade and colonialism, sought to explain white European supremacy in terms of cultural superiority. Hume is notorious for having suspected “the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites”. This was not, however, on account of any biological sense of racial difference. Rather, it was on account of customs and habits of “the Negroes”, the way of doing things that they had acquired—in other words their culture. John Stuart Mill, as a colonial administrator and Britain’s most outstanding liberal philosopher, similarly entertained a culturally chauvinist contempt for non-Europeans that was not grounded in biological racism, which he specifically opposed. He certainly accepted that colonial subjects were inferior but his explanation for that inferiority lay in the “laws of national character”, by far “the most important class of sociological laws”.
A more fundamental problem with the narrow reading of racism in terms of its bodily discourses is that it even misunderstands how “race” works. Historians of racism such as Theodore Allen, David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev demonstrate that race is a socially constructed category that expresses socially produced phenomena as inherent qualities of oppressed groups. The concept of “race” as a biological entity has had little to do with the actual construction of racial hierarchies, which was always a political act. Historically the purpose of “race” has been to manage class systems by stratifying labour markets along colour-coded lines. This was pioneered, according to Theodore Allen, in the rule of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, a distinctive form of class rule in which a segment of the labouring majority is integrated into an oppressor group. However poor Protestant labourers were in colonial Ireland they enjoyed privileges with respect to their Irish Catholic counterparts. Following a series of multiracial class rebellions against indentured servitude in 17th century Anglo-America, epitomised by the Bacon Rebellion of 1676, the ruling colonists turned to a system of racial slavery that accentuated and exaggerated the differences between the oppression of African and European workers. Through a series of legal and political innovations very similar to those elaborated in Ireland, a “white race” was constructed in opposition to more oppressed Africans and American Indians. Racial oppression did not depend on supposed physical differences.
“Race-making” processes continued to be important for capital accumulation in post-slavery America as new groups of immigrants were racially “othered”. Irish, Hungarian, Polish, Italian and Jewish workers, who would today be considered “white”, were racialised in such a way as to exclude them from the privileges of “whiteness”, while at the same time setting them in competition with one another as well as with Chinese immigrants and African-Americans. The “race management” strategies of American capital involved the constant adjustment and adaptation of racial categories and stereotypes such that the demarcations of “scientific” racist discourses were not strictly relevant. Instead of looking for a reference to supposed static entities called “races” to define acts of racism, it makes more sense to consider racialisation as a constant process. Just as fascism is notoriously a “scavenger” ideology, opportunistically appropriating ideological bric-a-brac from other outlooks and traditions, so racist ideologies are continually constructed and reconstructed with a variety of elements of national, regional, religious, sectional and class stereotypes. What they have in common is their relationship to the practice of racial oppression in which a minority is systemically excluded from the opportunities and entitlements of normal citizenship. Nor are they strictly literal in their expression.
Racism operates to a great extent by allusion and conflation—mark the speed with which “Muslim” was substituted for “Asian” in the target of racist polemics after 2001. Indeed, that very shift tells us that the cultural racism currently directed against Muslims is rooted in several generations of anti-immigrant racism and, before it, imperial racism. For as long as Britain remained an empire with global authority its ruling class preferred “free” immigration, its demand for labour seemingly limitless. Imperialist racism justified the domination rather than exclusion of non-European labour. At the turn of the 20th century there were some moves to restrict labour mobility. The 1905 Aliens Act was introduced on a wave of anti-Semitic invective in parliament and the gutter press, and amid protests and riots over the migration of Russian and Eastern European Jews to the UK. Political anti-Semitism was, until the Second World War, the ideological backbone of organised racists and fascists across Europe including the UK. But with the defeat of the Third Reich and the revelations of its barbarism such anti-Semitism no longer availed itself as a method of recruitment and growth. And as European countries experiencing severe labour shortages began to import labour from the colonies—North Africa in France, the Caribbean in the UK—the focus of necessity shifted to anti-immigrant racism.
Until 1962 there remained a considerable degree of freedom of movement for labour within the British Commonwealth both to and from the colonies. Subjects of the Commonwealth were considered subjects of the British monarch and in legislation passed in 1948 confirmed as citizens of the “UK and Colonies”. However, the post-war Labour government mainly sought to solve the labour shortfall, estimated at over 1.25 million, by recruiting white European labourers from Ireland and Poland. It was believed by both Conservatives and Labour that mass immigration could only be managed if the immigrants were of “good stock” and were capable of merging into the general population. Implicit in this approach was the racist belief that white and black people could not happily co-exist as equals. Even so a certain limited amount of immigration from the West Indies did begin to take place. The restrictions imposed upon such immigration began in 1962 with the Commonwealth Immigration Act with further restrictions added in a 1965 White Paper and then in subsequent acts in 1968 and 1971. The state’s regulation of flows of migrant labour tends to reflect the fluctuations of demand for labour in the economy, though initial restrictions did not come at a time when demand for labour was weakening.
A crucial consideration in the timing of the legislation was that the government found a way to implement controls that would be flexible, depending on political and economic factors, and overtly colour-blind while permitting de facto discrimination in favour of Old Commonwealth migrants. Even so the controls implemented by the act still permitted the influx of more New Commonwealth immigrants than had arrived throughout the 1950s. By 1982 no less than 80 percent of black and Asian immigrants living in Britain had arrived after the act was passed. What the new controls did achieve was not reduced immigration. Rather they entrenched institutional racism in a new way, curtailing the citizenship rights hitherto extended to citizens of the UK and Colonies and making their entitlement to live and work in the UK subject to employers’ demand for their labour. Labour had pledged to oppose the act while in opposition on the grounds that it was racist. Once in office, however, they effected a complete volte face, embraced the act and tightened the restrictions in its provisions. It was in this climate that the elements of New Right thinking on race started to come together. The transformation is neatly encapsulated in the career of Enoch Powell. During his period in government as Conservative health minister thousands of labourers from the West Indies were recruited and he never once gave any indication that he was opposed to such immigration. He spoke out against immigration controls in 1956 and in 1964 said that he could not support “making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin”.
Having lost the Conservative leadership election to Ted Heath in 1965 he served in the shadow cabinet before emerging with a new cause—one made infamous by his “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham in April 1968. This skilfully conjured racist hysteria with the use of anecdotes supposedly conveyed to him by his constituents. Most significantly for Powell’s purposes he could claim that “thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking” the things that he was expressing. The argument that he spoke for a hitherto silent populace represented an important step in articulating the “new racism”. As theorists of the “new racism” such as Martin Barker and Paul Gilroy have argued, the racism of the New Right no longer depended on claims of white superiority, or even of significant biological differences between “races”. It depended instead on a view of human nature in which social solidarity is only possible among those considered part of the “in-group” or “tribe”, an ideological assumption given a veneer of theoretical respectability by the output of sociobiology and ethology. It was not that black or Asian people were inferior but that they could not be assimilated into a white British nation. The instinctive passions of people keen to retain their traditional way of doing things, their “culture” in other words, were not susceptible to reason or bargaining.
An excess of non-white immigration—racists like Powell insisted that it was the numbers migrating that spelled disaster—would inevitably generate bloody conflict. Thus a defensive white nationalism could be asserted as a common sense response to immigration, with “voluntary” repatriation and authoritarian border controls an appropriate solution. The immediate beneficiary of Powell’s agitation was the fascist National Front (NF), the forerunner of today’s British National Party. For almost a decade afterward the party grew in membership reaching a high of over 17,000 members in 1976. It gained votes and began to build a cadre of street-fighters known as Honour Guards who terrorised black people, trade unionists and the left. The instinct of governments, both Tory and Labour, was to steal the NF’s clothes on immigration and race. The Heath government introduced new restrictions with the Immigration Act of 1971, while deportations under the subsequent Labour government increased and immigration officials began to impose virginity tests on Asian women. Though the fascist threat was seen off by a campaign attracting far larger numbers of people—the Anti Nazi League had 250 branches with 50,000 members and could mobilise half a million people at its height—the discourses that had fuelled the NF’s success also fed into the New Right’s attack on multiracial Britain.
Margaret Thatcher adopted a decidedly Powellite tone in 1978 when she argued that: People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. It was the shrill language of being “swamped” that was picked up on but the key referents here are a supposed common sense and specific focus on “culture” as the likely source of conflict. Good race relations, then, depended on minimising the number of black and Asian people in Britain. This approach was not unique to the New Right. It was an assumption built into successive governments’ handling of race relations. But it was reflected in the Thatcher government’s British Nationality Act of 1981, which consecrated existing practices by revising the category of “Citizenship of the UK and Colonies” into new categories so that most Commonwealth residents no longer had the right of abode in the UK. By this time primary immigration had come to a virtual standstill. The official moves to shut down black and Asian immigration were accompanied by a number of pieces of “race relations” legislation aimed at outlawing racial discrimination.
This set a pattern which has persisted to this day. Since the 1960s successive governments have pursued a contradictory policy of on the one hand separating race relations from immigration and on the other using the issue of race relations to justify ever tighter immigration controls. A primary justification for immigration controls is that they ensure good race relations. The rationale is that by controlling the fears of the white population integration for Britain’s non-white minority is made easier. Yet the signal sent by such a policy is that Britain is in some sense threatened by the presence of immigrants, especially by non-white immigrants. Roy Hattersley, once an advocate of strict immigration controls, conceded the point more than a decade ago regarding the Tories’ 1996 Asylum and Immigration Bill: “It is measures like the Asylum and Immigration Bill—and the attendant speeches—which create the impression that ‘we cannot afford to let them in’. And if we cannot afford to let them in, those of them who are here already must be doing harm”. This contradiction between anti-immigration measures and race relations policy has historically been overcome by exempting immigration policy from the provisions of anti-racist legislation. New Labour’s Race Relations (Amendment) Act of 2000 expanded the scope of the original 1976 legislation making it illegal for public authorities such as the police and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to discriminate on the grounds of race or nationality. However, there remains an exemption for immigration and nationality functions, where discrimination on ethnic and national grounds is permitted if it is required by legislation or ministerial authorisation. Thus agencies of the state can pursue and implement a racist immigration policy while preserving a formally anti-racist position in other policy areas.
Though the focus of official racism was initially on restricting New Commonwealth migration, changing patterns in labour migration and changing political attitudes led to new targets. Increasingly in the 1990s it was the issue of asylum that animated new government restrictions. Just as Europe was being transformed by the collapse of the USSR, and the European Community was looking to remove border controls among member states, the single largest category of migrants to the UK became asylum seekers. Asylum seekers had rights under law, that the British state did not extend to immigrants in general, as a result of previous racist legislation. The Major government sought to change that state of affairs with the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act of 1993, by increasing the number of asylum claims that could be rejected and reducing access to social security and legal aid for claimants. This was followed by further legislation in 1996 limiting access to employment and public services for asylum seekers. The goal was to restrict access to asylum without appearing to breach the British state’s legal commitments under the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the strategy settled upon was to transform asylum seekers into normal would-be immigrants, or “economic migrants”.
If a great number of asylum claims were “bogus”—the majority, as then home secretary Michael Howard claimed in a 1992 debate on the bill—then they could be treated as would-be immigrants and deported. New Labour had opposed the law in opposition but proposed and implemented even tougher measures in 1999. Just as previous arrivals in the UK had been regarded as threats to British identity and parasites who were liable to undermine the welfare system, so asylum seekers were depicted as drains on housing and welfare services. Rather than people in need, and perhaps with much to offer, they were considered competitors for scarce resources and sources of anti-social behaviour. These themes have been introduced by successive governments but they were avidly adopted by the British press. This had a predictable effect on public opinion. Polls showed that 67 percent of the public believed that less than a quarter of asylum seekers were genuine refugees. Research carried out at Swansea University found that most asylum seekers are fleeing persecution from war, don’t specifically seek to come to Britain, and have no knowledge of the welfare system before they arrive. The Refugee Council noted that while polling detected compassionate attitudes to asylum seekers the public over-estimated the number of refugees living in the UK by ten times. In one survey people thought that the UK had 23 percent of the world’s refugees, when the actual figure was closer to two percent. And the majority of the public, almost two thirds, supported the Tories’ 2005 proposal to withdraw from the 1951 Convention. A recent poll found that two thirds of Britons believe the country has an “immigration problem” and 47 percent—twice the average across Europe—favour discrimination against legal immigrants in terms of access to benefits.
The anti-immigrant racism directed towards Eastern Europeans, especially Roma gypsies in the form of asylum-bashing has also fed into hostility towards Polish workers. This found a small but dangerous foothold in the organised labour movement during the Lindsey oil construction workers’ dispute in early 2009 where a prominent slogan was “British jobs for British workers”. However, it is in the context of a pronounced Islamophobia that New Right arguments over immigration and integration have been taken up by segments of the centre left. Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism, represents a culmination of a trend which developed throughout the 1990s when anti-Muslim sentiment was commingled with a more diffuse anti-Asian racism. In northern cities such as Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and Leeds institutional racism combined with the wholesale destruction of local economies wrought by neoliberalism to produce severe racial tensions. Policies of de facto segregation in housing allocation had been pursued by local councils, leaving Asian families in poorer housing, cut off from white neighbourhoods. Following the 1988 Education Reform Act, designed to foster a homogenous white Christian culture in schools, a number of white parents began to withdraw their children from schools with too many Asian students. In some districts school catchment areas were almost exclusively composed of one ethnic group. Unemployment had soared as a result of the destruction of labour-intensive manufacturing industries. This affected all workers but it did not affect them equally and about 54 percent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi homes across the country survived on income support. Racist gangs engaged in altercations with local Asian youths, though the blame for ensuing violence was placed by both police and local media on Asians. In February 2001 Oldham’s police chief Eric Hewitt blamed most racist violence on Asian youths.
In the spring of 2001 riots broke out across northern towns after a gang of 200 white racists attacked an Asian area of the Glodwick estate in Oldham. When police clad in riot gear targeted Asians resisting this assault, there was a prolonged stand-off between hundreds of youths and a hundred police officers. A similar confrontation took place when a gang of racists and football hooligans, including National Front members, Combat-18 fighters and—though they deny this—BNP supporters, attempted to march on an Asian area in Burnley. When residents gathered to stop the march from taking place, riot police advanced on them and another night of rioting ensued. Similar events later took place in Bradford.
The official response, the Cantle report, blamed “self-segregation” by the different communities and commended Oldham Council for its attempts to “build community cohesion”. The report systematically refused to consider issues of racial oppression, implying that the “communities” were symmetrical and that the problem was simply a failure to get along. Its suggested solution was not to offer ways to combat racial oppression but to elaborate a set of shared “values” that would centre on the meaning of British citizenship. Significantly, it was interpreted by the government to mean that minority communities in particular must get their act together. Home secretary David Blunkett responded by proposing a “British test” for would-be immigrants, and later told British Asians that they must speak English when in their homes if they wanted to properly integrate. This anticipated the themes that would later be adopted by those belabouring Muslims. The rise of anti-Muslim racism has been documented in numerous studies. A 2004 study by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia revealed a variety of forms of discrimination, including the absence of legal protection extended to other religious groups, employment discrimination, media hostility to Muslims, and verbal and physical attacks on Muslims.
A recent British Social Attitudes survey found that 45 percent believe that “religious diversity” is harming Britain. 55 percent would object to a large mosque being built in their area compared to only 15 percent who would object to a large church. Only a quarter entertain “positive” feelings about Muslims while a third say they feel “cool” about them. To a considerable extent the media bears responsibility for this. In 2007 a study of one week of national newspaper headlines found that 91 percent of those dealing with Muslims were negative. This is a trend that has become particularly marked as a result of the war on Iraq. A detailed survey of the British print media (focusing on the broadsheets and therefore omitting the more pungent output of tabloids such as the Express and the Star) found that the single biggest category of Islam-related stories in 2003 were those relating to terrorism, counter-terrorism and “extremism”. The themes of such reporting were that British Muslims posed a security threat to the UK, threatened mainstream “British values”, and created tensions through their inherent cultural differences with other Britons. The survey also noted that in the pre-9/11 period, though Muslims were less likely to be discussed in the media because they lacked news clout, the framework (of “fundamentalism”, criminality, Muslim politics, the impact of Muslim schools, arranged marriages and—increasingly—”honour killings”) in which Muslims were discussed tended to be in terms of their non-proximity to mainstream culture. The construction put on such news items overwhelmingly tended to depict Muslims as being inherently at odds with a desirable norm. This once again warns against reducing the hostility toward Muslims to a product of the “war on terror”.
The current wave of Islamophobia is given an official mandate by policies pursued by governments across Europe on the pretext of seeking the “integration” of spotlit minorities, particularly Muslims. A pattern of measures such as language tests, loyalty tests, and even—in one German state—inquiries as to private beliefs concerning such matters as sexuality, has emerged as part of the state’s crackdown on politically troublesome immigrant populations. New Labour launched a series of initiatives concerned with promoting the integration of Muslim communities. Just as Asians were previously singled out for lectures on what language to speak, who to marry and what values they should have, there was an increasing government focus on the supposedly disintegrative propensities of Muslims, particularly after 7 July 2005. The precedent had been set by the government’s response to the Macpherson report into police handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Home secretary David Blunkett protested against the idea of “institutional racism” being a problem in Britain, and opposed the Macpherson report’s proposals for anti-racism education on the grounds that Britons had too long downplayed their culture and “we need to reinforce pride in what we have”. This agenda was carried forward in a 2002 White Paper which averred that the influx of immigrants caused “tensions” that needed to be overcome with “a shared sense of belonging and identity”, as opposed to the old canons of cultural diversity. This could be achieved with citizenship tests, language tests and ceremonial oaths to the queen.
There were many subsequent efforts to bolster the government’s flagging popularity with clumsy appeals to nationalism. Gordon Brown announced in January 2005 that it was time to stop apologising for the British Empire: “We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it” he claimed. “And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world”. This was a vision of “Britishness” that a large number of Britons would find repellent: it could hardly be expected to be endorsed by descendants of African-Caribbean, Pakistani, Bengali and Indian migrants. After 7/7 the promotion of “British values”—always nebulously defined—became a top priority. Blair made a point of insisting, contrary to intelligence briefings and popular opinion, that the attacks on London had nothing to do with the war in Iraq. They were, he said, motivated by an “evil ideology”, a perversion of Islam that promoted “absurd” grievances. Muslims were charged with the task of rooting out “this evil within the Muslim community”, and he sought to mobilise “moderate” Muslim leaders for that task. The message strongly sent was that the only acceptable “moderate” Muslims, as far as the government was concerned, were Muslims who didn’t have anything critical to say about government policy.
This point was emphasised by the response to a letter from three Muslim MPs who criticised UK foreign policy. The government said that it would give “ammunition to extremists”, while the pro-Labour Daily Mirror squealed “Muslim Blackmail”. Just as Muslims have been singled out for failing to properly integrate, British Muslims have demonstrated more “patriotism” than their non-Muslim counterparts in polls. For example, a Gallup poll conducted in May 2009 found that 77 percent of Muslims said they “identified with the UK”, compared to just 50 percent of the public at large—in fact, the same pattern was repeated across Europe. Such expressions of loyalty can in part be interpreted as a defensive response to official opprobrium. And the very fact that such questions are being asked of Muslims is itself indicative of the atmosphere of the tribunal. But if one half of the public at large is not terribly bothered about patriotism or loyalty, why should Muslims be expected to be different? The demand for “integration” is a demand for double standards and ultimately for political quiescence. Liberals have all too often provided cover for this particular kind of racism. After 2001 the centre-left began to espouse arguments about national identity and immigration that mimicked those of the New Right. The New Labour friendly commentator and editor of Prospect, David Goodhart, revived Powellite arguments that the welfare state was under threat from excessive diversity. He maintained that the pro-welfare consensus was under threat because people would be less willing to pool resources to look after people who were unlike them and whose values they did not share. The upshot was that the government should not only seek to control borders but should work harder to “integrate” minorities—thus he applauded David Blunkett’s demand that Asian families should speak English in their own homes. He expressed the fear that “we will wake up in 20 years and find we have become a US-style society with sharp ethnic tension and a weak welfare state”.
Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality (now the Equality and Human Rights Commission) initially denounced liberals of Goodhart’s ilk as “liberal Powellites”, but later reversed his position and advised that it was time to dump “multiculturalism” as it “suggests separateness”. He said that it was necessary to fight for a “core of Britishness” that would unite society, and was defended in this position by liberal columnist Polly Toynbee. He warned that Britain was “sleepwalking to segregation” with the development of “fully fledged ghettos”. In a detailed response to these sorts of alarmist claims, a study by two experts based in Manchester University found that the evidence does not support the claims of disintegration along racial lines. For most young people from minorities half or more of their friends are white, less than a fifth of minorities born in Britain have friends only among their ethnic cohort (far fewer than whites), and Asian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus marry out of their own group as frequently as white Christians.
As liberals have embraced such discourses, the right has felt more confident about exploring them, as when Lord Carey announced that migration threatened the “DNA” of the nation. That “DNA” consisted of “liberal democratic values” which were upheld by “democratic institutions such as the monarchy, parliament, the judiciary, the Church of England, our free press and the BBC”. He went on to say that “some groups of migrants are ambivalent about or even hostile to such institutions”. He also called for a campaign to prevent a projected 15 percent rise in the UK population over the next 20 years. David Cameron backed the call, maintaining that such levels of immigration would place a burden on public services—Cameron’s core policy for the coming election is a rapid and deep cut in public spending! Aside from the fact that immigrants can work and produce taxes as well as consume public services, the majority of future population increase will be due to births, not immigration. In general, immigrants are largely skilled, qualified professionals, and generate more in taxes than they consume in public services and benefits.
The structural logic of the liberal antagonism to Islam, moreover, is almost identical to that of forces much further to the right. Essentially, it goes like this: we do not oppose Islam only extremism. But, as it happens, Islam itself is extreme therefore it is necessary to discipline Muslims and to prevent Europe from becoming too populated with Muslims either by birth or migration. Sometimes liberal concerns about Muslims are ostensibly humanitarian, most obviously so when liberals rail against the oppression of Muslim women. However, in subjecting the patriarchal aspects of Islam to selective attention, Islamophobic liberals have actually colluded in discourses that make life more difficult for Muslim women. Some have even been willing to defend discriminatory employment practices. Consider the case of Bushra Noah who was refused a job at a hairdressing salon because she wore a hijab. She successfully pursued a law suit proving that she was the victim of discrimination, a decision that led to murmurs of discontent among some liberals. The purported humanitarianism of liberals, concerned about the condition of women who wear the hijab or niqab, is intermingled with a moral panic about Muslims “not fitting in”. For liberals as much as for reactionaries, the “veil” is a signifier of cultural separatism, of Islamist agitation and ultimately of terrorist intent. Joan Smith, for example, leavens her feminist objections to the niqab and the burqa with shrill denunciations of alleged separatism. For example, she maintains that “it’s hard to think of another form of dress which is so highly politicised—or so rejectionist of mainstream culture”.
However, what Smith means by “rejectionist of mainstream culture” is made clear when she speaks of Islamists plotting terror while enjoying “some success in persuading Muslim women to adopt the niqab and jilbab”. In a paranoid leap of the imagination, Smith treats such garments as if they are an extension of an “Islamist” agenda to subvert liberal democracy. Again this is a continental trend. The feminist writer Joan Wallach Scott has described how in France the “veil” is depicted as an “enemy flag” in the Republic. The Sarkozy administration’s attempts to ban the burqa bear this out. Construing Islam as an “enemy” within segues into a dangerous argument that Muslims are “colonising” Europe through sheer force of numbers. Lord Pearson, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), claims that on the basis of present Muslim birth-rates Britain will have lost the ability to determine its “own” system of government within ten or 20 years. Niall Ferguson has spoken of the “subtle Muslim colonisation of Europe’s cities”. Across the continent such claims consistently inform right wing hostility to Muslims. For example, the Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy ran an advertising campaign depicting the effects of “immigration” on Native Americans—”Now they live in reservations”, the posters said. The metaphor of colonisation was dramatically pictorialised during the successful Swiss campaign for a ban on the construction of minarets, when its campaign posters depicted a Swiss flag covered from corner to corner with ominous black minarets. In the foreground was a “veiled” Muslim woman, again depicted in black.
Taking this language to its demagogic extreme, the BNP asserts that “Islamic colonisation” in the UK amounts to a “bloodless genocide”. The language of colonisation implies that the appropriate response is a “national liberation” struggle. While such martial connotations would not be welcomed by liberal Islamophobes, this is the message taken to heart by would-be far-right bombers. Martin Gilleard, who manufactured nail bombs for the purposes of such a struggle, said, “Be under no illusion, we are at war. And it is a war we are losing badly… I am so sick and tired of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back…the time has come to stop the talk and start to act”. A founder of the English Defence League (EDL) feels much the same way. Commenting on the daubing of inflammatory graffiti on an Indian restaurant, he claimed, “I personally look forward to the day that we are posting news of acts of war against the Moslem community and not just graffiti”. This interface between the authoritarian policies of European states, media propaganda and the racist priorities of the far right has contributed to the growing profile of xenophobic and outright fascist parties across the continent. In Italy the Lega Nord shares power in a hard-right coalition. In Belgium the far-right Vlaams Belang is the single largest party. In Denmark the Danish People’s Party is the third largest party and governs in coalition with the centre-right Conservative People’s Party. In Holland the second largest party is Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party. And in Britain we face the twin threats of an electoral surge by the BNP and ugly manifestations of street violence by various far-right activists and racist hooligans under the rubric of the EDL.
The far right in Britain is currently enjoying its best election results since the Second World War. The BNP is outstripping the best results obtained by the National Front during its heyday in the mid-1970s. In the 2001 general election the party gained a total of 47,129 votes, largely based on localised pockets of strength in the north east following race riots. In the 2005 general election this had increased to 192,746. In the 2008 London Assembly elections the party gained a seat on the assembly for the first time with 130,714 votes. And in the 2009 European Parliament elections the BNP gained two MEPs and a total of 943,598 votes nationwide. From the start to the end of the last decade, in other words, the BNP had increased its total vote by over 2000 percent to almost a million. The party’s membership in 2008 stood at more than 10,000. This performance is even more shocking in the light of the schismatic nature of far-right politics, and the splits that have beset the BNP itself in recent years. There has been a simplistic tendency to reduce BNP support to the disaffected “white working class”, comprising former Labour supporters angered by the party’s allegedly lenient stance on immigration. The conclusion drawn by some Labour ministers is that the party should abandon “politically correct” equal rights legislation and appeal to white workers on the basis of pandering to anti-immigration sentiment. One study, based on a composite of several polls, would appear to give some weight to this picture. It identifies typical BNP supporters as middle aged white males working in skilled manufacturing roles. They are not necessarily the poorest workers but they are typically the most aggrieved. In contrast to NF supporters in the 1970s, they are older, less sympathetic to the Conservative Party and much angrier about the state of society. They share significant demographic qualities with Labour supporters and “52 of the 58 council seats won by the BNP since 2005 have come at the expense of Labour incumbents”.
Other research, however, casts a different light on this. First of all there is the Democratic Audit study from 2004 which found that the majority of BNP voters were ex-Tories rather than former Labour supporters. “In fact the BNP gains most from the Conservatives and least from Labour”, it said. That survey also suggested a more complicated story with respect to the class background of fascist voters, a disproportionate number of whom were “lower middle class”. Another survey carried out by YouGov last year was large enough to include a representative sample of BNP voters. It confirmed that the BNP had made substantial inroads into the working class but still found that their voters tended to have voted Conservative in the past rather than Labour. Indeed, the traditional base of the Labour Party, the organised labour movement, is the most resistant of all social groups to the BNP’s ideas. Another cliché is that BNP voters are not expressing racism so much as dissatisfaction with levels of immigration, or an inchoate rage about their diminishing economic prospects. Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, alleges that “most” BNP voters are “not racists”. In fact, the YouGov survey found that the majority of BNP voters, some 72 percent, support the party’s platform of “voluntary” repatriation, a key step in their programme for an “all-white Britain”. 94 percent want all immigration stopped and 58 percent attribute most crime to immigrants. Only 35 percent of BNP voters agree that non-white British citizens who were born in this country are just as “British” as their white counterparts. This is a layer of people who don’t want to share a country with black or Asian people. A sizeable number of them are also prepared to endorse explicitly punitive measures against non-white Britons, as 49 percent want employers to discriminate on the grounds of race. BNP voters are also disproportionately inclined to believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, in as much as 9 percent believe that there is an international conspiracy led by Jews and communists to undermine Christian values in Western countries. A further 24 percent believe that such a conspiracy exists but that it is “exaggerated”. These are not merely hardcore racist ideas. They are even more extreme than the BNP are prepared to appear in public.
BNP voters also tend to express a spurious victimology in which white people are the “real” victims of racism, corroborated by the media and politicians who hypocritically vent about the “white working class”. The Yougov poll found that 77 percent of BNP voters believe that white people are unfairly discriminated against. 70 percent believe that Muslims enjoy unfair advantages and 62 percent believe that non-white people in general are given undue favour. But in this as in other respects the BNP is tapping into much wider layers of racism. Across the public in general the single largest sector of opinion, 40 percent believe that white people are the victims of discrimination, 39 percent believe that Muslims are unfairly advantaged and 36 percent believe that non-white people in general receive unfair benefits. 44 percent believe that Islam, even in its milder forms, is a “serious danger” to “Western civilisation”. 61 percent of the public share the view that all immigration to the UK should be stopped. More than a quarter favour the government “encouraging” “immigrants and their families” to leave the UK even if they were born here. Predictably, it is the most right wing voters that entertain these views but they are also shared by a substantial number of Labour supporters. Note the overlap between the racist resentment of Muslims and the same resentment towards other minorities. These are not separate but parallel phenomena.
The BNP’s approach to would-be voters has been decisively shaped by the new international political climate forged by the “war on terror”. In this respect, it mimics xenophobic and fascist parties across Europe by redirecting its fire onto Muslims, tailoring its message to avoid public expressions of anti-Semitism and even for the first time expressing support for the state of Israel. The first sign of the latter change came in 2006 when Lee Barnes, the BNP’s legal officer, outlined the position with respect to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon: “I support Israel 100 percent in their dispute with Hezbollah… I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood.” The party declared itself “prudently” on Israel’s side, for reasons of “national interest”: Israel was part of a “Western, if not European” civilisation whose opponents were “trying to conquer the world and subject it to their religion”. An article on the BNP’s website explained that the party had cast off “the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades”. BNP leader Nick Griffin explained the new strategy berating those who wished to continue to focus on Jews by saying, “We should be positioning ourselves to take advantage for our own political ends of the growing wave of public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass media”.
However, this has not translated into a pro-war stance in the major theatres of the “war on terror”, nor has it necessarily involved explicitly cheerleading Israeli aggression. The BNP has opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming to be the “only serious party calling for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan”. It has, however, tapped into pro-troops sentiment by standing in wards where soldiers have died, and Griffin has even made an appearance at Wootton Bassett where the coffins of deceased soldiers are routinely paraded. On Operation Cast Lead, Nick Griffin explained to supporters that though it was in the general interest of Britain for Israel to defeat its opponents, the BNP took no view on Israel’s assault on Gaza because it was none of Britain’s business how the two sides dealt with one another. By saying that the troops should be brought home to police Britain’s borders the BNP taps into a right wing version of anti-war feeling, the gist of which is that Britain should have nothing to do with Muslims either at home or abroad. Obviously this does not represent a conversion to anti-imperialism. The BNP has roots in a post-war organisation called the League of Empire Loyalists, and its British Pride website celebrates the British Empire as a “noble” and “benevolent” venture. What it signifies is, firstly, the BNP’s hostility to the United States and, secondly, its adaptation to the shift from explicitly pro-colonial racism to a more conservative white nationalism. The claim that Muslim “colonists” are carrying out a “bloodless genocide” in Britain reflects an agenda of militarising British society in quite a different way to that intended by the government.
In order to “take advantage” of “public hostility to Islam” being “whipped up by the mass media”, a division of labour has come about on the far right. Lee Barnes explained: “The BNP have no interest in seeking to return to street activism so the way is clear for the NF to become the primary organisation in the UK that organises and deploys those nationalists who are not interested in political electioneering but in street activism.” Tom Linden, a National Front organiser, made the same point in strikingly similar language. The formation of the English Defence League, avowedly in response to “Islamic extremism”, represents something of an opportunity along these lines. The EDL and the BNP formally maintain an organisational distance. Indeed, each is operatically appalled at the very idea that it would have anything to do with the other. The EDL denies that it is racist like the BNP, and the BNP has gone so far as to accuse the EDL of being a “Zionist false flag” operation. The truth is that the two organisations are connected in a number of ways. Chris Renton, a key EDL organiser, is a known BNP activist. Davy Cooling, a member of the BNP, is also active in the thuggish outfit “Men in Gear” and a key activist in the EDL’s Luton “division”. Sean Corrigan, who runs the EDL’s online forum, is a BNP activist from St Albans. Several BNP members have been spotted at EDL protests. The EDL also accepts Nazis from other backgrounds such as the British Freedom Movement and is open about the fact that violent Combat 18 members attend its protests. One of its key funders and strategists is a far-right businessman named Alan Lake, who has previously worked with the fascist Swedish Democrats.
What appears to be happening is that the organisational and “intellectual” spine of the organisation is being supplied by organised Nazis while the foot-soldiers are recruited from among football casuals and other violent right wing, but non-Nazi, groups. This is not the first time that such a tactic has been pursued. The National Front used to infiltrate and mobilise skinhead and football hooligan groups during the 1970s in order to attack the left and ethnic minorities. It is also analogous to the general tendency by fascist organisations to use paramilitaries, comprising many who are not ideologically committed fascists, both as weapons against opponents and as socialising institutions that can help produce a disciplined fascist cadre. This is one reason why it is a mistake to simply dismiss the EDL as thugs who can be dealt with by police as a public order issue. The swing, within a decade, from post Lawrence Inquiry optimism to the current abysmal state of affairs was not inevitable. To a considerable extent racism has been driven by policy and encouraged by media reaction. Contrary to the ahistorical analyses of racism that see it as an instinctive response to “otherness”—which by naturalising racism, undermines criticism of it—racialisation is a political act, and racism a structure of political oppression. In this sense the revival of Powellite racism, the “new racism”, is a result of various government strategies for managing troublesome minorities, making immigration work to the benefit of capital accumulation, and depoliticising anti-racism so that it can be accommodated to the neoliberal settlement.
But it would be a mistake to see this as a purely top-down process. Racist ideas have caught on because they in some sense explain people’s experiences of the world, and they are particularly popular among those for whom the world is structured by competition for scarce resources. It is these groups of naturally right wing voters who gravitate toward UKIP and the BNP. The “war on terror” has helped radicalise these ideas and give them a poisonous edge, but it didn’t create them, and it isn’t the principal source of them. To combat racism it is necessary not only to mobilise the anti-war and anti-racist majority and fight the delirious propaganda of the right wing press, but also to reassert the basic class antagonism that structures society and the necessity for working class unity in the face of that. This becomes an altogether more urgent task as the deepest recession since the 1920s throws millions out of work, depresses incomes, and threatens to eviscerate public services and welfare.
Showing posts with label British National Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British National Party. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Fascist vultures are circling
The British National Party is determined to contest more seats than any British extreme-right party ever before. With over 160 candidates declared for the general election at the time of writing, the BNP appears well on track to reach its target. The figure the BNP has to beat is the 303 candidates that the National Front (NF) fielded in the 1979 general election. However, their average vote of 1.5% was the end of the road for the NF, which had overreached itself and imploded. Out of the ruins was born the BNP, founded in 1982. Unfortunately there are few comparisons between today’s BNP challenge and that of the NF. The NF had never really been interested in contesting elections for their own sake, preferring a more violent path. It believed it could rise to power if it could “kick our way into the headlines” through demonstrations and marches in an attempt to “control” the streets. Nevertheless the NF did contest elections and occasionally achieved some notable results. In 1973 Martin Webster, the NF’s national activities organiser, polled 16% in a by-election in West Bromwich. This compares favourably with the 16% that Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, polled in Oldham West and Royton in the 2001 general election and the 17% that Richard Barnbrook won in 2005, the highest percentage achieved by the BNP at a general election to date.
However the NF was not geared organisationally towards contesting elections in the same sustained manner in which the BNP has focussed on cultivating wards and constituencies in recent years. The NF believed that its support, which was concentrated in the West Midlands and Greater London, would simply filter outwards but did little to facilitate such growth. NF support experienced two distinct spikes related to the influx of Asian immigrants in 1972 and 1976. BNP support in contrast, although similarly concentrated in pockets of the country, shows some sign that it is transcending the regionalisation of its core support base. Since emerging as an electoral threat in 2001-02, the BNP has fielded increasing numbers of candidates at local and general elections. It currently has 56 council seats, one member in the London Assembly and two MEPs. BNP support appears less volatile than that of the NF, which has given the BNP a measure of electoral stability that the NF never managed to achieve. There is another crucial factor, which invalidates any comparison with the 1979 general election. The BNP’s fortunes are still rising; the NF in 1979 was already in decline, which its appalling showing in the general election that year only helped accelerate. The party was in poor shape after being wracked by splits in the middle of the decade, which the temporary boost given to the NF by the arrival of the Malawi Asians in 1976 served to mask.
The party polled strongly in the 1976 local election and in the following year fielded more than 400 council election candidates across the country, achieving 235,000 votes. In the 1977 Greater London Council election the NF stood in all but one of the 92 seats and took 119,000 votes, over 5% of the total. In Hackney South the NF polled 19%. This was the peak of the NF’s electoral achievement. The BNP is simply not in the same position. Griffin is more realistic about his prospects and is standing for Parliament in Barking largely to boost his party’s attempt to win the main prize, namely control of Barking and Dagenham council. The BNP has implemented a “ladder strategy” – securing one tier of government before contesting the next – something that was beyond the resources and strategic imagination of the NF. However, it offers the BNP its most realistic chance of putting down enduring roots in Barking and Dagenham. In addition, the BNP is operating in a different political context. In the 1970s Margaret Thatcher led a resurgent right-wing Conservative Party that won support on the back of campaigning against immigration. There was also a strong left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, which acted as a pole of attraction for working-class militants.
These factors are not present today. David Cameron is desperate to divest the Conservative Party of its right-wing image but is widely disliked by the type of working-class Tories who flocked to Thatcher in 1979. The left is considerably weaker than in the past and less involved in the lives of working-class communities. The vacuum, on the left and the right, is now being occupied by the BNP. It has taken the BNP a long time to reach this position. After founding the BNP in 1982, John Tyndall perhaps unsurprisingly remained committed to the same failed strategy as he had followed while leader of the NF. The BNP would have to wait more than a decade for its first whiff of electoral success, with the election of a councillor in Tower Hamlets in a by-election. The party lost the seat in the council elections seven months later and it would be another decade before it began to focus on elections and grassroots campaigning. Unlike Tyndall, however, Griffin has belatedly learned many of the lessons of the past, making the BNP and the threat it poses in the forthcoming general election a very different proposition. Some argue that the BNP is overstretching itself by fielding so many candidates in the general election. However, the position of the BNP today cannot be compared with that of the NF in 1979.
Contesting a large number of seats will give the BNP legitimacy, a free mail shot to millions of voters and television airtime. With many of its candidates likely to save their deposits, the BNP will see the money paid out as a good political investment. The defeat of the British National Party in the court case brought by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) over the party’s racist constitution has, claims the BNP, galvanised its members to action. In truth the capitulation of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, to the EHRC, which forced him to comply with the Equality Bill now completing its passage through Parliament, has incensed a large swathe of BNP activists who have no desire whatsoever to associate with people from ethnic minorities in their party branch meetings, now that the BNP can no longer use skin colour as a membership criterion. The vultures are circling and none more so than the National Front (NF), which is trying to take advantage of the discontent in the BNP by pitching itself as a genuine racist alternative. With its hardline ideological stance, one of which is killing people for being gay, the NF is well placed to benefit from discontent in the BNP over the theoretical prospect of minority members, which many see as the start of the “sickly spiral of moderation” that Griffin once so vehemently denounced.
Following a “palace coup” against the ossified leadership of Tom Holmes, the top dog in the NF is Ian Edward, a former BNP member from west London, who was elected chairman after Holmes’s enforced resignation in January 2010. Others in the NF leadership are the Leeds-based fascist Eddy Morrison, who at one time or another has been a member of every far-right party you can name and probably a few that you can’t; Tom Linden, the former Harrogate BNP organiser, who has proved moderately adept at getting the NF into the media; Nick Walsh, the former BNP Hull organiser, and the NF veterans Steve Rowland and Andrew Cripps. The BNP is furious with even the limited inroads that the NF is making into its support. Lee Barnes, the head of the BNP’s legal department, at one point praised the NF as “heroes” for opposing the fictitious Islam4UK march through Wootton Bassett, which failed to materialise after it was whipped up into a massive media storm. Barnes now argues on his blog that NF is part of a massive state-orchestrated conspiracy against the BNP and that it is run (depending on his mood) either by “drunks” or by “Searchlight”. Griffin is said to be livid because the NF has succeeded in enticing some BNP branches to defect, including those in Daventry and Hull. The NF has also won over some individual BNP activists. Foremost among them is Chris Jackson, the BNP’s former North West regional organiser, who challenged Griffin for the party leadership in 2007. Jackson, who has been appointed North West NF organiser, is standing as an NF candidate in Rochdale in the general election. He is joined by the former Rochdale BNP organiser Kevin Bryan and Mike Easter, another veteran BNP member, who ran the BNP “Reform Group” against Griffin’s leadership in 2007, an act of “treachery” that prompted his expulsion from the party. It is not just the threat from the NF to its activist base that worries the BNP. The NF could also pose an electoral threat if it manages to get its act together. During the 2008 London Assembly elections the NF put forward five candidates in the constituency section of the poll. Their results were good enough to represent a threat to the BNP if the two parties were to go head to head.
Their votes were undoubtedly boosted by the absence of BNP candidates against them. Only in City and East, where the NF polled its lowest vote, was there a BNP candidate who polled 18,020 votes (9.82%). Despite easily outpolling the NF, the BNP certainly does not welcome a challenge for the racist vote. The NF has announced that it intends to field 25 candidates in the general election, although it remains to be seen whether the party has the funds and people to do so. Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, is known to be less than pleased that the NF has said it will stand against him in Stoke-on-Trent Central. Outside the BNP the rejuvenated NF has also absorbed much of the rest of the far-right fringe. Several members of the England First Party (EFP), including its leader Steven Smith, the former Burnley BNP leader, jumped ship to join the NF. The Democratic Nationalists, a BNP splinter group based primarily in Bradford, have also to all intents and purposes merged with the NF after Jim Lewthwaite, their leading light, joined the NF in December 2009. The NF even briefly gained a borough councillor. John Gamble was elected as a BNP councillor in Rotherham in 2008, defected to the EFP in 2009 and moved on to the NF in March 2010. However he lasted less than two weeks before the NF announced that its “party whip was removed” from him. The NF claims that its membership has recently “surged by 70%” but it continues to lack the organisational structure and internal unity to challenge the BNP effectively.
SEARCHLIGHT APRIL 2010 - DAVID WILLIAMS
However the NF was not geared organisationally towards contesting elections in the same sustained manner in which the BNP has focussed on cultivating wards and constituencies in recent years. The NF believed that its support, which was concentrated in the West Midlands and Greater London, would simply filter outwards but did little to facilitate such growth. NF support experienced two distinct spikes related to the influx of Asian immigrants in 1972 and 1976. BNP support in contrast, although similarly concentrated in pockets of the country, shows some sign that it is transcending the regionalisation of its core support base. Since emerging as an electoral threat in 2001-02, the BNP has fielded increasing numbers of candidates at local and general elections. It currently has 56 council seats, one member in the London Assembly and two MEPs. BNP support appears less volatile than that of the NF, which has given the BNP a measure of electoral stability that the NF never managed to achieve. There is another crucial factor, which invalidates any comparison with the 1979 general election. The BNP’s fortunes are still rising; the NF in 1979 was already in decline, which its appalling showing in the general election that year only helped accelerate. The party was in poor shape after being wracked by splits in the middle of the decade, which the temporary boost given to the NF by the arrival of the Malawi Asians in 1976 served to mask.
The party polled strongly in the 1976 local election and in the following year fielded more than 400 council election candidates across the country, achieving 235,000 votes. In the 1977 Greater London Council election the NF stood in all but one of the 92 seats and took 119,000 votes, over 5% of the total. In Hackney South the NF polled 19%. This was the peak of the NF’s electoral achievement. The BNP is simply not in the same position. Griffin is more realistic about his prospects and is standing for Parliament in Barking largely to boost his party’s attempt to win the main prize, namely control of Barking and Dagenham council. The BNP has implemented a “ladder strategy” – securing one tier of government before contesting the next – something that was beyond the resources and strategic imagination of the NF. However, it offers the BNP its most realistic chance of putting down enduring roots in Barking and Dagenham. In addition, the BNP is operating in a different political context. In the 1970s Margaret Thatcher led a resurgent right-wing Conservative Party that won support on the back of campaigning against immigration. There was also a strong left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, which acted as a pole of attraction for working-class militants.
These factors are not present today. David Cameron is desperate to divest the Conservative Party of its right-wing image but is widely disliked by the type of working-class Tories who flocked to Thatcher in 1979. The left is considerably weaker than in the past and less involved in the lives of working-class communities. The vacuum, on the left and the right, is now being occupied by the BNP. It has taken the BNP a long time to reach this position. After founding the BNP in 1982, John Tyndall perhaps unsurprisingly remained committed to the same failed strategy as he had followed while leader of the NF. The BNP would have to wait more than a decade for its first whiff of electoral success, with the election of a councillor in Tower Hamlets in a by-election. The party lost the seat in the council elections seven months later and it would be another decade before it began to focus on elections and grassroots campaigning. Unlike Tyndall, however, Griffin has belatedly learned many of the lessons of the past, making the BNP and the threat it poses in the forthcoming general election a very different proposition. Some argue that the BNP is overstretching itself by fielding so many candidates in the general election. However, the position of the BNP today cannot be compared with that of the NF in 1979.
Contesting a large number of seats will give the BNP legitimacy, a free mail shot to millions of voters and television airtime. With many of its candidates likely to save their deposits, the BNP will see the money paid out as a good political investment. The defeat of the British National Party in the court case brought by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) over the party’s racist constitution has, claims the BNP, galvanised its members to action. In truth the capitulation of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, to the EHRC, which forced him to comply with the Equality Bill now completing its passage through Parliament, has incensed a large swathe of BNP activists who have no desire whatsoever to associate with people from ethnic minorities in their party branch meetings, now that the BNP can no longer use skin colour as a membership criterion. The vultures are circling and none more so than the National Front (NF), which is trying to take advantage of the discontent in the BNP by pitching itself as a genuine racist alternative. With its hardline ideological stance, one of which is killing people for being gay, the NF is well placed to benefit from discontent in the BNP over the theoretical prospect of minority members, which many see as the start of the “sickly spiral of moderation” that Griffin once so vehemently denounced.
Following a “palace coup” against the ossified leadership of Tom Holmes, the top dog in the NF is Ian Edward, a former BNP member from west London, who was elected chairman after Holmes’s enforced resignation in January 2010. Others in the NF leadership are the Leeds-based fascist Eddy Morrison, who at one time or another has been a member of every far-right party you can name and probably a few that you can’t; Tom Linden, the former Harrogate BNP organiser, who has proved moderately adept at getting the NF into the media; Nick Walsh, the former BNP Hull organiser, and the NF veterans Steve Rowland and Andrew Cripps. The BNP is furious with even the limited inroads that the NF is making into its support. Lee Barnes, the head of the BNP’s legal department, at one point praised the NF as “heroes” for opposing the fictitious Islam4UK march through Wootton Bassett, which failed to materialise after it was whipped up into a massive media storm. Barnes now argues on his blog that NF is part of a massive state-orchestrated conspiracy against the BNP and that it is run (depending on his mood) either by “drunks” or by “Searchlight”. Griffin is said to be livid because the NF has succeeded in enticing some BNP branches to defect, including those in Daventry and Hull. The NF has also won over some individual BNP activists. Foremost among them is Chris Jackson, the BNP’s former North West regional organiser, who challenged Griffin for the party leadership in 2007. Jackson, who has been appointed North West NF organiser, is standing as an NF candidate in Rochdale in the general election. He is joined by the former Rochdale BNP organiser Kevin Bryan and Mike Easter, another veteran BNP member, who ran the BNP “Reform Group” against Griffin’s leadership in 2007, an act of “treachery” that prompted his expulsion from the party. It is not just the threat from the NF to its activist base that worries the BNP. The NF could also pose an electoral threat if it manages to get its act together. During the 2008 London Assembly elections the NF put forward five candidates in the constituency section of the poll. Their results were good enough to represent a threat to the BNP if the two parties were to go head to head.
Their votes were undoubtedly boosted by the absence of BNP candidates against them. Only in City and East, where the NF polled its lowest vote, was there a BNP candidate who polled 18,020 votes (9.82%). Despite easily outpolling the NF, the BNP certainly does not welcome a challenge for the racist vote. The NF has announced that it intends to field 25 candidates in the general election, although it remains to be seen whether the party has the funds and people to do so. Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, is known to be less than pleased that the NF has said it will stand against him in Stoke-on-Trent Central. Outside the BNP the rejuvenated NF has also absorbed much of the rest of the far-right fringe. Several members of the England First Party (EFP), including its leader Steven Smith, the former Burnley BNP leader, jumped ship to join the NF. The Democratic Nationalists, a BNP splinter group based primarily in Bradford, have also to all intents and purposes merged with the NF after Jim Lewthwaite, their leading light, joined the NF in December 2009. The NF even briefly gained a borough councillor. John Gamble was elected as a BNP councillor in Rotherham in 2008, defected to the EFP in 2009 and moved on to the NF in March 2010. However he lasted less than two weeks before the NF announced that its “party whip was removed” from him. The NF claims that its membership has recently “surged by 70%” but it continues to lack the organisational structure and internal unity to challenge the BNP effectively.
SEARCHLIGHT APRIL 2010 - DAVID WILLIAMS
Sunday, 25 April 2010
BNP offer no way forward
In last year's European elections the British National Party (BNP) got just under a million votes, 6.4% of the total votes cast. Its highest polling areas were all traditionally Labour voting, working class areas - Barking and Dagenham, Stoke-on-Trent, Thurrock, Barnsley and Rotherham. On 6 May the BNP are hoping to take control of Barking and Dagenham council. Party leader, Nick Griffin, is also standing for parliament in Barking, one of 326 parliamentary seats that the BNP will be contesting. Regrettably, it is no surprise that the number of working class people voting BNP has increased over recent years. Workers are faced with a choice between three major parties that stand in the interests of big business and not of working class people. These are parties that have supported bailing out the 'banksters' while expecting us to pay for the crisis. No wonder many workers cannot bring themselves to vote at all and others express their anger by voting for the BNP. But the BNP does not stand in the interests of working class people. On the contrary, its ideas are a recipe for defeat and despair.
Public services are already inadequate, underfunded and overcrowded. But, whichever party wins the general election, Tories, New Labour or LibDems, they will take an axe to what is left of our services, with proposed cuts of 15% or more over the coming years. Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, is not campaigning to defend public services, but the bankers! As a member of the European parliament he has argued that the European Commission does not understand "the City of London's role in world markets and that it is a leading economic and commercial asset in Great Britain." Far from being an 'asset', the rich bankers in the City of London bear responsibility for the dramatic increase in public debt. Deregulated under the Tories and then New Labour, the City enjoyed a massive party of profits. When the hangover came, it was taxpayers who propped them up. Now the bankers are partying again and our services are being cut to pay the bill. Socialists demand nationalisation of the major banks - with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. Instead of being run by and for the profiteers, a nationalised finance sector could be run by and for the mass of the population. The BNP, by contrast, not only opposes nationalisation, but even demands increased deregulation of the City!
The BNP's programme for the economy does not include one proposal to make the rich pay more - either in taxation or by other means. Nick Griffin may pose as a friend of working class people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where they have councillors they have consistently supported massive cuts. In Barking the BNP moved an alternative budget, which not only accepted all £14 million in cuts proposed by the New Labour-led council, but added its own cuts of several million - including £0.8 million from the school buildings budget. In Stoke-on-Trent the BNP supported the council budget, which proposes savage cuts in jobs, closure or further privatisation plus an almost 3% council tax increase. In Kirklees the BNP voted for a huge £400 million worth of cuts over the next five years. A BNP councillor called for public sector jobs to be slashed by 25%, even more than the cuts that the Labour council was proposing. Only councillor Jackie Grunsell, a member of the Socialist Party, is actually fighting the cuts.Defending our services will require a united mass movement. To be successful, like the movement against Thatcher's poll tax 20 years ago, it will need to unite as many working class people as possible - men and woman, old and young, migrant and those who were born here. The racist and pro-cuts BNP will never lead such a movement. It creates division not unity - and supports the cuts!
Five million people say they want social housing. But as a result of government policy over the last 30 years, there is virtually none available. 20 years ago there were more than five million council homes, now there is barely half that number. In Barking and Dagenham alone there are 8,000 people on the council house waiting list. The number of council homes in the borough has fallen by 22,000 in the last 20 years. Now the Labour council, frightened by the growth of electoral support for the BNP, is building its first council houses for 25 years - all 32 of them! From 1949 to 1954 an average of 230,000 council houses a year were built. The Socialist Party campaigns for a programme on a similar scale now that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem for all. Such houses could be built to the highest environmental specifications but, unlike the eco-housing Brown is proposing, be public and affordable. The BNP has gained support in Barking and Dagenham as a result of anger at the terrible housing situation, for which it has no solution. BNP councillors propose to take a council site in the borough and bung 1,000 caravans on it - worth £1,000 each. That appears to be as far as their 'Steptoe and son' solution to the crisis goes!
At the same time the BNP actually opposes a major council house building programme in Barking and Dagenham, ignoring the huge drop in the number of council houses. Completely wrongly they argue that if indigenous families are prioritised, it will be possible for them all to get housing without building new homes. Given capitalism's and, in particular, New Labour's failure to provide council housing it is inevitable that tensions will exist about who does, and who does not, get council housing. These tensions are exacerbated in areas like Barking, where there has been a recent and significant increase in the population, including increased numbers of immigrants. The lack of an open, democratic and accountable system of allocations, that would be accepted by most workers, also increases anger. The Socialist Party believes that the right of families to be housed in the same community, if they wish to be, is an important one. The struggle to achieve this, and to satisfy the housing needs of other categories of applicant, has to be linked to both the fight for a mass council house building programme and for democratic control of the allocation system.
Decisions should be taken on the basis of need, including the right to be housed near relatives and friends, not by unelected council officials, but by elected representatives of local community organisations, including tenants' associations, trade unions, community campaigns and councillors. The struggle for decent housing has to be linked to the election of councillors who stand in the interests of working class people. That means socialists - not the BNP. From 1983 to 1987 the socialist-led Liverpool City Council mobilised a mass campaign to defy the Tory government and built 6,000 new council homes, as well as massively improving local public services. We need councillors who are prepared to do the same today. Since Nick Griffin was elected to the European parliament (less than a year ago) he has claimed £200,000 in expenses, in addition to his £82,000 salary! So much for standing up for working class people! Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist explains how Socialist Party MPs and MEPs would be different: "I was a socialist MP for nine years and, unlike the current money grubbing MPs, I only took the average wage of a worker. "I lived the same lifestyle as my constituents. Any Socialist Party member elected to parliament will take the same principled approach that I did."
Over the last decade in Britain big business has moved might and main to keep wages down. One way that they have done this is by using workers from other countries as a supply of cheap, highly-exploited labour. The BNP has no solution to this problem. This is understood by workers who are fighting to defend their pay and conditions. Last year, during the victorious construction workers' strikes at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) against the race to the bottom, BNP members tried to visit the picket lines - but the workers sent them packing. The oil refinery workers understood that the only way they could defend their pay, conditions and jobs was by united action - demanding the rate for the job for every worker, regardless of their national origin. The vile racism of the BNP would have divided the workforce and led to a defeat. As Keith Gibson, a leading member of the Lindsey strike committee put it: "The workers of LOR, Conoco and Easington did not take strike action against immigrant workers. Our action is rightly aimed against company bosses who attempt to play off one nationality of worker against the other and undermine the NAECI agreement. "The BNP should take heed; UK construction workers will not tolerate another racist attempt to sever fraternal relations with workers from other nations."
The LOR workers' strike has lessons for the trade union movement. The only way to prevent big business driving down wages is a united struggle to demand that all workers - regardless of national origin - are paid 'the rate for the job'. To do this successfully means appealing to immigrant workers for a joint struggle. Otherwise big business will continue to use the tactics of 'divide and rule'. The same applies to the struggles in local communities to defend public services. It is also important for the British trade union movement to support struggles of workers in other countries against low pay, cuts in services, etc. The BNP claim that they are not a racist party, but this is a lie. Until the courts forced them to change their rules, only people of "Caucasian origin" were allowed to join their party. To give another example, the BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They do not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British! The leadership of the BNP has a long record of supporting neo-fascist ideas. Now, to try to gain votes, they are attempting to present a respectable gloss. However, as recently as 1998 Griffin was found guilty of inciting racial hatred for holocaust denial.
In 1995 Griffin wrote: "The electors of Millwall [who elected the BNP's first and short-lived local councillor in 1993] did not back a post-modernist rightist party but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan 'Defend Rights for Whites' with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not rational debate". Mark Collett, previously BNP director of publicity and general election candidate for Sheffield Brightside, has been sacked by the BNP for allegedly threatening to kill Nick Griffin. However, he was never sacked for supporting Hitler. In 2002 Collett was filmed saying: "I honestly can't understand how a man who has seen the inner-city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era of Hitler's Germany without a certain nostalgia and think 'yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people in the streets, saluting and everything, was a bad thing'." The BNP is growing because of the lack of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. New Labour is a party of big business, yet most trade unions continue to fund it to the tune of millions. Meanwhile New Labour continues to kick working class people in the teeth. The trade unions should stop funding New Labour and begin to build a party that stands in their interests.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - supported by trade union champions like Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, Brian Caton, general secretary of the POA, and others - will contest seats in the coming general election as a step towards an independent political voice for working class people. In addition to calling for a vote for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition wherever it is standing, the Socialist Party supports a vote for genuine, left, anti-cuts and anti-privatisation candidates. Only a party that genuinely stands in the interests of working class people will be able to successfully expose and undermine the BNP. That is why we are campaigning for the development of a party that, instead of backing the 'banksters', fights to defend the NHS, stands for a living wage for all, for a mass programme of council house building - a party that stands for the millions, not the millionaires.
Public services are already inadequate, underfunded and overcrowded. But, whichever party wins the general election, Tories, New Labour or LibDems, they will take an axe to what is left of our services, with proposed cuts of 15% or more over the coming years. Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, is not campaigning to defend public services, but the bankers! As a member of the European parliament he has argued that the European Commission does not understand "the City of London's role in world markets and that it is a leading economic and commercial asset in Great Britain." Far from being an 'asset', the rich bankers in the City of London bear responsibility for the dramatic increase in public debt. Deregulated under the Tories and then New Labour, the City enjoyed a massive party of profits. When the hangover came, it was taxpayers who propped them up. Now the bankers are partying again and our services are being cut to pay the bill. Socialists demand nationalisation of the major banks - with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. Instead of being run by and for the profiteers, a nationalised finance sector could be run by and for the mass of the population. The BNP, by contrast, not only opposes nationalisation, but even demands increased deregulation of the City!
The BNP's programme for the economy does not include one proposal to make the rich pay more - either in taxation or by other means. Nick Griffin may pose as a friend of working class people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where they have councillors they have consistently supported massive cuts. In Barking the BNP moved an alternative budget, which not only accepted all £14 million in cuts proposed by the New Labour-led council, but added its own cuts of several million - including £0.8 million from the school buildings budget. In Stoke-on-Trent the BNP supported the council budget, which proposes savage cuts in jobs, closure or further privatisation plus an almost 3% council tax increase. In Kirklees the BNP voted for a huge £400 million worth of cuts over the next five years. A BNP councillor called for public sector jobs to be slashed by 25%, even more than the cuts that the Labour council was proposing. Only councillor Jackie Grunsell, a member of the Socialist Party, is actually fighting the cuts.Defending our services will require a united mass movement. To be successful, like the movement against Thatcher's poll tax 20 years ago, it will need to unite as many working class people as possible - men and woman, old and young, migrant and those who were born here. The racist and pro-cuts BNP will never lead such a movement. It creates division not unity - and supports the cuts!
Five million people say they want social housing. But as a result of government policy over the last 30 years, there is virtually none available. 20 years ago there were more than five million council homes, now there is barely half that number. In Barking and Dagenham alone there are 8,000 people on the council house waiting list. The number of council homes in the borough has fallen by 22,000 in the last 20 years. Now the Labour council, frightened by the growth of electoral support for the BNP, is building its first council houses for 25 years - all 32 of them! From 1949 to 1954 an average of 230,000 council houses a year were built. The Socialist Party campaigns for a programme on a similar scale now that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem for all. Such houses could be built to the highest environmental specifications but, unlike the eco-housing Brown is proposing, be public and affordable. The BNP has gained support in Barking and Dagenham as a result of anger at the terrible housing situation, for which it has no solution. BNP councillors propose to take a council site in the borough and bung 1,000 caravans on it - worth £1,000 each. That appears to be as far as their 'Steptoe and son' solution to the crisis goes!
At the same time the BNP actually opposes a major council house building programme in Barking and Dagenham, ignoring the huge drop in the number of council houses. Completely wrongly they argue that if indigenous families are prioritised, it will be possible for them all to get housing without building new homes. Given capitalism's and, in particular, New Labour's failure to provide council housing it is inevitable that tensions will exist about who does, and who does not, get council housing. These tensions are exacerbated in areas like Barking, where there has been a recent and significant increase in the population, including increased numbers of immigrants. The lack of an open, democratic and accountable system of allocations, that would be accepted by most workers, also increases anger. The Socialist Party believes that the right of families to be housed in the same community, if they wish to be, is an important one. The struggle to achieve this, and to satisfy the housing needs of other categories of applicant, has to be linked to both the fight for a mass council house building programme and for democratic control of the allocation system.
Decisions should be taken on the basis of need, including the right to be housed near relatives and friends, not by unelected council officials, but by elected representatives of local community organisations, including tenants' associations, trade unions, community campaigns and councillors. The struggle for decent housing has to be linked to the election of councillors who stand in the interests of working class people. That means socialists - not the BNP. From 1983 to 1987 the socialist-led Liverpool City Council mobilised a mass campaign to defy the Tory government and built 6,000 new council homes, as well as massively improving local public services. We need councillors who are prepared to do the same today. Since Nick Griffin was elected to the European parliament (less than a year ago) he has claimed £200,000 in expenses, in addition to his £82,000 salary! So much for standing up for working class people! Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist explains how Socialist Party MPs and MEPs would be different: "I was a socialist MP for nine years and, unlike the current money grubbing MPs, I only took the average wage of a worker. "I lived the same lifestyle as my constituents. Any Socialist Party member elected to parliament will take the same principled approach that I did."
Over the last decade in Britain big business has moved might and main to keep wages down. One way that they have done this is by using workers from other countries as a supply of cheap, highly-exploited labour. The BNP has no solution to this problem. This is understood by workers who are fighting to defend their pay and conditions. Last year, during the victorious construction workers' strikes at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) against the race to the bottom, BNP members tried to visit the picket lines - but the workers sent them packing. The oil refinery workers understood that the only way they could defend their pay, conditions and jobs was by united action - demanding the rate for the job for every worker, regardless of their national origin. The vile racism of the BNP would have divided the workforce and led to a defeat. As Keith Gibson, a leading member of the Lindsey strike committee put it: "The workers of LOR, Conoco and Easington did not take strike action against immigrant workers. Our action is rightly aimed against company bosses who attempt to play off one nationality of worker against the other and undermine the NAECI agreement. "The BNP should take heed; UK construction workers will not tolerate another racist attempt to sever fraternal relations with workers from other nations."
The LOR workers' strike has lessons for the trade union movement. The only way to prevent big business driving down wages is a united struggle to demand that all workers - regardless of national origin - are paid 'the rate for the job'. To do this successfully means appealing to immigrant workers for a joint struggle. Otherwise big business will continue to use the tactics of 'divide and rule'. The same applies to the struggles in local communities to defend public services. It is also important for the British trade union movement to support struggles of workers in other countries against low pay, cuts in services, etc. The BNP claim that they are not a racist party, but this is a lie. Until the courts forced them to change their rules, only people of "Caucasian origin" were allowed to join their party. To give another example, the BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They do not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British! The leadership of the BNP has a long record of supporting neo-fascist ideas. Now, to try to gain votes, they are attempting to present a respectable gloss. However, as recently as 1998 Griffin was found guilty of inciting racial hatred for holocaust denial.
In 1995 Griffin wrote: "The electors of Millwall [who elected the BNP's first and short-lived local councillor in 1993] did not back a post-modernist rightist party but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan 'Defend Rights for Whites' with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not rational debate". Mark Collett, previously BNP director of publicity and general election candidate for Sheffield Brightside, has been sacked by the BNP for allegedly threatening to kill Nick Griffin. However, he was never sacked for supporting Hitler. In 2002 Collett was filmed saying: "I honestly can't understand how a man who has seen the inner-city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era of Hitler's Germany without a certain nostalgia and think 'yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people in the streets, saluting and everything, was a bad thing'." The BNP is growing because of the lack of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. New Labour is a party of big business, yet most trade unions continue to fund it to the tune of millions. Meanwhile New Labour continues to kick working class people in the teeth. The trade unions should stop funding New Labour and begin to build a party that stands in their interests.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - supported by trade union champions like Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, Brian Caton, general secretary of the POA, and others - will contest seats in the coming general election as a step towards an independent political voice for working class people. In addition to calling for a vote for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition wherever it is standing, the Socialist Party supports a vote for genuine, left, anti-cuts and anti-privatisation candidates. Only a party that genuinely stands in the interests of working class people will be able to successfully expose and undermine the BNP. That is why we are campaigning for the development of a party that, instead of backing the 'banksters', fights to defend the NHS, stands for a living wage for all, for a mass programme of council house building - a party that stands for the millions, not the millionaires.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
A proudly diverse nation
Britain is a land built by migrants. After all, there was no one inhabiting these islands 50,000 years ago, and for most of human history there were no international borders. The emergence of the modern British nation state and the advent of a global economy brought with it the movement of capital in search of profit and the movement of people in search of work. Britain, home of the industrial revolution, saw successive waves of immigration from the 19th century onwards. It was driven by the needs of capitalists to find an adequate supply of workers. However, from the beginning, the capitalist class also grasped that the migration of cheap labour into the country provided them with a ready mechanism for dividing working people. This was not automatic; it depended on an invented common identity of Britishness, which offered a false sense of solidarity between workers and bosses, while dividing native born from “foreign workers”. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the treatment of Irish workers who came to Britain in the 19th century to work on the canals and railways. They were forced to leave their homes—much like Roma people in Slovakia today—because of impoverishment or oppression, and usually both.
Our rulers have always tried to sow divisions among workers but there is a powerful history of class solidarity.The next time you walk down a canal towpath or ride a train think of the thousands of Irish labourers—the navvies—who died building the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, housed in the most squalid living conditions imaginable. Textile mill bosses also imported Irish workers. Initially this was often to use them as strikebreakers. In situations of sharpened competition in the labour market among low-skilled workers, it is not difficult to see how tensions arose. Karl Marx observed the process and got straight to the heart of the matter: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps… The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his own country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” Marx went on to explain how this antagonism was kept alive by “the press, the pulpit and the comic papers” in much the same way that the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express do today, with their relentless attacks on migrants and Muslims. But there was another process cutting aganist the divisions between workers. The bringing together of workers in the factory system created a need for unity against the common enemy exploiting their labour. Despite the best efforts of the capitalists to stoke racism, the impulse to class solidarity was often stronger. Many leading members of the Chartists, Britain’s first mass workers’ movement in the mid 19th century, came from the ranks of Irish labourers. Class fighters such as Feargus O’Connor and James Bronterre O’Brien led British workers into struggle, as did other “foreign” workers like the black Chartist organiser William Cuffay. Unfortunately the Chartists were defeated, and racist ideas were able to fester.
The New Unionism of the 1880s brought a new wave of Irish activists into politics. Ireland was officially part of Britain at this time so there was no issue of immigration controls—it was the availability of work not controls that adjusted the flow. At the end of the 19th century millions of Jews from the economically undeveloped parts of eastern Europe fled poverty and persecution. State-sponsored anti-semitic pogroms killed thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland. Three million largely poor Jews migrated to the US and perhaps a quarter of a million to Britain. Ruling class figures responded with racism. Tory MP William Evans Gordon said in parliament in 1902, “Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders.” This racism paved the way for the Aliens Act of 1905, the first to limit immigration and which defined some groups of migrants as “undesirable”. It made it easier for racists to argue that Jewish people were a problem in British society - however, Jewish workers came together with other sections of the working class. In the 1930s fascist attempts to turn “native” Britons against Jews were defeated on the streets. The long economic boom after the Second World War saw capitalists respond to increasing demand for labour by again looking to workers from overseas.
This time they looked further afield in the British Empire—to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent—for workers to plug the shortages in areas such as public transport and the hospitals. Black people soon found that the land of opportunity was also a land of racism. Some landlords and pubs in places like London and Birmingham put up signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. But socialists and trade unionists organised reception committees to welcome the new workers and to help them settle in. However there was no automatic unity among the oppressed. Some established migrants, who had become assimilated into British society, came to view more recent immigrants as outsiders, and at times as a threat.
Some British people of Irish backgrounds could be among the most antagonistic towards Black people, seeing their own “whiteness” as making them superior to African-Caribbeans. Post-war Britain’s open door policy wasn’t to last as the boom ebbed and turn into crisis towards the end 1960s. The Tory politician Enoch Powell who had once implored Jamaicans and others to come to find work in the “mother country”, now scapegoated black and Asian immigrants for the mounting problems faced by a British economy in decline. This was even though many so-called immigrants were in fact born in the country. The 1971 Immigration Act brought a shuddering halt to “primary” immigration to Britain. Future migrants would be the dependants of those already here and not new workers. But the rising racism, especially in the mid 1970s, led to a powerful anti-racist response that reached a crescendo with the formation of the Anti Nazi League (ANL). The ANL drove the predecessors of the Nazi British National Party (BNP), the National Front, off our streets. Today asylum seekers, living in forced destitution, are blamed for “ruining areas” and bringing crime. Or in the case of “economic migrants”, like those from new European Union countries in eastern Europe like the Irish before them, lowering wages.
It can sometimes appear easier to kick the “foreign” worker next to you, especially during times of low class struggle, such as after the defeat of the Chartists in the 19th century. Equally however, during times of rising struggle, divisions are overcome time and time again. A key task of socialists today is to harness that class solidarity to fight both against the bosses and in defence of the rights of all working people, regardless of spurious notions of nation and race. Socialists must act as “tribunes of the oppressed”, as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it. We must oppose all racism and bigotry. Today that means standing up against Islamophobia and racism, and breaking the back of the organisations these twin poisons are breeding, the Nazi BNP and the English Defence League.
Our rulers have always tried to sow divisions among workers but there is a powerful history of class solidarity.The next time you walk down a canal towpath or ride a train think of the thousands of Irish labourers—the navvies—who died building the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, housed in the most squalid living conditions imaginable. Textile mill bosses also imported Irish workers. Initially this was often to use them as strikebreakers. In situations of sharpened competition in the labour market among low-skilled workers, it is not difficult to see how tensions arose. Karl Marx observed the process and got straight to the heart of the matter: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps… The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his own country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” Marx went on to explain how this antagonism was kept alive by “the press, the pulpit and the comic papers” in much the same way that the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express do today, with their relentless attacks on migrants and Muslims. But there was another process cutting aganist the divisions between workers. The bringing together of workers in the factory system created a need for unity against the common enemy exploiting their labour. Despite the best efforts of the capitalists to stoke racism, the impulse to class solidarity was often stronger. Many leading members of the Chartists, Britain’s first mass workers’ movement in the mid 19th century, came from the ranks of Irish labourers. Class fighters such as Feargus O’Connor and James Bronterre O’Brien led British workers into struggle, as did other “foreign” workers like the black Chartist organiser William Cuffay. Unfortunately the Chartists were defeated, and racist ideas were able to fester.
The New Unionism of the 1880s brought a new wave of Irish activists into politics. Ireland was officially part of Britain at this time so there was no issue of immigration controls—it was the availability of work not controls that adjusted the flow. At the end of the 19th century millions of Jews from the economically undeveloped parts of eastern Europe fled poverty and persecution. State-sponsored anti-semitic pogroms killed thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland. Three million largely poor Jews migrated to the US and perhaps a quarter of a million to Britain. Ruling class figures responded with racism. Tory MP William Evans Gordon said in parliament in 1902, “Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders.” This racism paved the way for the Aliens Act of 1905, the first to limit immigration and which defined some groups of migrants as “undesirable”. It made it easier for racists to argue that Jewish people were a problem in British society - however, Jewish workers came together with other sections of the working class. In the 1930s fascist attempts to turn “native” Britons against Jews were defeated on the streets. The long economic boom after the Second World War saw capitalists respond to increasing demand for labour by again looking to workers from overseas.
This time they looked further afield in the British Empire—to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent—for workers to plug the shortages in areas such as public transport and the hospitals. Black people soon found that the land of opportunity was also a land of racism. Some landlords and pubs in places like London and Birmingham put up signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. But socialists and trade unionists organised reception committees to welcome the new workers and to help them settle in. However there was no automatic unity among the oppressed. Some established migrants, who had become assimilated into British society, came to view more recent immigrants as outsiders, and at times as a threat.
Some British people of Irish backgrounds could be among the most antagonistic towards Black people, seeing their own “whiteness” as making them superior to African-Caribbeans. Post-war Britain’s open door policy wasn’t to last as the boom ebbed and turn into crisis towards the end 1960s. The Tory politician Enoch Powell who had once implored Jamaicans and others to come to find work in the “mother country”, now scapegoated black and Asian immigrants for the mounting problems faced by a British economy in decline. This was even though many so-called immigrants were in fact born in the country. The 1971 Immigration Act brought a shuddering halt to “primary” immigration to Britain. Future migrants would be the dependants of those already here and not new workers. But the rising racism, especially in the mid 1970s, led to a powerful anti-racist response that reached a crescendo with the formation of the Anti Nazi League (ANL). The ANL drove the predecessors of the Nazi British National Party (BNP), the National Front, off our streets. Today asylum seekers, living in forced destitution, are blamed for “ruining areas” and bringing crime. Or in the case of “economic migrants”, like those from new European Union countries in eastern Europe like the Irish before them, lowering wages.
It can sometimes appear easier to kick the “foreign” worker next to you, especially during times of low class struggle, such as after the defeat of the Chartists in the 19th century. Equally however, during times of rising struggle, divisions are overcome time and time again. A key task of socialists today is to harness that class solidarity to fight both against the bosses and in defence of the rights of all working people, regardless of spurious notions of nation and race. Socialists must act as “tribunes of the oppressed”, as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it. We must oppose all racism and bigotry. Today that means standing up against Islamophobia and racism, and breaking the back of the organisations these twin poisons are breeding, the Nazi BNP and the English Defence League.
Friday, 16 April 2010
Nothing democratic about Nazis
The election of two members of the fascist British National Party (BNP) to the European Parliament in June has triggered a variety of reactions. Most people are rightly shocked and disgusted that Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, a pair of hardened racists with a long history of involvement in Nazi politics, grabbed enough votes to become Euro MPs. But the BNP's electoral advance has also opened up a series of arguments in the media and the population at large. In particular, there is a section of the establishment which insists that the BNP must now be treated as a legitimate political organisation and accorded the same rights and privileges given to any other party. The people who make this argument typically say that, while they personally find the BNP's views reprehensible, they believe the party has won a democratic mandate. That was the reaction of many right wing commentators, who were outraged when a BNP "victory" press conference outside the Houses of Parliament was disrupted by violent protesters from Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Griffin had wanted to pose as a dignified and respectable politician - instead he ended up scurrying away from demonstrators with an egg splattered over his suit.
The egg incident brought a smile to the faces of millions of people who hate the BNP and were glad to see Griffin get humiliated. It made clear that any attempts by the BNP to gain political respectability would be sharply challenged by anti-fascists. But it also led to a debate in the media about what kind of organisation the BNP was and what sort of tactics should be used against it. It's important to understand that the BNP did not get its two seats because of a sudden lurch rightwards in the population at large. In fact the BNP's vote dropped from the 2004 European elections in both regions where it gained seats, the North West of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber. The BNP pulled only 6.2 percent of the vote nationally and only 2.1 percent of those eligible to vote. Nevertheless, anger at the recession, disgust at the MPs' expenses scandal and disillusion with all the mainstream political parties meant that many people did not vote. It was this drop in turnout that led to the BNP getting in - a drop that was sharpest among Labour voters in the party's traditional heartlands. The Labour vote in Yorkshire and the Humber was just over half what it polled in 2004.
Whatever the dynamics behind the election, the fact remains that the BNP did manage to ride what Griffin called a "perfect storm" to win seats. Almost immediately this led to calls for the party to be brought in from the cold. Senior journalists started to wonder out loud whether the previous informal ban on granting the BNP editorial space was "sustainable". Much of these arguments traded on the lazy assumption that the BNP's racism somehow becomes politically acceptable if enough people vote for it. Under this logic the BNP view that black and Asian people in Britain are "racial foreigners" who should be "repatriated" is now apparently 6.2 percent OK, and would be 20 percent OK if the BNP polled 20 percent of the vote. There is nothing "democratic" about these spurious arguments. For starters, there can never be anything democratic about the state licensing the oppression and persecution of ethnic minorities. More fundamentally, democracy has to be based on equality. An organisation like the BNP that denies that equality cannot be considered democratic. But the BNP is not just a racist party. It is a fascist organisation, dedicated to continuing the political project of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is important to understand this because fascism poses a specific threat to democracy, and all progressive politics, that marks it out from other forms of right wing reaction and bigotry.
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky took a very different approach when he theorised fascism as it first emerged in the 1920s in Italy and then Germany in the 1930s. Trotsky noted that fascism was different from previous forms of authoritarian reaction because it made use of a mass movement based on the petit bourgeoisie - the lower middle class - shopkeepers, doctors, small businesspeople and the like. Its historic function is to smash the working class and all forms of democratic institutions and replace them with a dictatorship. When capitalism is in a relatively stable condition this class tends to look towards the major political parties such as the Tories or social democratic parties. But during economic crises, Trotsky argued, "everything is turned on its head." The 1929 Wall Street Crash heralded the deepest slump in history. Europe's middle class found that their world was collapsing around them. It was at this point that demagogues like Hitler offered a simple, racist, solution - the venomous and divisive conspiracy theory that Jewish international financiers and Jewish communists were conspiring to destroy society. Anti-Semitism was also used by Hitler to give his members a sense of superiority and provide a scapegoat for society's ills.
Although fascism is based primarily around the middle class, as it grows it begins to recruit sections of the working class and the unemployed. It is a mass party that acts like a cancer and eats away at the democratic structures of society.
Fascist parties create a street army designed to smash working class organisations. As Hitler's Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, said, "Whoever controls the street also conquers the masses, and whoever conquers the masses thereby conquers the state." In the years following the First World War, the Italian fascist leader Mussolini cobbled together a street army from demobbed veterans - the Blackshirts. He used these gangs to spread terror on the left, beating up and murdering socialists and trade unionists. At the same time, he posed as a respectable "patriotic" politician and persuaded Italy's rulers to hand power over to him. A decade later Hitler deployed the same tactics in Germany. His Brownshirts were used to physically attack the left while the Nazi Party contested elections on a platform of nationalism and race hatred against Jews. Again, the ruling class eventually handed power over to him. The result was the Holocaust - the murder of 6 million Jews. Fascist movements come to power under two conditions. Firstly fascists have to prove to the ruling class that they are powerful enough to terrorise and smash the working class. The second condition is that sections of the ruling class are so desperate that they are prepared to abandon traditional methods to defend their interests and instead look towards fascism as a solution.
In the past the ruling class had turned to the police or the army to maintain its position at the top of society. But as revolution swept across Europe in the early 20th century these tactics started to fail. The police were unable to put down mass strikes involving millions of workers. If fascist parties are allowed to create a mass base, they are able to do what the police and army cannot. It is in situations like this that sections of the ruling class can look towards the unthinkable. Fascist parties may talk about a "Third Way" between capitalism and democracy, but ultimately when they have taken power they have always run society in the interests of big business; it is this dual approach of organising street thuggery on the ground while maintaining a level of political respectability and standing in elections that is the defining characteristic of fascist politics. Fascists exploit the space afforded to them by democracy in order to take it over and smash it. They are counter -revolutionaries who want to forcibly reverse even the limited democratic rights we have. Thankfully we have seen nothing on this scale in Europe so far. But the warning signs are there. The victory of fascist parties in the European elections has seen a massive increase in attacks and murders of Roma people by fascist gangs in Eastern Europe. We have also seen attacks on Romanian Roma in Northern Ireland and rampaging right wing thugs in Luton attacking Asian shops amongst other examples.
But we also understand that fascists aim to control the streets and must therefore be physically confronted and defeated by a mass movement. Attempting to defeat the Nazis solely through peaceful and constitutional means is at best futile and at worst positively dangerous. Whenever the BNP gets its claws into a community, racist attacks and murders rise. They must not be allowed to become a fixture on our television screens and in our newspapers. Nor can we let them hold meetings, rallies and press conferences without protesting against them and disrupting their activities where possible. The history of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s stand as terrible warnings of what fascists can do to democracy if politicians give them the benefit of the doubt and grant them democratic rights. But the tradition of militant anti-fascist mass movements has a track record of success, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the Anti Nazi League in the 1970s and early 1990s. We urgently need to reactivate that tradition today to deal with the increased threat of the BNP. We need to win the argument that democracy is best defended by shutting the fascists out - an argument that is all the more pertinent now that the Nazi BNP has got its jackboot wedged firmly in the door.
The socialist approach to opposing fascism, in contrast, understands that pandering to right wing arguments over Muslims and immigrants only helps to encourage the poisonous atmosphere from which the BNP draws strength. We root ourselves in a tradition of working class anti-racism that fights for black and white unity and defends minorities from those who would scapegoat them. And we need to demonstrate in practice that socialists have the best understanding of who the fascists are and how to fight them effectively. Building that fight is a crucial part of a wider struggle against poverty and racism - and ultimately against the capitalist system that is responsible for generating those evils in the first place.
The egg incident brought a smile to the faces of millions of people who hate the BNP and were glad to see Griffin get humiliated. It made clear that any attempts by the BNP to gain political respectability would be sharply challenged by anti-fascists. But it also led to a debate in the media about what kind of organisation the BNP was and what sort of tactics should be used against it. It's important to understand that the BNP did not get its two seats because of a sudden lurch rightwards in the population at large. In fact the BNP's vote dropped from the 2004 European elections in both regions where it gained seats, the North West of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber. The BNP pulled only 6.2 percent of the vote nationally and only 2.1 percent of those eligible to vote. Nevertheless, anger at the recession, disgust at the MPs' expenses scandal and disillusion with all the mainstream political parties meant that many people did not vote. It was this drop in turnout that led to the BNP getting in - a drop that was sharpest among Labour voters in the party's traditional heartlands. The Labour vote in Yorkshire and the Humber was just over half what it polled in 2004.
Whatever the dynamics behind the election, the fact remains that the BNP did manage to ride what Griffin called a "perfect storm" to win seats. Almost immediately this led to calls for the party to be brought in from the cold. Senior journalists started to wonder out loud whether the previous informal ban on granting the BNP editorial space was "sustainable". Much of these arguments traded on the lazy assumption that the BNP's racism somehow becomes politically acceptable if enough people vote for it. Under this logic the BNP view that black and Asian people in Britain are "racial foreigners" who should be "repatriated" is now apparently 6.2 percent OK, and would be 20 percent OK if the BNP polled 20 percent of the vote. There is nothing "democratic" about these spurious arguments. For starters, there can never be anything democratic about the state licensing the oppression and persecution of ethnic minorities. More fundamentally, democracy has to be based on equality. An organisation like the BNP that denies that equality cannot be considered democratic. But the BNP is not just a racist party. It is a fascist organisation, dedicated to continuing the political project of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is important to understand this because fascism poses a specific threat to democracy, and all progressive politics, that marks it out from other forms of right wing reaction and bigotry.
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky took a very different approach when he theorised fascism as it first emerged in the 1920s in Italy and then Germany in the 1930s. Trotsky noted that fascism was different from previous forms of authoritarian reaction because it made use of a mass movement based on the petit bourgeoisie - the lower middle class - shopkeepers, doctors, small businesspeople and the like. Its historic function is to smash the working class and all forms of democratic institutions and replace them with a dictatorship. When capitalism is in a relatively stable condition this class tends to look towards the major political parties such as the Tories or social democratic parties. But during economic crises, Trotsky argued, "everything is turned on its head." The 1929 Wall Street Crash heralded the deepest slump in history. Europe's middle class found that their world was collapsing around them. It was at this point that demagogues like Hitler offered a simple, racist, solution - the venomous and divisive conspiracy theory that Jewish international financiers and Jewish communists were conspiring to destroy society. Anti-Semitism was also used by Hitler to give his members a sense of superiority and provide a scapegoat for society's ills.
Although fascism is based primarily around the middle class, as it grows it begins to recruit sections of the working class and the unemployed. It is a mass party that acts like a cancer and eats away at the democratic structures of society.
Fascist parties create a street army designed to smash working class organisations. As Hitler's Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, said, "Whoever controls the street also conquers the masses, and whoever conquers the masses thereby conquers the state." In the years following the First World War, the Italian fascist leader Mussolini cobbled together a street army from demobbed veterans - the Blackshirts. He used these gangs to spread terror on the left, beating up and murdering socialists and trade unionists. At the same time, he posed as a respectable "patriotic" politician and persuaded Italy's rulers to hand power over to him. A decade later Hitler deployed the same tactics in Germany. His Brownshirts were used to physically attack the left while the Nazi Party contested elections on a platform of nationalism and race hatred against Jews. Again, the ruling class eventually handed power over to him. The result was the Holocaust - the murder of 6 million Jews. Fascist movements come to power under two conditions. Firstly fascists have to prove to the ruling class that they are powerful enough to terrorise and smash the working class. The second condition is that sections of the ruling class are so desperate that they are prepared to abandon traditional methods to defend their interests and instead look towards fascism as a solution.
In the past the ruling class had turned to the police or the army to maintain its position at the top of society. But as revolution swept across Europe in the early 20th century these tactics started to fail. The police were unable to put down mass strikes involving millions of workers. If fascist parties are allowed to create a mass base, they are able to do what the police and army cannot. It is in situations like this that sections of the ruling class can look towards the unthinkable. Fascist parties may talk about a "Third Way" between capitalism and democracy, but ultimately when they have taken power they have always run society in the interests of big business; it is this dual approach of organising street thuggery on the ground while maintaining a level of political respectability and standing in elections that is the defining characteristic of fascist politics. Fascists exploit the space afforded to them by democracy in order to take it over and smash it. They are counter -revolutionaries who want to forcibly reverse even the limited democratic rights we have. Thankfully we have seen nothing on this scale in Europe so far. But the warning signs are there. The victory of fascist parties in the European elections has seen a massive increase in attacks and murders of Roma people by fascist gangs in Eastern Europe. We have also seen attacks on Romanian Roma in Northern Ireland and rampaging right wing thugs in Luton attacking Asian shops amongst other examples.
But we also understand that fascists aim to control the streets and must therefore be physically confronted and defeated by a mass movement. Attempting to defeat the Nazis solely through peaceful and constitutional means is at best futile and at worst positively dangerous. Whenever the BNP gets its claws into a community, racist attacks and murders rise. They must not be allowed to become a fixture on our television screens and in our newspapers. Nor can we let them hold meetings, rallies and press conferences without protesting against them and disrupting their activities where possible. The history of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s stand as terrible warnings of what fascists can do to democracy if politicians give them the benefit of the doubt and grant them democratic rights. But the tradition of militant anti-fascist mass movements has a track record of success, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the Anti Nazi League in the 1970s and early 1990s. We urgently need to reactivate that tradition today to deal with the increased threat of the BNP. We need to win the argument that democracy is best defended by shutting the fascists out - an argument that is all the more pertinent now that the Nazi BNP has got its jackboot wedged firmly in the door.
The socialist approach to opposing fascism, in contrast, understands that pandering to right wing arguments over Muslims and immigrants only helps to encourage the poisonous atmosphere from which the BNP draws strength. We root ourselves in a tradition of working class anti-racism that fights for black and white unity and defends minorities from those who would scapegoat them. And we need to demonstrate in practice that socialists have the best understanding of who the fascists are and how to fight them effectively. Building that fight is a crucial part of a wider struggle against poverty and racism - and ultimately against the capitalist system that is responsible for generating those evils in the first place.
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