Well we knew that it was coming and we knew that it would be nasty, but it certainly didn't make Tuesday's Budget any more palatable. Truth has been turned on its head and the economy is being adjusted to deal with a fiction. That fiction is that swingeing cuts, the like of which we haven't seen in a generation, are necessary if the country isn't going to be thrust into chaos and bankruptcy; but they aren't necessary and the economy wouldn't have collapsed into entropic disaster without them. The truth is that the massive public-sector cuts and the vindictive attack on the benefits structure that Chancellor George Osborne has inflicted on us is a sop to the pressure from international bankers and speculators, to the grey men of the IMF, the European Union and the City. It's a capitulation to those who have said that, unless the government inflicts massive pain on the population, they will attack the currency and the country's credit rating with all the considerable weapons in their armoury, bringing about a crisis which would make the Greek disaster pale into insignificance. The poor are once again targeted disproportionately by this pack of coalition wolves, this collection of Tory class warriors and Lib-Dem turncoats.
There's £11 billion to be slashed from the benefits bill.That's a mind-boggling sum to rip off from those least able to defend themselves. And it's being done in the most dishonest way possible, by linking benefits to the CPI measure of inflation rather than RPI at a time when the RPI measure has gone up by 5.1 per cent in the past year , while the CPI has risen by 3.4 per cent. This will hurt households reliant on benefits significantly because of the way that spending in poorer households operates. And it will hurt even more when the 2.5 per cent VAT rise comes into effect on January 4, taking it to 20 per cent. Spending by government departments will, we are told, be cut by 25 per cent over the next four years - put like that, it doesn't seem to be that significant. But when you realise that government departments deal with everything in your life from schooling to health and safety at work, the impact becomes a little clearer. Public-sector wages frozen for two years will certainly not please civil and public servants. But this real-terms pay cut will hit the manufacturing and retail sectors as well, with the dramatic cut in the amount of spending power in the economy that it represents. And freezing child benefit for three years sounds like picking on families rather than saving the nation's credibility.
But perhaps abusing families is what it takes to win brownie points with the City? If we're all taking the hit equally, why is corporation tax going to be cut by 1 per cent every year for the next four? Doesn't sound all that equal to me at least. What this says is that we can forget about any recovery. The Tories and their Lib-Dem toadies are going for broke. They are front-loading a huge attack on working people early in their term of office and attempting to use phoney claims of a financial crisis to justify redrawing the economic map of Britain. Every service that is crippled will be accompanied with a transfer to the private sector justified by the specious claim of "attracting private capital," when what will happen in reality is that what will be attracted are profiteers and speculators. The leeches will have a field day and the profits will flow freely - as freely as the lifeblood of an economy that is being hijacked by those who see public service as an opportunity to milk the public purse and benefit recipients as mere parasites and scroungers, not people in need of help and support from their society. It's an attack of huge proportions and unlimited malevolence and we are going to have to tell this government that we are having none of it. It's an assault that will have to be resisted by every parliamentary and extra-parliamentary resource that we can summon. And it's a fight that must be won.
Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Democracy is dying
So that’s what “democracy” means. Every five years or so we vote – and that’s the end of it until the next election. Of course, having a vote is certainly better than not having one. But the hung parliament has led to backroom discussions – and we are all as excluded as the thousands of people who couldn’t get into polling stations after 10pm on election day. The truth is that what we voted for bears little resemblance to what we got. The Tories have far more seats than can be justified by the number of votes they got. In this situation, many, including myself, are calling for a change to the voting system, in the shape of proportional representation. The first-past-the-post electoral system, which allowed Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to win election landslides with just two fifths of the vote, is indeed unfair. The last time there was momentum for PR on the left was when the Tory election victories in the 1980s and 1990s looked like they would never end. Then it was out of desperation – a belief that only by changing the voting system could the Tories be beaten. Now it is out of frustration that all the parties are so similar. After the Second World War, the Labour and Tory parties completely dominated British politics, sharing around 96 percent of the popular vote between them. Last week they got just 65 percent between them. Yet parliament is still dominated by the two biggest parties.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Noxious election campaign stirs up racial division
This general election has been the one most dominated by immigration since 1979. Consider the two most important incidents of the past month.The first was hapless Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy in Rochdale. Brown’s behaviour—polite and patient to her face, calling her “a bigoted woman” behind her back—played into a favourite myth peddled by the tabloids and the British National Party (BNP). This is that “liberal elites” are happy to see Britain flooded by migrants and refuse to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of “ordinary people” about immigration.Brown himself clearly subscribes to a version of this myth. Having been caught out, he rushed to apologise to Mrs Duffy. This no doubt reflected a conviction that “ordinary people” are generally “bigoted” and that all Labour leaders can do is pander to anti-immigrant prejudice, however much they may privately dislike it. This is a longstanding attitude. The diaries of Richard Crossman, Labour cabinet minister in the 1960s, repeatedly express the belief that his working class voters in Coventry were racists who wanted tighter immigration controls.The second key event for Brown was, of course, the final television debate between the leaders of the three main parties. This was descending into tedium until immigration came up. We were treated to the spectacle of Brown and David Cameron rounding on Nick Clegg to denounce the Liberal Democrats’ proposal to offer an amnesty to some illegal immigrants. This was partly about the representatives of the old two-party system whacking the new kid on the block.
But Cameron and Brown were also trying to signal that they were hard on immigration. The anger that Clegg displayed in his clashes with Cameron on this issue no doubt reflected anxiety that he was being portrayed as “soft” on migrants.The irruption of immigration in the final stages of the election has almost certainly worked to the Tories’ advantage. The Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on the subject last Saturday. Apparently Cameron initially resisted considerable pressure to make immigration central to the Tory election campaign, “fearful that the anti-immigration message peddled by his predecessor Michael Howard would spoil his attempts to detoxify the Tory brand. “Mr Brown’s travails and the debate questions have done Mr Cameron’s job for him, pushing immigration to the centre of the campaign without forcing him to look like the ‘nasty party’ of old. The subject was one of the hottest topics on Twitter on Friday.Tim Montgomerie, editor of the ConservativeHome website and voice of the party’s grassroots, was among those pushing for more aggression at the start of the campaign. But on Friday he told the Financial Times he was now ‘much happier’ with Mr Cameron’s strategy. It’s very interesting that the issue came up in all three debates and Cameron hit the issue very hard in the last one.’”Cameron’s strategy bears some resemblance to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. Immigration wasn’t formally central to the Tory campaign then either. But Thatcher had already, in her notorious World in Action interview of January 1978, made it clear where she stood: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
This phrase—and particularly the use of the word “swamped”—was enough to signal to anyone hostile to migrants that Thatcher was one of them. It remains to be seen whether the way the election has tilted towards immigration will help to scrape Cameron together a parliamentary majority. Almost certainly it will benefit the hard anti-migrant parties—the BNP, but also UKIP. At 1979 general election, the Anti Nazi League had reversed the advance of the National Front. Alas, the BNP and the EDL are still on the offensive. Whoever forms the next government, anti-fascists will have plenty to do to undo the damage caused by this noxious election campaign.
But Cameron and Brown were also trying to signal that they were hard on immigration. The anger that Clegg displayed in his clashes with Cameron on this issue no doubt reflected anxiety that he was being portrayed as “soft” on migrants.The irruption of immigration in the final stages of the election has almost certainly worked to the Tories’ advantage. The Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on the subject last Saturday. Apparently Cameron initially resisted considerable pressure to make immigration central to the Tory election campaign, “fearful that the anti-immigration message peddled by his predecessor Michael Howard would spoil his attempts to detoxify the Tory brand. “Mr Brown’s travails and the debate questions have done Mr Cameron’s job for him, pushing immigration to the centre of the campaign without forcing him to look like the ‘nasty party’ of old. The subject was one of the hottest topics on Twitter on Friday.Tim Montgomerie, editor of the ConservativeHome website and voice of the party’s grassroots, was among those pushing for more aggression at the start of the campaign. But on Friday he told the Financial Times he was now ‘much happier’ with Mr Cameron’s strategy. It’s very interesting that the issue came up in all three debates and Cameron hit the issue very hard in the last one.’”Cameron’s strategy bears some resemblance to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. Immigration wasn’t formally central to the Tory campaign then either. But Thatcher had already, in her notorious World in Action interview of January 1978, made it clear where she stood: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
This phrase—and particularly the use of the word “swamped”—was enough to signal to anyone hostile to migrants that Thatcher was one of them. It remains to be seen whether the way the election has tilted towards immigration will help to scrape Cameron together a parliamentary majority. Almost certainly it will benefit the hard anti-migrant parties—the BNP, but also UKIP. At 1979 general election, the Anti Nazi League had reversed the advance of the National Front. Alas, the BNP and the EDL are still on the offensive. Whoever forms the next government, anti-fascists will have plenty to do to undo the damage caused by this noxious election campaign.
Tory bigots fail to change ways
Homophobic remarks by Tory candidates have become an almost weekly occurrence in this election campaign. David Cameron claims that these comments do not represent the Conservative Party's real attitudes to same-sex relationships. But he constantly talks about "families" in a way that still upholds only one type of relationship as the ideal. In the run-up to the election, Cameron tried to present the Tories as friends of equality. The first major blow came only days before the election was called, with the release of a crackly recording of a private meeting in which shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said that guest house owners should be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples. He argued that if someone is selling bed and breakfast "in their own home" they should have the right to discriminate on grounds of conscience. Grayling made his old Tory attitudes very obvious. His determination to see a guest house as a private house rather than a public service seems to have more to do with a belief in property than in liberty or conscience. It was some days before Grayling apologised, and the Tories have kept him well away from the front line of the campaign. They may have thought that they had managed to get through that controversy, but then a letter came to light in which shadow defence minister Julian Lewis argued that the age of consent for same-sex relations should never have been lowered to 16, because homosexual sex puts teenage boys at "serious physical risk."
Unlike Grayling, Lewis stuck to his guns when challenged by the press. Lewis's desire to protect young people from sexually transmitted infection might make sense if he wanted also to raise the age of consent for heterosexual acts. But while Lewis backs civil partnerships, his comments display a form of prejudice that is scarcely more subtle, associating gay and bisexual people with disease and assuming that it is acceptable for them to have fewer rights than others. The next two incidents involved less prominent individuals with rather more shockingly homophobic views. First Philip Lardner, Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran, claimed that homosexuality is not "normal." Then Philippa Stroud, candidate for the Tory target seat of Sutton and Cheam, hit the headlines for her involvement in the leadership of a homophobic church that "exorcises" people attracted to members of their own sex. While Lardner was removed, Stroud was allowed to stay. But then Lardner wasn't in a winnable seat. It seems that prejudiced and hateful attitudes lurk only slightly below the surface in Cameron's "new" Conservative Party. While Cameron has been keen to play down the embarrassing incidents, his own record of tolerance is hardly more laudable.
The Tory leader has said that his tax breaks for married couples would also apply to same-sex couples in civil partnerships, but he still hasn't adopted a policy of allowing same-sex marriage. In reality, the very existence of the tax breaks policy is based on a series of fundamental and fundamentally flawed Tory premises - that marriage is about going through a ceremony, rather than about what happens in people's hearts, that the interests of single people are not a priority, that couples must conform to conventional family structures and that - as Cameron said several times in the televised leaders' debates - it is "families" that really matter. Of course, it is not only the Tories who talk of prioritising families. The term "hard-working families" has been a catchphrase of both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who appear to believe that all single people are lazy. The main problem with this sort of rhetoric - and with the Tory Party's attitude to sexuality - is not homophobia as such, but "heteronormativity." In other words, same-sex couples are tolerated as long as they conform to certain narrow and restrictive expectations. Society's general acceptance of homosexuality and divorce has liberalised attitudes to sexuality, but the boundaries are still more rigid than is often acknowledged. Homosexuality and bisexuality are tolerated as outlying exceptions that need to be crammed into the heteronormative marriage model, rather than accepted fully as part of the diversity of human relationships. Heteronormativity is also oppressive towards heterosexuals. The word describes an attitude that assumes that the ideal relationship involves a couple in a long-term relationship bringing up children.
Of course, many people are suited to this form of family. But the idealisation of this relationship relegates many people to second class status - including single, divorced and widowed people, children whose parents do not live together, couples without children and those who practise polyamory or other unconventional forms of relationships. It can also cause huge harm even to married, mixed-sex couples with children, pressuring them to live up to the ideal. As someone who was brought up in a Christian family, I find it particularly outrageous that many of those who defend heteronormativity most strongly often link it with Christianity. They use euphemistic phrases such as "family values." Many people who have read the Gospels must surely find it baffling that so many followers of Jesus are keen to support "family values," given how much effort Jesus seemed to put into opposing them. He differed from the expectations of his time by not getting married, he allowed women to make physical contact with him in a society that disapproved of it and he shocked observers by befriending prostitutes. Jesus even redefined family, asking: "Who are my mother and my brothers?" and answering: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." Cameron hopes to draw in Christian voters and others with "traditional values" with his rhetoric about "supporting families." Responding to a question about the Pope in the second leaders' debate, he said that the Roman Catholic Church still has "work to do" to convince people that its intolerant views have changed. So does the Tory Party.
Unlike Grayling, Lewis stuck to his guns when challenged by the press. Lewis's desire to protect young people from sexually transmitted infection might make sense if he wanted also to raise the age of consent for heterosexual acts. But while Lewis backs civil partnerships, his comments display a form of prejudice that is scarcely more subtle, associating gay and bisexual people with disease and assuming that it is acceptable for them to have fewer rights than others. The next two incidents involved less prominent individuals with rather more shockingly homophobic views. First Philip Lardner, Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran, claimed that homosexuality is not "normal." Then Philippa Stroud, candidate for the Tory target seat of Sutton and Cheam, hit the headlines for her involvement in the leadership of a homophobic church that "exorcises" people attracted to members of their own sex. While Lardner was removed, Stroud was allowed to stay. But then Lardner wasn't in a winnable seat. It seems that prejudiced and hateful attitudes lurk only slightly below the surface in Cameron's "new" Conservative Party. While Cameron has been keen to play down the embarrassing incidents, his own record of tolerance is hardly more laudable.
The Tory leader has said that his tax breaks for married couples would also apply to same-sex couples in civil partnerships, but he still hasn't adopted a policy of allowing same-sex marriage. In reality, the very existence of the tax breaks policy is based on a series of fundamental and fundamentally flawed Tory premises - that marriage is about going through a ceremony, rather than about what happens in people's hearts, that the interests of single people are not a priority, that couples must conform to conventional family structures and that - as Cameron said several times in the televised leaders' debates - it is "families" that really matter. Of course, it is not only the Tories who talk of prioritising families. The term "hard-working families" has been a catchphrase of both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who appear to believe that all single people are lazy. The main problem with this sort of rhetoric - and with the Tory Party's attitude to sexuality - is not homophobia as such, but "heteronormativity." In other words, same-sex couples are tolerated as long as they conform to certain narrow and restrictive expectations. Society's general acceptance of homosexuality and divorce has liberalised attitudes to sexuality, but the boundaries are still more rigid than is often acknowledged. Homosexuality and bisexuality are tolerated as outlying exceptions that need to be crammed into the heteronormative marriage model, rather than accepted fully as part of the diversity of human relationships. Heteronormativity is also oppressive towards heterosexuals. The word describes an attitude that assumes that the ideal relationship involves a couple in a long-term relationship bringing up children.
Of course, many people are suited to this form of family. But the idealisation of this relationship relegates many people to second class status - including single, divorced and widowed people, children whose parents do not live together, couples without children and those who practise polyamory or other unconventional forms of relationships. It can also cause huge harm even to married, mixed-sex couples with children, pressuring them to live up to the ideal. As someone who was brought up in a Christian family, I find it particularly outrageous that many of those who defend heteronormativity most strongly often link it with Christianity. They use euphemistic phrases such as "family values." Many people who have read the Gospels must surely find it baffling that so many followers of Jesus are keen to support "family values," given how much effort Jesus seemed to put into opposing them. He differed from the expectations of his time by not getting married, he allowed women to make physical contact with him in a society that disapproved of it and he shocked observers by befriending prostitutes. Jesus even redefined family, asking: "Who are my mother and my brothers?" and answering: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." Cameron hopes to draw in Christian voters and others with "traditional values" with his rhetoric about "supporting families." Responding to a question about the Pope in the second leaders' debate, he said that the Roman Catholic Church still has "work to do" to convince people that its intolerant views have changed. So does the Tory Party.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Wake me up when the crisis is over
The state of the economy will continue to mould British politics after the election. Economics will constrain the room for manoeuvre of the political elite, pressing them to drive through a series of attacks. It will also create the terrain on which workers will have to organise and resist. The prospects for the system are, then, of keen interest to those who wish to challenge it. After almost three years of chaos, what lies in store? It is worth reminding ourselves of the enormity of the crisis that has unfolded around us. It is estimated that lost output, the goods and services that went unproduced during the crisis, amounts to $4 trillion - enough dollar bills to stretch to the sun and back twice over. That sum would also be sufficient to provide basic education, healthcare, sanitation and nutrition to all those on the planet currently denied them, and to do so for 30 years. According to Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England's director of financial stability (an oxymoron if ever there was one), the permanent long-term impact of the crisis could magnify these losses to anywhere from $60 trillion to $200 trillion. One of the oldest and most powerful arguments for socialism is the gap between what the system ought to make possible, the capacity of collective human labour to enrich the lives of those who undertake it, and the miserable reality of what it actually delivers. And every sign is that the impact of the crisis, which has already mutilated nations, tortured millions with hunger and sparked both instability and resistance, will continue to be felt.
A year ago economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke published research showing that the "Great Recession", as it has been dubbed, was closely tracking the trajectory of the Great Depression that began in 1929. But history seldom repeats itself. In a recent update to their original paper they show how the global economy has begun to diverge from the path of that earlier meltdown. The action of states across the globe, which engineered a series of financial bailouts, stimulus packages and liquidity injections on a scale hitherto unseen, is largely responsible for preventing a 1930s-style slump. But this intervention has come at a great price. Socialising the risks associated with the crisis, at the very moment when tax revenues were spiralling down, has replaced the danger of a private-sector meltdown with that of entire nations becoming bankrupt. Events in Greece this spring are the clearest example. After months of insisting that it would not bail out the heavily indebted Greek economy, the German government, along with the other eurozone countries and in partnership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), agreed to do just that. The bailout comes with strings attached - Greek workers, a fifth of whom already live below the poverty line, will now face a structural adjustment programme as savage as that imposed on many Third World countries in the past. In return the IMF and eurozone government will guarantee that Greece can, in the short term, roll over its debt. Even this may well merely postpone the inevitable as markets continue to bet on an eventual default.
But even if Greece does avoid bankruptcy, this is not the end of the matter. Several financial columnists likened the bailout to that of Bear Stearns, which in spring 2008 became an early casualty of the crisis on Wall Street. Few people now remember Bear Stearns, but most do remember the next big Wall Street bank to collapse - Lehman Brothers - and the meltdown that followed. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Britain. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott writes, "Greece's...projected budget deficit in 2010 is lower than those for the US, Ireland and, of course, Britain. The UK is helped by the long maturity of its existing debt, which removes some of the short-term pressures on government bonds, and by its floating exchange rate, which allows the currency to take the strain during a financial crisis. On the other hand, there are plenty of off-balance-sheet liabilities, a record peacetime budget deficit, a dysfunctional financial system and a grotesquely unbalanced economy. "The assumption is that the US is too big to fail because the dollar is the world's reserve currency... The assumption is that Japan is too big to fail because a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 200 percent can always be financed by high levels of domestic savings. The assumption is that Britain is too big to fail because, well, just because those sort of things don't happen here." As Elliott points out, this is hardly reassuring.
All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: "weak", "fragile" and "uncertain". The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems capitalism faces. The conditions for the crisis were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. This argument, often made by Marxist commentators, occasionally finds an echo in the mainstream press. So a recent column in the Financial Times lamented the collapse of the "return on capital", roughly equivalent to what Karl Marx called the "rate of profit". It pointed out that after the Second World War this held up at about 15 percent in the US. By the 1980s it was 10 percent, and today it is just 5 percent. If these figures are to be trusted, the system has gone from a situation in which US firms could double the scale of their investment in just six years to one in which it would take two decades - hardly a great advert for the dynamism of global capitalism. Marx placed just such a long-term decline in the rate of profit at the centre of his theory of crisis. He also argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called "the annihilation of a great part of the capital". During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of "creative destruction" may lead to a boom following a slump.
But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies. The current crisis has led to a surge in firms failing. In the US the asset value of publicly listed companies filing for bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total for the preceding 28 years. However, so far the current crisis has not been long enough or deep enough to clear out the system and pave the way for a boom like that of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the big multinationals have been able to survive by reducing their output for a time in an attempt to ride out the storm. And, more importantly, states have intervened to keep failing businesses afloat, for instance by rescuing car manufacturers Chrysler and General Motors along with large chunks of the banking system. Eichengreen and O'Rourke contrast the length of the Great Recession with that of the Great Depression: "Global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years." Paradoxically, staving off a catastrophic slump may have simply guaranteed that problems linger on, ensuring that recovery remains weak. The recovery is also uneven.
Initial estimates suggested that British growth slowed to just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The US is growing faster, and is also faring better than Germany and Japan, which are more export-oriented and have suffered more from the decline in world trade than from the initial financial meltdown. China was also hit by falling demand for its exports but has continued to boom due to a massive state-sponsored domestic investment programme. This has revived the fortunes of some of the developing economies that supply it with raw materials. But even in China there are fears that growth is unstable, with widespread concerns about an emerging property bubble, a glut of lending raising the prospect of colossal levels of bad debt, and the danger that too much is being produced for still-limited markets. The weakness of the global recovery means that workers will continue to suffer. In some countries this takes the form of high unemployment and attacks on wages, as in the US, Spain and Ireland. In others, such as Germany and Japan, where unemployment has not risen as fast, companies have sought to hold on to workers but have cut pay rates, reduced hours or shifted workers onto part-time contracts. Britain lies somewhere between the two extremes. Wages have been held below the rate of inflation and unemployment has increased significantly. In April the jobless rate hit 8 percent, the highest it has been in 14 years. This figure excludes the growing number of people no longer looking for employment, which currently stands at over 21 percent of those of working age. In addition, the number of people working part-time because they cannot get full-time work is at its highest level since 1992.
Unemployment and underemployment will persist well into any recovery. A recent IMF report argues that employment falls further and takes longer to recover during recessions that have a significant financial component. The report indicates that it could take a year and a half from the end of the recession for any substantial improvement, assuming that the recovery continues. Accompanying the weakness of the recovery is its fragility. This is a product of changes to capitalism that took place during the past few decades. Faced with continued low profitability, capitalists began to shift their investment towards the financial system, where they hoped to be able to grab short-term paper profits. This created a series of bubbles as asset prices boomed, from the dotcom bubble of the 1990s through to the subprime mortgage and commodities bubbles that had swollen to huge proportions when the crash came. These bubbles flattered economies with the impression of dynamism and kept the system ploughing forwards. Underlying them was a "mega-bubble" of credit, fuelled by low interest rates and excess savings seeking a profitable outlet.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, one of the ruling class's most brutally honest spokespeople, argues, "Quite simply, the financial system has become bigger and riskier. The UK case is dramatic, with banking assets jumping from 50 percent of GDP to more than 550 percent over the past four decades... A large part of the financial system seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outside to inside, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole." He concludes that the financial system produced "illusory gains on the way up and real pain on the way down". The excesses of the bubble era now emerging are astonishing. April saw the beginning of a series of litigations against those who created the arcane financial instruments traded in the run-up to the crash. Goldman Sachs stands accused of repackaging loans, including what it knew to be toxic debts, in an asset it created for the Paulson hedge fund. Paulson could then bet on its failure, while unsuspecting buyers lost out. So too did companies who insured the investment, including RBS and AIG, in which the British and US governments respectively are now the majority shareholders. Goldman Sachs denies the allegations, but whatever the outcome of the case it sheds light on the increasingly bizarre and bloated world of finance. There is little evidence that the crash has "tamed" finance, as some left-leaning economists had hoped. Indeed, all the features of the bubble era are returning. Financial profits are growing far faster than profits in the wider economy; the housing market, which tumbled with the recession, is shooting back up, as are oil prices; speculation on exchange rates continues; banking bonuses are back. The super-rich are also returning to the conspicuous consumption to which they are accustomed, as evidenced by the 33 percent growth in sales of Dom Pérignon and similar high-end champagnes in the first three months of 2010.
Financialisation means each new problem that emerges is amplified as panic spreads rapidly through the system. This is what happened just before Christmas with the Dubai property crash and then in spring with events in Greece. All of this lends an additional fragility to the already weak recovery.
Finally, any recovery is and will remain uncertain. State interventions replaced private borrowing and investment with mountains of public debt, and falling tax revenues made it difficult to recover the money spent. Now governments everywhere face a dilemma. Do they cut back to pay off their debts, risking a "double-dip recession" as the stimulus is withdrawn? Or do they continue spending and risk a run on their currencies, as the eurozone experienced amid fears of a Greek default? Chris Giles writes in the Financial Times, "Never has a UK government borrowed more in peacetime than Labour did last year, when it was in the red to the tune of 11.8 percent of national income. Never has a government had to obtain £1 for every four it spends from investors rather than tax payers. And never has a government borrowed £6,000 annually, as in 2010-11, on behalf of every household, with a further £25,000 expected over the course of the coming parliament." Even if Britain avoids a complete loss of faith on the part of its financiers, the political elite is committed to an assault on the public sector the likes of which we have never seen. The general election result was unknown as Socialist Review went to press but the consensus between the parties in the run-up to polling day was greater than the differences. As Giles argues, "In terms of defined spending cuts, each [party] has outlined less than £10 billion worth - far less than the minimum £40 billion needed in the first three years." In order to appease the City of London real government spending will have to be slashed by about one fifth, he concludes.
Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a body representing human resources professionals, predicted "a 10 percent reduction in the 5.8 million core public sector workforce...the likelihood of 500,000 jobs being shed in the next five years dwarfing the figures the parties have been prepared to acknowledge".
The scale of the challenge facing the left can seem paralysing. But it is important to remember that crisis also weakens and divides our rulers. Capitalism has been discredited in the eyes of many who live under it as once solid certainties have melted into air. The crisis has sharpened the divisions within the ruling class, setting its representatives against each other as they each seek to find ways to preserve their profits at the expense of their rivals. Different groups of capitalists are coming into conflict on a global and national level, further fracturing the ideological consensuses of our age and creating cracks that the left can exploit by putting forward its own arguments. The political elite who claim to preside over the system have suffered blow after blow to their legitimacy. Any incoming government will be a weak one, lacking real hegemony over those it seeks to rule. But it will be under pressure from the wider ruling class to drive through attacks on an unprecedented scale, whether it does so enthusiastically or reluctantly. This is an explosive combination, and in this context there will be further struggles, both local eruptions and national disputes. Politics will be crucial to these battles. For instance, in order to break out of the commonsense view that some part of the public sector has to be slashed, it will be necessary to argue that there are other ways of raising the money - through cutting the budget for the Trident nuclear programme, for example, or closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich, or by increasing the top rate of income tax. That means challenging the agenda of the mainstream political parties.
Politics can also bridge the gap between local campaigns to defend public services and struggles by groups of workers in these services who also wish to defend their wages and their jobs. The Right to Work initiative, set to hold an emergency conference on 22 May, can begin to draw together a network of solidarity and resistance, strengthening each of the different battles and maintaining a permanent relationship between all those who want to fight back. At the heart of the resistance, we also need a growing core of revolutionaries committed to a socialist alternative to capitalism and capable of arguing for a way forward for the working class movement as a whole. The situation in the coming months can change very rapidly indeed. To rise to the challenge, the left must be able to match the pace of events.
A year ago economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke published research showing that the "Great Recession", as it has been dubbed, was closely tracking the trajectory of the Great Depression that began in 1929. But history seldom repeats itself. In a recent update to their original paper they show how the global economy has begun to diverge from the path of that earlier meltdown. The action of states across the globe, which engineered a series of financial bailouts, stimulus packages and liquidity injections on a scale hitherto unseen, is largely responsible for preventing a 1930s-style slump. But this intervention has come at a great price. Socialising the risks associated with the crisis, at the very moment when tax revenues were spiralling down, has replaced the danger of a private-sector meltdown with that of entire nations becoming bankrupt. Events in Greece this spring are the clearest example. After months of insisting that it would not bail out the heavily indebted Greek economy, the German government, along with the other eurozone countries and in partnership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), agreed to do just that. The bailout comes with strings attached - Greek workers, a fifth of whom already live below the poverty line, will now face a structural adjustment programme as savage as that imposed on many Third World countries in the past. In return the IMF and eurozone government will guarantee that Greece can, in the short term, roll over its debt. Even this may well merely postpone the inevitable as markets continue to bet on an eventual default.
But even if Greece does avoid bankruptcy, this is not the end of the matter. Several financial columnists likened the bailout to that of Bear Stearns, which in spring 2008 became an early casualty of the crisis on Wall Street. Few people now remember Bear Stearns, but most do remember the next big Wall Street bank to collapse - Lehman Brothers - and the meltdown that followed. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Britain. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott writes, "Greece's...projected budget deficit in 2010 is lower than those for the US, Ireland and, of course, Britain. The UK is helped by the long maturity of its existing debt, which removes some of the short-term pressures on government bonds, and by its floating exchange rate, which allows the currency to take the strain during a financial crisis. On the other hand, there are plenty of off-balance-sheet liabilities, a record peacetime budget deficit, a dysfunctional financial system and a grotesquely unbalanced economy. "The assumption is that the US is too big to fail because the dollar is the world's reserve currency... The assumption is that Japan is too big to fail because a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 200 percent can always be financed by high levels of domestic savings. The assumption is that Britain is too big to fail because, well, just because those sort of things don't happen here." As Elliott points out, this is hardly reassuring.
All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: "weak", "fragile" and "uncertain". The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems capitalism faces. The conditions for the crisis were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. This argument, often made by Marxist commentators, occasionally finds an echo in the mainstream press. So a recent column in the Financial Times lamented the collapse of the "return on capital", roughly equivalent to what Karl Marx called the "rate of profit". It pointed out that after the Second World War this held up at about 15 percent in the US. By the 1980s it was 10 percent, and today it is just 5 percent. If these figures are to be trusted, the system has gone from a situation in which US firms could double the scale of their investment in just six years to one in which it would take two decades - hardly a great advert for the dynamism of global capitalism. Marx placed just such a long-term decline in the rate of profit at the centre of his theory of crisis. He also argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called "the annihilation of a great part of the capital". During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of "creative destruction" may lead to a boom following a slump.
But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies. The current crisis has led to a surge in firms failing. In the US the asset value of publicly listed companies filing for bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total for the preceding 28 years. However, so far the current crisis has not been long enough or deep enough to clear out the system and pave the way for a boom like that of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the big multinationals have been able to survive by reducing their output for a time in an attempt to ride out the storm. And, more importantly, states have intervened to keep failing businesses afloat, for instance by rescuing car manufacturers Chrysler and General Motors along with large chunks of the banking system. Eichengreen and O'Rourke contrast the length of the Great Recession with that of the Great Depression: "Global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years." Paradoxically, staving off a catastrophic slump may have simply guaranteed that problems linger on, ensuring that recovery remains weak. The recovery is also uneven.
Initial estimates suggested that British growth slowed to just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The US is growing faster, and is also faring better than Germany and Japan, which are more export-oriented and have suffered more from the decline in world trade than from the initial financial meltdown. China was also hit by falling demand for its exports but has continued to boom due to a massive state-sponsored domestic investment programme. This has revived the fortunes of some of the developing economies that supply it with raw materials. But even in China there are fears that growth is unstable, with widespread concerns about an emerging property bubble, a glut of lending raising the prospect of colossal levels of bad debt, and the danger that too much is being produced for still-limited markets. The weakness of the global recovery means that workers will continue to suffer. In some countries this takes the form of high unemployment and attacks on wages, as in the US, Spain and Ireland. In others, such as Germany and Japan, where unemployment has not risen as fast, companies have sought to hold on to workers but have cut pay rates, reduced hours or shifted workers onto part-time contracts. Britain lies somewhere between the two extremes. Wages have been held below the rate of inflation and unemployment has increased significantly. In April the jobless rate hit 8 percent, the highest it has been in 14 years. This figure excludes the growing number of people no longer looking for employment, which currently stands at over 21 percent of those of working age. In addition, the number of people working part-time because they cannot get full-time work is at its highest level since 1992.
Unemployment and underemployment will persist well into any recovery. A recent IMF report argues that employment falls further and takes longer to recover during recessions that have a significant financial component. The report indicates that it could take a year and a half from the end of the recession for any substantial improvement, assuming that the recovery continues. Accompanying the weakness of the recovery is its fragility. This is a product of changes to capitalism that took place during the past few decades. Faced with continued low profitability, capitalists began to shift their investment towards the financial system, where they hoped to be able to grab short-term paper profits. This created a series of bubbles as asset prices boomed, from the dotcom bubble of the 1990s through to the subprime mortgage and commodities bubbles that had swollen to huge proportions when the crash came. These bubbles flattered economies with the impression of dynamism and kept the system ploughing forwards. Underlying them was a "mega-bubble" of credit, fuelled by low interest rates and excess savings seeking a profitable outlet.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, one of the ruling class's most brutally honest spokespeople, argues, "Quite simply, the financial system has become bigger and riskier. The UK case is dramatic, with banking assets jumping from 50 percent of GDP to more than 550 percent over the past four decades... A large part of the financial system seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outside to inside, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole." He concludes that the financial system produced "illusory gains on the way up and real pain on the way down". The excesses of the bubble era now emerging are astonishing. April saw the beginning of a series of litigations against those who created the arcane financial instruments traded in the run-up to the crash. Goldman Sachs stands accused of repackaging loans, including what it knew to be toxic debts, in an asset it created for the Paulson hedge fund. Paulson could then bet on its failure, while unsuspecting buyers lost out. So too did companies who insured the investment, including RBS and AIG, in which the British and US governments respectively are now the majority shareholders. Goldman Sachs denies the allegations, but whatever the outcome of the case it sheds light on the increasingly bizarre and bloated world of finance. There is little evidence that the crash has "tamed" finance, as some left-leaning economists had hoped. Indeed, all the features of the bubble era are returning. Financial profits are growing far faster than profits in the wider economy; the housing market, which tumbled with the recession, is shooting back up, as are oil prices; speculation on exchange rates continues; banking bonuses are back. The super-rich are also returning to the conspicuous consumption to which they are accustomed, as evidenced by the 33 percent growth in sales of Dom Pérignon and similar high-end champagnes in the first three months of 2010.
Financialisation means each new problem that emerges is amplified as panic spreads rapidly through the system. This is what happened just before Christmas with the Dubai property crash and then in spring with events in Greece. All of this lends an additional fragility to the already weak recovery.
Finally, any recovery is and will remain uncertain. State interventions replaced private borrowing and investment with mountains of public debt, and falling tax revenues made it difficult to recover the money spent. Now governments everywhere face a dilemma. Do they cut back to pay off their debts, risking a "double-dip recession" as the stimulus is withdrawn? Or do they continue spending and risk a run on their currencies, as the eurozone experienced amid fears of a Greek default? Chris Giles writes in the Financial Times, "Never has a UK government borrowed more in peacetime than Labour did last year, when it was in the red to the tune of 11.8 percent of national income. Never has a government had to obtain £1 for every four it spends from investors rather than tax payers. And never has a government borrowed £6,000 annually, as in 2010-11, on behalf of every household, with a further £25,000 expected over the course of the coming parliament." Even if Britain avoids a complete loss of faith on the part of its financiers, the political elite is committed to an assault on the public sector the likes of which we have never seen. The general election result was unknown as Socialist Review went to press but the consensus between the parties in the run-up to polling day was greater than the differences. As Giles argues, "In terms of defined spending cuts, each [party] has outlined less than £10 billion worth - far less than the minimum £40 billion needed in the first three years." In order to appease the City of London real government spending will have to be slashed by about one fifth, he concludes.
Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a body representing human resources professionals, predicted "a 10 percent reduction in the 5.8 million core public sector workforce...the likelihood of 500,000 jobs being shed in the next five years dwarfing the figures the parties have been prepared to acknowledge".
The scale of the challenge facing the left can seem paralysing. But it is important to remember that crisis also weakens and divides our rulers. Capitalism has been discredited in the eyes of many who live under it as once solid certainties have melted into air. The crisis has sharpened the divisions within the ruling class, setting its representatives against each other as they each seek to find ways to preserve their profits at the expense of their rivals. Different groups of capitalists are coming into conflict on a global and national level, further fracturing the ideological consensuses of our age and creating cracks that the left can exploit by putting forward its own arguments. The political elite who claim to preside over the system have suffered blow after blow to their legitimacy. Any incoming government will be a weak one, lacking real hegemony over those it seeks to rule. But it will be under pressure from the wider ruling class to drive through attacks on an unprecedented scale, whether it does so enthusiastically or reluctantly. This is an explosive combination, and in this context there will be further struggles, both local eruptions and national disputes. Politics will be crucial to these battles. For instance, in order to break out of the commonsense view that some part of the public sector has to be slashed, it will be necessary to argue that there are other ways of raising the money - through cutting the budget for the Trident nuclear programme, for example, or closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich, or by increasing the top rate of income tax. That means challenging the agenda of the mainstream political parties.
Politics can also bridge the gap between local campaigns to defend public services and struggles by groups of workers in these services who also wish to defend their wages and their jobs. The Right to Work initiative, set to hold an emergency conference on 22 May, can begin to draw together a network of solidarity and resistance, strengthening each of the different battles and maintaining a permanent relationship between all those who want to fight back. At the heart of the resistance, we also need a growing core of revolutionaries committed to a socialist alternative to capitalism and capable of arguing for a way forward for the working class movement as a whole. The situation in the coming months can change very rapidly indeed. To rise to the challenge, the left must be able to match the pace of events.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Being gay is still an issue
Last October, the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote one of the most bigoted and despicable articles that odious right-wing rag has seen fit to publish. She was responding to the untimely death of pop idol Stephen Gately. Despite the coroner's report which stated that Gately had died of natural causes Moir decided that she knew better - Gately was gay and therefore his "lifestyle" meant his death could not have been natural. It wasn't just that it was insensitive to his family and friends to write such an article before Gately had even been buried, it was also an attack on all the advances gay people have made in the last decade. According to Moir, civil partnerships cause suicide, while homosexuality is an unnatural lifestyle connected with promiscuity and drug taking which does not deserve to be regarded in the same way as heterosexual relationships. So far, so depressing, but there is a brighter side to this story. Moir got more than she bargained for when she penned this reactionary drivel. Within hours of the story going to print the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was being bombarded by those who were disgusted by the Daily Mail piece. Within a day the PCC had issued a statement saying that it had already received a record number of complaints and the reaction to her piece went to the top of the news agenda, helped no doubt by the star quality of her victim.
While Moir's article was a throwback to the '70s, the response was something new. It's not just that there was no email and Twitter back then, although that certainly speeded up the ability of people to write in. There has been a significant cultural shift against this kind of bigotry, even if the Daily Mail isn't printing the letters. You'd have to have a heart made of stone not to recognise the importance of that shift, but sadly there is no time for complacency because it is not just in the fetid corridors of the Mail that homophobia still exists. In the same week in Trafalgar Square Ian Baynham, a 62-year-old gay man on his way home, was attacked by a small gang of youths who hurled homophobic abuse at him and then kicked him to death; astonishingly, none of them were brought to justice. If anyone thought that homophobia was confined to an older generation raised with less enlightened values, they had better think again. The fact that Baynham's attackers were young men and women is a warning to us all that we need to be ensuring our schools are part of the fight against bigotry. "There have been major changes in some areas like civil partnerships, equal age of consent etc but we have to contrast this with problems at schools," says London Assembly Member Darren Johnson. "Bullying in many schools is as bad now as it was 30 years ago. We need to tackle this, taking a much more proactive approach."
Johnson's view is shared by Charlotte Dingle, editor of gay and bisexual women's magazine G3. She tells the Morning Star: "I think homophobia is slowly on the wane, but it's atrocious that things aren't moving faster. I think there's a widespread misconception that because of changes in the law gay people are now more or less treated equally. It's not all about laws, though. People's attitudes still desperately need changing. "The fact that people are still spouting homophobic rubbish in our papers and on our TVs and not being properly held to account, because, oh, it was a 'joke,' makes my blood boil. I'm afraid I don't have much truck with the political correctness gone mad brigade. The situation in schools is still pretty awful, despite the best efforts of groups like Stonewall campaigning to try and change kids' attitudes. There need to be far more regulations in place preventing gay children being bullied - indeed, this is one of the most important issues that needs addressing for the gay community in this country. Teachers just don't want to address the problem, mainly because they don't know how to, and they don't know what they're allowed to say or do. This needs to change." In 2008 the campaigning organisation Stonewall commissioned YouGov to conduct a comprehensive poll of lesbian and gay people. It found that one in five had suffered from some form of homophobic attack in the previous three years. For those who think we're living in a liberal utopia where bigotry has been abolished that may come as something of a shock.
Due to changes in the way that hate crimes have been recorded it is difficult to draw out a definitive picture of long-term UK statistics in hate crime, but what's clear is that there are two dominant trends. First, that it is easier to be openly gay now than at any time in the last 50 years. Second, that this is not the same thing as saying that we have wiped out homophobia from society - far from it. There is a social movement against prejudice that we can draw on. Sadly we're going to have to do just that, because there is an anti-social movement for prejudice that must be faced up to. The answer lies in reaching into every part of society to challenge stereotypes and equip those in positions of authority, like teachers, with the arguments and training they need. People in the media like small-minded Radio One DJ Chris Moyles who undermine the good work of campaigners against homophobia also need to be challenged. As Mark Healey, the organiser of a vigil in Trafalgar Square next week against homophobic attacks, says, "we need to unite against all forms of hate crime, stand together and say out loud that this is no longer acceptable in our society anymore." We certainly can't just sit back and assume things will get better on their own.
While Moir's article was a throwback to the '70s, the response was something new. It's not just that there was no email and Twitter back then, although that certainly speeded up the ability of people to write in. There has been a significant cultural shift against this kind of bigotry, even if the Daily Mail isn't printing the letters. You'd have to have a heart made of stone not to recognise the importance of that shift, but sadly there is no time for complacency because it is not just in the fetid corridors of the Mail that homophobia still exists. In the same week in Trafalgar Square Ian Baynham, a 62-year-old gay man on his way home, was attacked by a small gang of youths who hurled homophobic abuse at him and then kicked him to death; astonishingly, none of them were brought to justice. If anyone thought that homophobia was confined to an older generation raised with less enlightened values, they had better think again. The fact that Baynham's attackers were young men and women is a warning to us all that we need to be ensuring our schools are part of the fight against bigotry. "There have been major changes in some areas like civil partnerships, equal age of consent etc but we have to contrast this with problems at schools," says London Assembly Member Darren Johnson. "Bullying in many schools is as bad now as it was 30 years ago. We need to tackle this, taking a much more proactive approach."
Johnson's view is shared by Charlotte Dingle, editor of gay and bisexual women's magazine G3. She tells the Morning Star: "I think homophobia is slowly on the wane, but it's atrocious that things aren't moving faster. I think there's a widespread misconception that because of changes in the law gay people are now more or less treated equally. It's not all about laws, though. People's attitudes still desperately need changing. "The fact that people are still spouting homophobic rubbish in our papers and on our TVs and not being properly held to account, because, oh, it was a 'joke,' makes my blood boil. I'm afraid I don't have much truck with the political correctness gone mad brigade. The situation in schools is still pretty awful, despite the best efforts of groups like Stonewall campaigning to try and change kids' attitudes. There need to be far more regulations in place preventing gay children being bullied - indeed, this is one of the most important issues that needs addressing for the gay community in this country. Teachers just don't want to address the problem, mainly because they don't know how to, and they don't know what they're allowed to say or do. This needs to change." In 2008 the campaigning organisation Stonewall commissioned YouGov to conduct a comprehensive poll of lesbian and gay people. It found that one in five had suffered from some form of homophobic attack in the previous three years. For those who think we're living in a liberal utopia where bigotry has been abolished that may come as something of a shock.
Due to changes in the way that hate crimes have been recorded it is difficult to draw out a definitive picture of long-term UK statistics in hate crime, but what's clear is that there are two dominant trends. First, that it is easier to be openly gay now than at any time in the last 50 years. Second, that this is not the same thing as saying that we have wiped out homophobia from society - far from it. There is a social movement against prejudice that we can draw on. Sadly we're going to have to do just that, because there is an anti-social movement for prejudice that must be faced up to. The answer lies in reaching into every part of society to challenge stereotypes and equip those in positions of authority, like teachers, with the arguments and training they need. People in the media like small-minded Radio One DJ Chris Moyles who undermine the good work of campaigners against homophobia also need to be challenged. As Mark Healey, the organiser of a vigil in Trafalgar Square next week against homophobic attacks, says, "we need to unite against all forms of hate crime, stand together and say out loud that this is no longer acceptable in our society anymore." We certainly can't just sit back and assume things will get better on their own.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Britain's shifting racism spectre
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.
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.
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