27.05.1999

Germany calling

As part of their ongoing pitch for bourgeois respectability, the British National Party’s TV political broadcast for June’s European elections screened on Friday May 21. Having stumped up the cash to stand in all English European constituencies, as well as in Scotland and Wales, John Tyndall’s Hitler-saluting boneheads are making another attempt to make a breakthrough to the big time.

The film was full of the Union Flag, the Westminster parliament, British democracy and, incredibly, the sacrifice of ordinary Brits in World War II. The opening shot of the five-minute piece started with “Our glorious dead” etched into the cenotaph on Whitehall, panning down to a Churchillian John Tyndall, damning the European superstate and its threats to Britain. The broadcast never deviated from this script. Let’s get out of Europe. British jobs for British people. Europe is destroying ‘our’ economic base. There was also reference to Britain’s mythical ‘thousand years of unbroken history’ - echoes of John Major’s 1997 election campaign.

Of course, the would-be Führer failed to mention his retrospective sympathies for and desire to emulate Nazi Germany, his belief that Britain and the Germans should have fought Russia side by side in World War II, his denial of the holocaust against Jews, gypsies, communists, gays and other ‘alien’ elements, nor his party’s sickening racist ‘send ’em back’ programme. This self-censorship is part and parcel of Tyndall’s ‘constitutional’ turn. A cynical or genuine turn which has led to former supporters splitting away into Combat 18 and other forms of deranged terrorism.

Far from parading fascist credentials, the BNP is attempting to present itself as a political alternative for a xenophobic British chauvinism. Fat chance. As its party political half-consciously reflects, official Britain has been moulded as an antithesis to the Hitlerite politics of the BNP. Modern Britishness is “our finest hour”; Churchill, the blitz, Dunkirk, D-Day and anti-Nazism. And as official Britain is being reshaped by Blair, the emergent consensus is based on inclusive, bourgeois anti-racism - against the outside world.

Yet much of the left had a near hysterical reaction to the BNP’s broadcast. The SWP obviously fears the power of the BNP message. Either that or it fears for its own ability to answer the BNP and tear away its veil of respectability. Falling behind the liberals, the SWP implies that the BNP should be banned. It asks: why did the BBC and the state allow the BNP broadcast to go ahead? Of course, the SWP would have us believe that the state is involved in a vast conspiracy to protect the Nazis. While they fall short of actually calling on the state to ban the BNP or its propaganda, they do nothing to challenge this draconian demand from the likes of Mark Wadsworth and the Anti-Racist Alliance.

Given the BNP’s pathetic sociopathic mimicking of Hitlerism, Tyndall’s motley crew has no hope of cohering any serious base. They have no hope of following in the footsteps of the Saxe-Coburgs and becoming British. They are not an integral part of the high establishment. Their Hitlerphilia is too engrained, their ranks too tainted. On the contrary, they are viewed as thoroughly unBritish. The SWP’s hysteria fits neatly into the ideology of the ruling class, based as it is on ‘us versus the Nazis’. The SWP’s flirting with statism - bans limiting freedom of speech, legal restrictions, is utterly short-term and seems more to do with pursuing recruits and bolstering the sect than actually challenging the real sources of fascism. - the capitalist system.

Worryingly, the only organisation articulating any consistent or ‘credible’ little-British vision in the June 10 European elections is Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party. While any attempt to directly equate the SLP’s politics with the BNP’s would be out of order, the election campaigns of both organisations appear to be aimed at the same chauvinist nervous system - the main difference being the BNP appeals to an exclusive white Britishness, the SLP to a more ‘modern’ multi-ethnic Britishness. Announcing the launch of its Euro-election campaign, an SLP press release declares it is “the only socialist party campaigning for Britain’s immediate and complete withdrawal from the European Union” (emphasis added). The “only socialist” tag is needed because this central demand of the SLP is also the central demand of the BNP and the UK Independence Party. Amazingly, the respectable BNP broadcast was almost indistinguishable from the SLP’s stress on British freedom from Brussels.

To cover themselves, the SLP’s press release clams that “Socialist Labour is not nationalistic or jingoists [sic]; we want to get out of the EU and back into the world. We want to trade with the countries of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America”. As if British capitalism was not doing that today. But what Scargill has in mind is pulling Britain out of the EU and imposing a national socialism. Such a policy would, if implemented, condemn Britain to dire poverty. It seamlessly segues with the thoughts of Ella Rule, SLP London candidate, Stalin Society member and secretary of the Korean Friendship Society when she says that North Korea gives us an image of “what we are all fighting for” and that the system in Britain that “replaces capitalism will be like North Korea”.

Such a system has nothing to do with the proletarian socialism envisaged by Marx and Engels. Proletarian socialism - the first stage of communism - must be based on the advanced capitalist countries. In the contemporary world that means the economies of the European Union, Japan and North America. If the policy of “Vote us in to get us out” is ever successful – whether from the SLP or the BNP – it would spell disaster for the British working class and throw back the project of genuine socialism for many decades.

Marcus Larsen