19.07.2000

Party notes

Welcome where?

If it has any sense, the left must learn some lessons from the by-election in Bexley's North End ward.

In a poor, run down, working class area, the British National Party took second place to Labour, scoring 26.2% of the vote, pushing the Tories and Liberal Democrats into third and fourth place as also-rans - a result which will fill the fascists with confidence for future contests.

Of course, it could have been much, much better for them. A Guardian journalist took a trip to the area and came across two typical local men, Ken and Del. Neither had bothered to vote, although both expressed views which actually made them ideal BNP election fodder. The journalist, Paul Kelso, concludes that, "Apathy may yet halt the racists' progress" (July 15). The left would be ill-advised to be so complacent.

The result coincides with the opening of a debate on the slogan, 'Refugees are welcome here', one of the main campaigning points of the London Socialist Alliance in its various electoral outings so far. On various web discussion lists, comrades have been getting stroppy with each other over the slogan. Even in the painfully anodyne letters page of Socialist Worker, a correspondent has been allowed to question its worth: "Most people I've talked to see it as aimed from Socialist Worker at them," says Ben Drake of York (July 15).

My own experience canvassing for the LSA bears this out. It is deeply flawed as a slogan on a number of levels.

First, because the politics it encapsulates are not formulated as a demand on anyone. It does not explicitly call on the government to make refugees welcome here, to end their foul harassment. So what is it? An aspiration? Is it meant to be a description of the real state of affairs in working class communities in contrast to the chauvinism of the government - 'Hands off our brothers and sisters from other countries', in other words?

That, unfortunately, is nonsense. Amongst wide swathes of our class, the brutal fact is that refugees are not welcome, are viewed with deep suspicion and - incredibly - as relatively privileged competitors for scarce local resources. In many of the poorest working class areas, the level of demoralisation and defeat is such that the pathetic amounts of state aid being given to asylum-seekers engenders violent resentment. The hostility to these new 'outsiders' is inversely proportional to the ability of our class to fight and win on its own account. If workers in this country were confident, politically and organisationally strong with a genuinely independent working class culture, the arrival of refugees would spontaneously prompt solidarity rather than brutality, fear and hatred.

Areas of leafy Hampstead and Highgate, for example, have witnessed a relatively large influx of eastern European economic migrants over the last 10 years or so - typically the new lumpen rich from the former Soviet Union - but with no violent backlash. Why would there be? The arrivals pose no threat in terms of new claims on already beleaguered social services like house provision or schooling. Bexley's North End is a little different, of course.

The slogan, 'Refugees are welcome here' - even when raised as part of a broader package of demands - smacks of patronising finger-wagging towards working class communities. It seems to suggest that if they are not welcome, it is the fault of those communities. Clearly, a far better call for this essentially defensive period is 'Refugees are not to blame', which challenges the claim that they are responsible for "poor public services, housing shortages, job losses and low pensions" - to quote Ben Drake's letter to Socialist Worker.

It is truly remarkable that working class people in the south east of London have turned to an organisation like the BNP, which despite its recent image makeover under a relatively urbane new leader, remains deeply scarred by its Nazism. Because of the isolation of the left from the working class, the BNP has been able to pose itself as the radical alternative to Labour in some areas of the country.

Until very recently, the response of the Socialist Workers Party to the BNP's moral victory in Bexley would have been to flood the area with posters, stickers and leaflets telling people, 'Don't vote Nazi' - with the strong implication that they had best carry on voting Labour. Yet it is precisely the experience of Labour in power - locally and now nationally - that has driven sections of our class to such despair that they have turned to these scum in the ballot box. The SWP line implicated revolutionaries and socialists in the betrayals of Labour.

Of course, the BNP is a Nazi party. Which makes it doubtful whether, in its present form, it could achieve a genuine national breakthrough. Yet its successes underline once again that space exists in Britain for a mass, reactionary movement of the right. And, of course reaction, national chauvinism and worries about new migrants are not confined to so-called white racists. My local Asian newsagent complains bitterly and at length about asylum-seekers, about how they have 'jumped' housing waiting lists, about the noise, the smell, their light-fingered kids swarming all over his Pokémon display case. He does not see the irony that the same sort of things were said about his parents when they arrived. Those already here define themselves negatively against the latest 'outsiders' to arrive on these shores.

How should we respond? First, by recognising that the 'lost' 26.2% are our people, our class. We must fight any attempt to demonise them as racists, from whichever political direction. They have responded in a 'common-sense' way to the situation they have been forced into by decades of neglect by Labour and - unfortunately - much of the revolutionary left. The local authority in the area plans to stage yet another anti-racism festival in September, with the more or less explicit message that the attitudes of the local poor whites is the problem, and the enlightened bureaucracy needs to 'educate' them.

Official anti-racism thus racialises the politics of working class communities, making every dubiously defined group into ethnic supplicants to the local state. In such circumstances, it is not hard to see how the BNP's 'Rights for whites' slogan might have resonance. The strength of the fascists is that they have a programme that appears to answer pressing questions for sections of our class.

By definition, socialist ideas have to cut against mainstream prejudices: they have to fight for an audience. The LSA commitment to challenge Labour nationally in the next general election represents the beginnings of the left taking its responsibilities to our class seriously. As illustrated in Bexley, we have a long way to go.