22.09.2004

No to state bans

The increased electoral success of the British National Party has been met with threats by the home office to bar members of the BNP from being employed as civil servants. But, reports Tina Becker, the recent federal elections in Germany show that a campaign to illegitimatise and even ban the rightwing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands has backfired badly - the NPD for the first time in decades now has representation in a state parliament

The increased electoral success of the British National Party has been met with threats by the home office to bar members of the BNP from being employed as civil servants. But, reports Tina Becker, the recent federal elections in Germany show that a campaign to illegitimatise and even ban the rightwing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands has backfired badly - the NPD for the first time in decades now has representation in a state parliament

Should socialists and communists call for a ban on rightwing extremists putting forward their disgusting views? Should we support home secretary David Blunkett, who is “considering” barring members of the BNP from the civil service (Sunday Times September 19 2004)?

Undoubtedly, the BNP’s recent electoral successes will have fuelled the government’s overblown reaction and it has to show that it is doing something … On September 16 the BNP polled 51.8% in the Goresbrook by-election in east London’s Barking and Dagenham. The week before, on September 9, it polled 53% in Keighley’s Guard House ward in West Yorkshire - the biggest ever share of the vote for the BNP since its foundation in 1982.

The BNP now has 24 councillors, but there are over 22,000 of them across Britain. So we are not about to witness “the Nazis” taking over. However, their increased electoral support certainly does reflect a crisis of the political establishment. Support for protest parties like the BNP (and Respect, for that matter) show that many people do not feel represented by a Labour government that has taken us into a war most people opposed and now privatises everything from the local hospital to the postal service.

Undoubtedly, real chauvinism and racism in society also play a big role in electoral support for the BNP. In particular the government’s so-called ‘war on terror’ has - as a means of social control - successfully created not only fear in many people’s minds, but also hostility and suspicion towards muslims. Often there is a direct relationship between the numbers of muslims living in a locality and the support the BNP receives (east London, Bradford, Oldham, etc).

This level of support is unlikely to carry over into the general elections, which will presumably take place sometime in 2005. During a general election, people are usually less likely to ‘experiment’ or protest with their vote, sticking instead to the established parties. In 2001, for example, the 33 BNP candidates got on average only 3.74% (with a high of 16% in one constituency in Oldham).

However, revolutionary socialists and communists cannot afford to simply wait for the BNP to go away. Particularly in a local community where the BNP polls over 50%, the left needs to actively engage with those who have illusions in the right. It would be a disastrous mistake to view them simply as “the scum from the estates”, as the Socialist Workers Party’s Julie Waterson (then one of the leaders of the Anti-Nazi League) put it at the Socialist Alliance conference in May 2003 (see Weekly Worker May 15 2003). And the majority of those voters will not be “Nazis” either. Most of them will be pretty normal, white working class men and women, who feel lost and disempowered by the effects of capitalism.
That so many people feel attracted to the scumbags of the BNP should really set alarm bells ringing. Quite clearly, we should challenge rightwing candidates in terms of propaganda; crucially, though, the left needs to be organising amongst the BNP’s electoral base against low pay, against council cuts, against bad housing. Only that way can such backward sections begin to realise that in working class unity lies strength, in division and sectionalism, only weakness, manipulation and further demoralisation.

The ANL, which called for an outright state ban on the BNP, has shut up shop in favour of Unite Against Fascism, an organisation which is supported by many national trade unions and Labour MPs (Peter Hain tops the list). Like the ANL, it exhorts us: ‘Don’t vote Nazi’. But please do feel free to vote Labour, Lib Dem or even Tory instead - all parties which, through their anti-immigrant scaremongering and attacks on asylum-seekers, have laid the groundwork for BNP’s success. And there is not a single word from UAF on Blunkett’s BNP proposals either.

The proposed state ban on civil servants joining the BNP should be rejected by all democrats and socialists. We favour workers themselves exposing and if need be driving out hard-line racists (although, of course, in general we try to overcome backward ideas by persuasion and active involvement in the class struggle, not management policing).

Just like a full-blown ban on the organisation itself, Blunkett’s proposal would most likely have the diametrically opposite effect to the one intended: the BNP would have its anti-establishment credentials boosted no end. In all likelihood that would make it even more attractive to many.

And once such a ban has been introduced to deal with the right, what is to stop it being used against the left? No one should forget the ‘Berufsverbote’ in west Germany, which has only recently been removed. For more than three decades, over three million teachers and civil servants were vetted by the state. Many, many thousands were harassed, intimidated, sacked and blacklisted as a result of their alleged or actual membership of the German Communist Party (the DKP, successor of the 1956 banned Communist Party of Germany, the KPD).

After a ban on the BNP, what next? If Tony Blair were to follow the German example, all organisations and parties advocating verfassungsfeindliche (unconstitutional) measures would be outlawed.
Even with its terrible history of mass arrests and state extermination, the left in Germany still makes outraged calls for the state to ban “the fascists”. The Party of Democratic Socialism, for example, initiated moves in the German parliament to outlaw the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) - even though in some federal states the PDS itself is subject to official state surveillance.

The NPD has become the most visible and vocal far-right force Germany has seen for decades. In last week’s federal elections in the east German state of Saxony, it won nine percent and now has 12 representatives in the state parliament - one less than the governing party, the Social Democrats. In the west German state of Saarland, it polled over four percent a few weeks ago. No more than a small part of this electoral support comes from hardcore Nazis.

In the east of Germany, the effects of the re-introduction of capitalism have been devastating for large sections of the working class. Consequently the mainstream parties are suffering heavy losses in elections, with both the NPD and PDS (the former ruling party of the German Democratic Republic) making gains. The PDS won 28% of the vote in the east German state of Brandenburg and 23.6% in Saxony, coming a strong second in both.

In 1972, the NPD was represented in seven of the 11 West German federal parliaments but, as a result of infighting and the general rightward turn of the mainstream parties, became marginalised in the 80s and 90s. In recent years, it has slowly risen to become the main far right party, ahead of both the Republikaner and the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU) - although the DVU also picked up six percent in Brandenburg last week.

The NPD, however, has been able to present itself as a national ‘fighting organisation’ and has recruited many members of the more ‘respectable’ Republikaner and DVU. It organises combat training camps for its youth section and has worked hard to become the party that most openly glorifies Germany’s Nazi era; the party that most viciously campaigns against the Nicht-Deutsche (non-Germans), while attacking the “capitalist government elite”.

Support for the NPD really started to gather pace last year, after the German parliament unsuccessfully tried to ban it. The whole Bundestag - including the PDS - supported the official application to the Bundesgerichtshof (supreme court), which is the only body that can ban political parties (and has done so twice: in 1952 proscribing the extreme rightwing Sozialistische Reichspartei and in 1956 outlawing the communists).

The result was an embarrassment: during the hearings, it transpired that around 15% of the NPD leadership were agents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (national news service - the harmless-sounding name for the German secret service) - quite a few of them were even founding members. It emerged that not a few of these agents (most of them recruited after they became NPD members) were actively involved in racist attacks. And when it finally came to light that some of them actually led those attacks, the whole banning process started to unravel. In March 2003, the court threw out the application because of a lack of evidence.

The bulk of the NPD’s support does not in the first instance rest on its xenophobic and racist rhetoric. Dramatic growth has been in step with the SDP-Green government’s attacks on the welfare system. Through his so-called reform package, ‘Agenda 2010’, chancellor Gerhard Schröder has introduced some of the most draconian cuts in social services, healthcare and now unemployment benefit.
Like the PDS, the NPD vociferously opposes these attacks. Not surprisingly, it not only blames the “capitalists” for the Agenda 2010 assault. It demands “national solidarity”, “German money only for German people” and justifies its hatred of foreigners with the claim that “survival instincts transform everybody into a xenophobe - especially in these difficult times” (NPD website).

On more than one occasion, the NPD has been able to sneak onto the ‘Monday demonstrations’ run by the German left. This has become such a problem that the organisers are now dishing out leaflets on how to challenge the racists. The advice ranges from useful, though obvious, tips, such as “always have speakers on the platform that stress our solidarity with all people living in Germany - asylum-seekers, refugees and so-called foreigners” to the more dubious proposal for “the police and the existing assembly laws to protect your demonstration”.

So the state is called upon to protect demonstrations which are directed … against the state.