10.06.2009
Far right on the march?
James Turley sees the best positioned anti-establishment parties on the far right
After the total collapse of Labour, the most widely reported outcome of Britain’s leg of the EU elections has been the rise of the far right.
As readers will know, the UK Independence Party, the hard-line Eurosceptic electoral front, overtook Labour in the popular vote, though not by enough to become a larger party in the British contingent to Strasbourg. The British National Party, meanwhile, managed to get its first two MEPs (the largest single increase among any of the parties). This is a pattern which has broadly been repeated across Europe, with establishment parties being hammered and the radical right benefiting (the exception is, of course, Italy, where the largest ‘establishment’ front has coopted the largest far-right forces anyway).
The BNP is, of course, jubilant - it was optimistic about getting leader Nick Griffin elected in the North West region, and elected he was; but grabbing another seat in Yorkshire and Humberside, which went to Andrew Brons, was a bonus.1
By contrast, Ukip - while enjoying its position as second party in terms of votes - will be very aware that it has not made much of a net gain on its performance of five years ago. A single new seat under current circumstances is a disappointment. That said, a few weeks ago, before the avalanche of revelations around MPs’ expenses, Ukip’s prospects did not look so good, having never truly recovered from its disastrous flirtation with the philistine former Labour MP, Robert Kilroy-Silk, in 2004. The tacit support from the Barclay brothers, who own The Daily Telegraph allowed Ukip to resurface for the EU poll.
Nevertheless, the implications are clear - in the midst of a political crisis and economic downturn, both of which are the most severe of their kind for decades, the best positioned anti-establishment parties are those of the far right, whose advances on Thursday contrast clearly with the abysmal results for left-of-Labour formations, particularly the Bob Crow/Socialist Party/Morning Star lash-up, ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’.
The BNP vote, needless to say, is the biggest problem for the respectable political establishment - especially when we examine exactly who it is the BNP will be packing off to Europe. Nick Griffin’s history is relatively well-known - a former hard-line advocate of street violence and virulent anti-semite, he came to supplant the openly Nazi John Tyndall as BNP leader in the late 90s after enacting one of the most spectacular (and unconvincing) volte-faces in British political history. Going from the most obscurantist anti-semitic position to that of the party’s leading ‘reformer’.
Brons has a similar trajectory: a founding member of the self-explanatory National Socialist Movement in the 1960s, he along with the NSM became part of the National Front following a series of fusions. He was a frequent NF electoral candidate and replaced Tyndall as its chairman. Like Griffin, he had links with the Political Soldier movement, which was influenced by Italian neo-fascist Roberto Fiore and cultivated alliances with repressive Arab regimes against the Jews. Brons was fined in the 1980s for calling a policeman of Malaysian descent an “inferior being”, and after a long period out of politics joined the BNP three years ago.
The BNP, then, has sent to the European parliament two men with notoriously Hitlerite histories and, while I cannot say whether or to what extent Brons has moderated his views, barely a month before donning the mantle of reform Griffin remained editor of anti-semitic journal The Rune, which excoriated holocaust-denier David Irving for admitting that any Jews were exterminated in the death camps.
This rather underlines the curious position the BNP finds itself in today. It is clear that the leadership looks to various European far-right formations for influence - so-called Euro-nationalists. The success of Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s Front National has been a major influence, and the rebranding of the direct genealogical descendant of Mussolini’s Fascisti as just such a Euro-nationalist party (now absorbed into the Berlusconi movement) perhaps provides the most direct example for the process undergone by the BNP under Griffin’s reign.
Yet it is equally clear that Griffin has done all this on the back of an activist base (himself, by all appearances, included) still committed to ‘conventional’ neo-fascist politics. Though the BNP does not explicitly espouse illegal violent activity, it could not purge its ranks of those who engage in racist attacks without destroying much of its cadre.
Griffin touts one message to the general public, and is forced to justify its dilution of the fascist message to the hard core - in a 2006 speech to the BNP’s Burnley branch, filmed and uploaded to the web by the BNP itself, Griffin argues: “We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it’s the thing they can understand. It’s the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with”; hating Jews, he says, just gets you branded an “extremist crank lunatic”2 (and he would know). Griffin and his coterie have reconstructed the BNP, but they have not reconstructed the membership - which will come to be a problem as it drifts into mainstream politics.
This process may already have begun. A lead article on the subject in The Guardian highlighted the possibility of legal challenges to the BNP’s constitution, which currently limits membership to those hailing from the “indigenous Caucasian” ‘race’, along with “defined ethnic groups emanating from that race”. Legal opinion, according to the article, suggests that this may be in breach of laws governing discrimination in members’ clubs - provided, of course, that political parties can be defined as members’ clubs. Additionally, all organisations which receive public funds are required under British employment law to comply with equal opportunities legislation.3
The fact that these questions are seriously being raised points to the basic inability of the mainstream parties to deal with a monster created by their own loss of credibility. This is particularly true in this election - the BNP vote, though up overall on 2004, actually fell in both regions where it gained MEPs. Its success is strictly coterminous with the collapse in support for the Labour Party.
Unfortunately, the mainstream parties are not the only political forces utterly adrift in dealing with the BNP. It was notable that shamefaced No2EU advocates were reduced to selling their idiotic front on the basis that it was both not the mainstream and not the BNP.4 You cannot fight a formation which - whatever we may think of it - goes to the electorate on-message with a clear programme simply through moralistic denunciation, as if the left is naturally more deserving of votes. This is particularly true of a front such as No2EU, which cedes endless ground to the likes of Ukip and plainly considers ‘democracy’ identical with the ‘sovereign’ nation-state.
As ever, the wooden spoon goes to the Socialist Workers Party, which is a key player in the profoundly misguided Unite Against Fascism. UAF posters were visible up and down the country urging us all to “use our vote” to stop the BNP. Of course, in the absence of any serious alternative, this amounted to a blanket recommendation to vote for the same mainstream parties which Socialist Worker blames for the conditions that led to the BNP’s rise - an impression strengthened by the very visible presence on endless UAF platforms of establishment grandees.
This week’s issue5 is gushing over the alleged success of actions against the fascists - the execrable-sounding Love Music Hate Racism concert in Stoke-on-Trent attracted 20,000, we are told. The only problem is that the BNP attracted 120,000 people to the polls in the West Midlands6 - an increase on 2004 and a bigger share of the vote than in the North West, where Griffin was elected! BNP one, UAF nil.
It is tempting to call this UAF’s strategy a dismal failure. But that, ultimately, is too kind - because calling it a ‘strategy’ implies that it is actually coherent and directed at its ostensible object. It is not. The UAF organises endless empty stunts, as vexatious to militant anti-fascists as they are congenial to the BNP (which gains the sheen of democracy).
For example, on June 9 UAF protestors pelted Griffin with eggs and prevented him from addressing a press conference in parliament. UAF national secretary and SWP central committee member Weyman Bennett justified this on the grounds that “The majority of people did not vote for the BNP. The reality was because the turnout was so low they got elected.”7
On that basis perhaps it is sensible for the tiny groups of leftwing demonstrators to attempt to shout down all other groups and parties rather than try to win the battle of ideas. And, while none of them ever get the votes of the “majority of people”, the results enjoyed by all of them, including the BNP, dwarf those of the left sects - the SWP’s last venture into electoral politics saw its pathetic Left List do even worse in the 2008 London assembly elections than No2EU did last week.
When the SWP triumphantly declares the rise of the right to be the creature of Brown and Blair through their failure to address the concerns of the masses, it neglects to mention its own role, insidious as it is incompetent, in railroading leftwing activity into pseudo-reformist philistinism. This method has given us an utterly compromised UAF, destroyed the fragile unity of the far left in the Socialist Alliance and alienated a large part of the SWP’s own cadre via the Respect debacle. The irony is clear - the same opportunism and contempt for the masses that has yielded two MEPs for Griffin has borne only disaster for the SWP; the left more generally simply varies the theme, and has been rewarded with electoral wipe-out.
If the far right is seriously to be combated, we must do better. We must offer a political alternative that makes sense and is uncompromising in its attack on bourgeois society. That alternative is communism, and nothing less.
Notes
1. news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_999999.stm
2. video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1269630805284168668
3. The Guardian May 9.
4. See, for example, an online article from the Morning Star: www.morningstaronline.co.uk/britain/no2eu_tackles_bnp
5. ‘Anti-fascist movement can push back the BNP after their Euro success’ Socialist Worker June 13.
6. news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_37.stm
7. Morning Star June 10.