29.10.2009

Second-rate response to second-rate führer

Communists have no desire to sign up to the bourgeois consensus, writes Eddie Ford

Well, one thing you can certainly say is that last week’s  Question time show featuring Nick Griffin - the “Nazi” British National Party’s very own ‘führer’ - was not your normal affair.

Since the time of Moses, the BBC’s ‘premier’ current affairs programme has almost always stuck to the same deadly dull traditional format - that is, three or more representatives of the mainstream parties and an ‘independent’ (nearly always, of course, someone with impeccably liberalistic, pro-establishment, credentials) slug it out in a tedious bore-fest as to who can give the most predictable, speak-your-weight, ‘respectable’ answers to carefully chosen questions from a selected audience. All designed, naturally, to give you a solidly, and very BBC, gaffe-free (and excitement-free) experience.

However, just for one perhaps all too brief hour, the old formula was thrown to the wind and instead we had David Dimbleby’s  ‘Let’s do Griffin’ time. A new, vibrant, more earthy programme, where the object of the exercise was to gang up on, and attempt to humiliate, Nick Griffin, and to judge by the audience figures the new, ‘redesigned’ Question time was a resounding success - bringing in a whopping 7.9 million viewers, nearly three times its normal audience. Who knows, maybe this display of Griffin-bashing will set a precedent and the next series of Question time will feature a hate figure every week - are bin Laden or Robert Mugabe available next year, by any chance?

Of course, communists have no objection to seeing an ultra-reactionary - or “Nazi”, as some on the left still insist on calling Griffin - getting a tongue-lashing on the BBC, or anywhere else for that matter. Quite the opposite in fact. Apart from the sheer entertainment factor, and a certain vicarious satisfaction at seeing Griffin sweat and semi-crumble under pressure, communists have long argued that in general the best and most effective way to defeat reactionary or backward ideas is the open clash of different and contending viewpoints.

This is in contrast, it has to be said, to large sections of the dogmatic left - most notably, of course, the Socialist Workers Party (and its current favourite popular front, Unite Against Fascism) - which has turned the tactic of no-platforming fascists into a fundamentalist ‘principle’ which cannot be violated or even moderated. No wonder the programmatically rudderless SWP is on the verge of a split.

With regards to the actual Question time show, Griffin’s performance was surprisingly flustered and amateurish - if not downright incompetent. Griffin may have been confronted by second-rate politicians with barely an original thought in their heads - but the BNP leader turned out to be a second-rate fuhrer.

So Griffin was at his seedy worst - or best, depending on your perspective - when questioned about his association with the Ku Klux Klan and his views on the genocidal Nazi campaign against the Jewish population. When asked, he admitted to sharing a platform with the former KKK leader, Grand Wizard David Duke, but rather farcically described him as “almost totally non-violent”. Then, to compound the absurdity, Griffin tried to make out that he was trying to win over the “youngsters” who Duke had supposedly “led astray”.

Of course, seeing that Griffin is on record as describing the holocaust as the “holo-hoax”, and so on, he was always going to come a cropper when directly questioned on this matter. Thus, when asked to explain a quote widely attributed to him - in which he equated the belief that there were six million Jewish deaths in the holocaust to the “flat earth theory” - he pathetically responded that “European law” prevented him from further elaborating upon his position.

Even worse, or at least for any Griffin sympathiser anyway, he went on to bluster: “I can’t tell you why I used to say those things any more than I can tell you why I have changed my mind.” Surely enough to make your ideologically committed BNP voter - an extremely small minority of the electorate, it should be noted - cringe with embarrassment, you would think. And, of course, it easily enabled the ever odious Jack Straw, the justice minister, to point out that when anybody tried to pin down Griffin to a specific quotation or previous political stance it was like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling - Griffin always attempted to “wriggle out of it”.

The same essentially went for Griffin’s famous, or notorious, evaluation of Islam as a “wicked and vicious faith”. Visibly squirming again, he made a desperately unconvincing bid to sound a bit more upbeat, stating that the religion had some “good points” - apparently, argued Griffin, it would not “have let the banks run riot”. But at the end of the day, for Griffin, Islam just does not fit in with “the fundamental values of British society, free speech, democracy and equal rights for women” - unlike Christianity, we are obviously meant to presume. Of course, the truth is that a calculating and cynical exploitation of Islamophobia is one of the BNP’s major electoral-political weapons - alongside heaping condemnation on the UK’s “political elite” for imposing “an enormous multicultural experiment on the British people”, a point Griffin repeated again on Question time.

Indeed on immigration Straw, the Tories’ baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Chris Huhne for the Lib Dems vigorously competed with each other in an attempt to show their toughness when dealing with the ‘problem’. It was the only time Griffin looked relaxed. The mainstream politicians were on BNP territory. No-one defended new migrants, let alone the right of people to move to which ever part of the world they like.

But Griffin is clearly caught in a real bind - and it is very hard to see how he can extract himself from it. He is caught between his explicitly fascist and neo-Nazi past and his no doubt genuine commitment to transforming the BNP into a successful rightwing nationalist party something along the lines of a UK version of Le Pen’s Front National in France (though, of course, the FN itself now appears to be in decline). Hence the rapid and loud distancing of the BNP from the antics of the English Defence League, or indeed anything that might potentially threaten the organisation’s newly won respectability - at least when it comes to the unforgiving court of electoral politics. But like Banquo, John Tyndall’s ghost keeps turning up to ruin the party.

On the other hand, the relentless heckling and hounding of Griffin by his anti-fascist Labour, Tory and Lib Dem co-panellists was hardly a stirring or edifying sight - more of a hypocritical wallowing in liberal indignation, which at times almost threatened to make the repellent Nick Griffin look like a victim of bullying.

Therefore we had the outrage, carried on and amplified by the media in the subsequent ‘post-match’ analysis, over Griffin’s claim - or observation - that if Winston Churchill was alive today he would be a BNP supporter. Yet, obviously, there is a kernel of truth to what Griffin says here.

The plain fact of matter is that the history of World War II has been rewritten in order to accommodate the credos and myths of mainstream official anti-fascist opinion - which tells us fairy stories about ‘plucky’ Britain and its great warrior helmsman, Churchill, leading a democratic crusade against the evil Nazis.

What crap, as the likes of Griffin know only too well. Churchill was an anti-democratic, anti-working class reactionary of the worst stripe - hence the BNP’s approval of the man - who was a keen advocate, amongst many disgusting things, of eugenics (such as the compulsory sterilisation of the so-called ‘mentally enfeebled’) and racial segregation, as practised in the deep south of the United States: naturally, he was also convinced of the innate racial-cultural superiority of the British ‘race’ over the backward and savage Irish, Indians, Kenyans, etc. Furthermore, the ‘anti-fascist’ Churchill was a enthusiastic supporter of a certain ... Benito Mussolini, when he and his blackshirts were handed state power in Italy.

So when Griffin tells the Question time audience that Churchill would have shared the BNP’s concerns about “mass immigration and foreigners coming for benefits” - or that his opinions about Islam would by “today’s standards” be deemed “Islamophobic” - all he is doing is highlighting a few salient facts that anyone with an objective and rational understanding of relatively recent history could have no choice but to readily concur with. Facts are facts, truth is truth - no matter who utters them.

Inevitably, there was also a heavy dose of dishonesty - in conjunction with the business-as-usual hypocrisy - when it came to dealing with, and reporting on, Griffin’s opinions and political outlook. Thus, for example, with regard to a question prompted by the recent and sudden death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, Griffin admitted that he would find the sight of two men kissing in public as “creepy” - which next day led the BBC online to excitedly declare, “Griffin says ‘gays are creepy’”, which, of course, is not quite the same thing. Rather, he expressed a gut feeling shared by very many men and not a few women - no doubt a relic of yesterday’s official homophobia. So Griffin is far from being alone. In point of fact Sayeeda Warsi herself is on record as expressing regret over the repeal of the homophobic clause 28 introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. Anyway, some have suggested, whether gleefully or darkly, that Griffin’s own viewpoint on this issue is linked to him being sexually propositioned at the age of 16 by the then National Front deputy leader, Martin Webster.

That aside, surely the most apposite - and truly damning - comment made concerning the entire Question time debate was by Jack Straw, no less. After denying that there had been any Griffin-bashing “collaboration” between the panellists, Straw revealingly stated: “What it showed is that there is something basically decent running through Britain and British politics, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Socialist Workers Party”.¹

In other words the popular frontism of the SWP, Respect, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, etc, get the thumbs-up from none other than Jack Straw. Such forces more and more resemble the extreme leftwing conscience of the bourgeoisie. Certainly UAF promotes the exact same political message and thereby bolsters the anti-fascist myths of the post-World War II bourgeois establishment.

So if invited would the UAF send a representative to sit alongside Jack Straw and Sayeeda Warsi in order to unitedly put Griffin down? Strangely enough, despite Straw’s inclusion of the SWP under the banner of British decency, Weyman Bennett damned the BBC for “rolling out the red carpet” to Griffin and reiterated his claim, also expressed by UAF chair Ken Livingstone, that Griffin’s Question time debut “will lead to the growth of a fascist party” and promote violence against ethnic minorities. For them no platform is a principle which means no-platforming yourself.

Others were also not so happy with Nick Griffin’s appearance - even if for entirely different reasons from Bennett or Livingstone. And that is to put it mildly. Not mincing his words, the BNP’s legal officer, Lee Barnes, fumed on his personal blog about his not so glorious party leader “failing to press the attack” on the “ethnic middle class” for “taking up the best jobs while still playing the bogus race card for every opportunity”. Instead, we read, Griffin “should have stood up to these whining, middle-class hypocrites that use the race card for self-enrichment - and thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces”.²

Slightly more calmly, David Duke concluded that Griffin’s overall performance did an unfortunate disservice to the far-right cause - offering the assessment that Griffin “looked terribly weak” - a bit like a man “who might be guilty of the accusations because he was not appalled enough by them to even attempt to respond”. Additionally, Duke cuttingly observes, Griffin’s “personal style on the programme was horrendous, and must be corrected”.³

For all that, though, there is no room for complacency, despite Griffin’s undoubted Question time squirming. Hence a Daily Telegraph poll suggested that 22% of the electorate would “seriously consider” voting BNP, while the party itself claimed thousands had registered for information following Griffin’s appearance - with the BNP’s webmaster, Simon Bennett, gushingly telling us the not so good news that “by the end of the night 9,000 new people had signed up as registered potential members or on our mailing lists”. He also informed us that in the European elections the BNP “gained 40,000 enquiries, but spent £500,000 to do so”, while on Question time the organisation “spent peanuts but gained almost 25% of the Euro election total in eight hours” - so much so, explained Bennett, that the BNP had to “upgrade our server capacity enormously, which allowed us to cope with extra traffic”.⁴

Communists have no desire to sign up to the bourgeois consensus that stretches from Ukip to the SWP. We will oppose the BNP through our ongoing fight against the poison of mainstream chauvinism and nationalism - not by pandering to the anti-Nazi mythology of the British establishment, or by promoting the official ideology of divisive multiculturalism.