Evening,
Looking on Sky News, and seeing protests springing up throughout the Arab World in the light of the latest airstrikes from Israeli fighter jets hitting Gaza, I was intrigued to find this piece on the Sky News website. Apologies in advance, as it encouraged me to do a much further in-depth piece about Fascism in general, as it is one of my biggest passions, politically to make people see these bastards for what they truly are.
In the article that I have linked above, in essence, there are fears that the far-right not just in Britain, but throughout Europe could see an ever bigger presence from neo-fascist groups, and that this could all come to prominence at the forthcoming European Parliamentary elections in May. 
The warning comes, on the back on an increasing wave of racist violence and attacks on gypsy communities across Europe. A far-right group called the Hungarian Guard, which has been accused of persecuting gypsies, says it will defy attempts to ban it, as governments become increasingly concerned at the rise of the right.
Of course, Hungary is one of the countries, which has been hit very hard by the current economical crisis that has swooped on the world in recent months, so much so that it had to go cap-in-hand to the international community recently, to get an emergency bail-out.
In other countries in Eastern Europe, there have been reports that racist groups have been adopting more radicalised and twisted methods to get their demented message across.
Sova, a Russian hate-crime monitoring centre, says neo-Nazi gangs are now taking a leaf from Islamic extremists as they try to incite a 'holy racial war'. Needless for me to say what that is.
Two migrant workers have been beheaded, al Qaeda style, in the last 18 months. The most recent victim was Salakhetdin Azizov. The 20-year-old market worker from Tajikistan was attacked as he walked home across a stretch of wasteland in South Moscow.
He was stabbed several times. His body was then dragged into nearby woodland where he was decapitated. Authorities were subsequently alerted to the murder after an e-mail was sent to Sova. It contained a photograph of the severed head.
Although, the situation in this country is not as insane and militarised as it is in other parts of the continent, the continuing rise and rise of the B*P continues to be a cancer that needs to be rid of forever.
Looking back in history and conventional thought suggests that the B*P will benefit politically from a recession. Government ministers certainly seem to think so. Journalists think so. And the B*P themselves believe this to be the case.
And with good reason.
With unemployment likely to hit two million by the end of the year and house prices dropping 15% in the past 12 months, most people are feeling the pinch. Labour's response to the downturn might have boosted its poll ratings in the short term but in reality it could be the far-right that benefits when the recession really bites. As we have seen in recent days, the government's short lived bubble has burst, with the Conservatives back into an 7% lead at Christmas.
The belief of a far-right gain is supported by the Labour MP Jon Cruddas.
“I’ve got a sense of foreboding about what lies ahead,” “It will make a qualitative difference in terms of the context within which they’re allowed to perpetuate their scapegoating and myth-making.”
But let us be blunt, for one moment. It isn't like this government is not helping itself nor its poll ratings when it is coming up with incendiary language like the stuff below said by the Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, in a interview with the Times in October.
“It’s a national health service – it’s not an international health service,”
In the same interview the Minister said that immigration became an “extremely thorny” subject if people were losing their jobs.
“It’s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it’s going to get harder,”
Employers should, he believes, put British people first, or they will risk fuelling racism.
“In times of economic difficulties, racial stereotyping becomes stronger but also if you’ve got skills shortages you should, as a government, attempt to fill those skills shortages with your indigenous population.”
Woolas was careful to include all British people in his British first policy, highlighting the high levels of unemployment affecting the British Bangladeshi community. He claimed that it was all too easy for an employer to hire a migrant to fill a job rather than to retrain British people of all races.
While Woolas was actually addressing some tough issues, including many which have wrongly been ignored for too long, he left himself open to attack with a series of incendiary quotes which he should have known would cause offence. By using the Norsefire-style language of British First, surely he knew that he was playing right into the dirty, little hands of the B*P.
Woolas has not been alone in raising difficult and controversial issues. Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, also weighed into the debate in October. Speaking ahead of an address to a CBI conference, Phillips said the following
“After forty years in which it was impolite to speak frankly about immigration policy, we now must be able to address this fundamental aspect of economic policy without embarrassment or without fear of being labelled closet racists or open-border fantasists.
“In what is to come, the best defence against prejudice against immigrants will be to make those who resent them competitive, to give them a place in society.
“We may need to do so with the sort of special measures we’ve previously targeted at ethnic minorities. But the name of the game today is to tackle inequality, not racial special pleading.”
As a respected member of the black community, these thoughts were not his first foray into this terrain. Previously he had stressed the importance of assertive action to help white working class communities through the economic crisis.
“What we are seeing is that there is a whole group of people, a large proportion of whom are white, who are going to suffer from this crisis who are going to be the people we should want to help, particularly because they come from the wrong side of town,”
“We are going to have to do something special for them. We are going to have to put extra resources where young people can’t compete with migrants’ skills.
“And in some parts of the country, it is clear that what defines disadvantage won’t be black or brown, it will be white. And we will have to take positive action to help some white groups, what we might call the white underclass.”
However, there is an alternative view regarding whether or not the far right will necessarily gain from an economic downturn.
“Although there tends to be a bit of moral panic about it, it’s never really happened in a way that, in any sense, threatens the domination of the political scene by the main parties,”
Those are the thoughts of Professor Colin Rallings, from Plymouth University. He went on to stress that previous economic downturns had been accompanied by only short-term boosts for the right and were often geographically patchy.
Is the Professor right? Will any boost for the far right be patchy and short-lived? If we are to go on recent history then he might have a valid point. The 1970s economic crisis failed to give any long-lasting boost to the National Front. In fact, if anything, the fortunes of the NF were already on the wane at the height of the crisis and certainly by the early 1980s, when unemployment topped three million and the bank base rate was in double figures and reached over 15%, the NF hardly existed.
During the recession of the early 1990s, and despite widespread media-fuelled concern over refugees, the BNP remained a largely inconsequential political force.
However, the concern within government and within the Anti-Fascist Movement in Britain and beyond is that there is reason to believe that events might be very different this time around. The country we live in today is very different from that of the late 1970s. The Cold War overshadowed British and indeed world politics. Unlike now, there was a vibrant and most importantly respected Left in Britain as well as a strong and very active trade union movement. The Second World War was only 30 years in the past and its reverberations and consequences was still strong in public consciousness and Nationalism was a dirty word.
Since then the Soviet Union has collapsed and Europe fragmented. Nationalism has become the driving ideology of the past 20 years and Socialism and Social Democracy are experiencing an identity crisis of huge proportions.
Here is a scary and worrying fact.
In the past year alone eight out of ten social democratic parties have been driven from power in Europe, partly to the benefit of the far right. Fascist and right-wing populist parties have been rising across western Europe and there is no reason to suggest that the same cannot happen in Britain.
Additionally, the B*P of today is quite different from the NF of the 1970s. The NF contested elections, but only in a half-hearted manner. For the NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster elections were simply an organising tool but real power was going to be gained through control of the streets and by positioning themselves as ready to answer society’s call to restore social order.
By contrast, the B*P has understood some political realities. It has publicly dropped some of its hardline policies, such as compulsory repatriation, which it knew would not be accepted by the vast majority of the population, and it has turned to local politics. As a result the B*P is gearing itself as a real and lasting challenge to the main political parties, particularly Labour.
More importantly, the political terrain has changed. Disillusionment with the mainstream parties is at an all-time high, voting at an all-time low and active participation in political parties is, in too many communities, seemingly non-existent.
It is into this disillusionment that the B*P message is resonating. Race remains the cornerstone of B*P politics but its appeal is far wider and deeper. It is precisely because of this that the BNP could benefit enormously from an economic downturn.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, in Stoke-on-Trent the B*P believes it can take control of the council within two years. If there had been a mayoral contest next spring there were many, including some government ministers, who believed the B*P could win. At 6% of the local population the non-white community is tiny compared to many other towns and cities across the country. Immigration and race are not the causes of the city’s problems but simply the prism through which the B*P allows local people to understand their problems and anger.
The same is true for many other areas where the B*P is doing well. The former mining communities of Rotherham, Heanor and Nuneaton, three other areas of B*P success, have relatively small BME populations but deep-rooted structural economic problems.
Compare that to the NF of the 1970s, which drew the bulk of its support from towns and cities, such as Leicester and Bradford, which experienced the greatest influx of non-white immigrants.
There are two other issues that differentiate the present from the 1970s. The Cold War has been replaced by a world defined by the “war on terror” and just as a recession could boost the far right, so fundamentalist religious groups will prosper.
As unemployment rises and disillusionment with mainstream parties deepens, friction between new and old communities will grow. Winding this up will be the B*P and other fascist groups on one side and fundamentalist religious groups, bent on demonising other communities and religions, on the other. There is a symbiotic relationship between these extremes, with both needing the other to justify their own existence.
This could play out on the streets, as we saw so vividly in Oldham and Burnley in 2001, or through a rise in domestic terrorism. It is this fear that is gripping the Home Office. We are already beginning to see a rise in violent racism and this is only likely to accelerate as the economy nosedives.
There has also been a rise in terrorism in recent times. While every Muslim plot attracts massive media attention, less known has been the increase in attempted far-right terrorism, both in Britain and across the continent. In 2007, ten people were arrested in alleged rightwing plots in Britain. While all were stopped before they were executed, it does raise the likelihood that rightwing terrorism, be it by individuals or small groups, will continue to grow. One can only imagine the consequences of a fascist bombing campaign against Muslim targets in Britain.
Likewise, while the feel good factor following the decision to award London the Olympics probably helped to defuse a backlash against the London bombs of 2005, a similar bombing campaign amid an economic downturn might have a different outcome.
In the 1970s the trade unions played a crucial role in defeating the NF and today they have once again indicated their willingness to take a lead. But today’s world, particularly in the workplace, is very different from that of 30 years ago. The unions are weaker, more workplaces are un-unionised and also fragmented.
“The workplace is different from the 1970s,” says Paul Meszaros, secretary of Bradford Trades Council. He continues:
“Back then workplaces were bigger and more unionised so it was more common for Asian and white people to work alongside each other. We were able to debate, argue and eventually find common ground.
“Today, workplaces are smaller and with communities living more separate lives and in different neighbourhoods within the city there are fewer opportunities for people to come together.”
Recession might be a gift to the B*P but whether it will exploit the opportunity remains to be seen. Despite its growing sophistication the B*P still struggles to win first-past-the-post elections. It has even performed poorly in recent by-elections, including some in traditional strongholds.
How opponents of the B*P react will also determine the potential electoral boost for the far right and this is where things need to change. The criticism of Woolas and Phillips has been strong and sometimes correct but it has also highlighted two fundamental issues. Firstly, a common unwillingness to debate difficult but very real issues and secondly an acknowledgement that progressives have partly contributed to the problem.
It is easy to criticise Woolas for his comments and of course some of his remarks echo the disastrous “British jobs for British workers” approach adopted by Gordon Brown last year. However, he was trying to grapple with some difficult issues, which all too many people prefer to ignore.
Likewise, Phillips’s call for preferential treatment for white working class communities has been met by a barrage of criticism. Phillips is totally correct in saying that a growing number of white working class people feel ignored, abandoned and unrepresented. It is this government which is allowing this resentment to fester as the B*P are feeding into this.
However, accepting the existence of these sub-groups and calling for preferential treatment is part of the problem in the first place. We no longer talk of a working class without sub-dividing it along racial lines. Playing identity politics is a very dangerous game and it is now coming back to haunt us. Too much government policy and spending, locally and nationally, is directed through the prism of race, which is unwittingly helping to create this “white” identity, which is in turn being exploited by the B*P. Too many progressive people who should have known better have been complicit in this, knowingly or unknowingly.
To prevent the B*P from exploiting our economic worries, class needs to replace race in popular discourse. We shouldn’t have white unemployed or black unemployed but just unemployed. We shouldn’t talk about white workers or black workers but just workers. That isn’t to say that we should ignore groups or not recognise particular hardships or discrimination, but we have to find a way to bring people along together, to get them to understand a common interest and shared future. If we don’t then how can we complain when communal groups, including the white working class, compete for scarce resources.
Similarly, there is the need to develop a more secular approach. One of the successes of the anti-fascist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1970s was its secularism. This was particularly found within the Asian Youth Movement, which brought together young Asian people of different religious backgrounds. While accepting the right to faith, there need be ways to bring people from different religious backgrounds together and this is no easy task. It is not just a question of differences between Christian and Muslim communities. In today’s Britain there is widespread suspicion and distrust between many religions, another issue that has too long been ignored.
We must bring more politics (with a small p) into anti-fascism. However, just shouting 'Nazi,' at far-right groups and supporters like I have done for years is no longer sufficient. As is calling for “Hope” over hate is also inadequate. When people are struggling economically and perhaps see little hope around them, we need to be able to address some of the underlying issues that might make them susceptible to the B*P and answer directly racist myths. Hope is a positive concept but will only resonate when people feel good about the community in which they live and positive about their own economic future.
We need to take the battle to the B*P on the same terms as they have done in recent years.
We must use their words, against them.
However, there is also need to show fairness in our approach. We need to demonstrate that we are fighting for everyone, regardless of colour of skin or religious background. We must also be prepared to criticise and condemn when it is necessary.
Wrong is wrong, from whichever angle or community it comes from.
Trade unions are in an excellent position to take on the B*P and its economic scapegoating, but it needs a different approach. Unions need to find a more direct way to engage with their members and their families than they do at present. A letter through the post or an article in a union journal is no substitute for a workplace meeting and human dialogue.
The road ahead will not be easy. The recession will increase insecurity and so suspicion and hostility between communities. As the job market shrinks and local resources become increasingly scarce so racism and bitterness will grow.
The B*P could make huge advances in the next couple of years.
Whether it does will partly depend on how those who can influence the future – government, unions and anti-fascists and everyone else – respond.
Rob :)
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