 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Andrew Pearmain
A friend of mine nearly became an MEP in June. He was top of the Green Party
list in the East of England, and while the electoral maths was complicated,
he basically needed ten per cent of the regional vote to win a seat in the
European parliament. He had always been reasonably hopeful; the Greens have
been steadily building their vote in local elections and winning council
seats across the region. In our home city of Norwich, they are now the main
opposition council group, with a realistic chance of becoming the largest
party and forming a minority administration in the next year or two. As
so often, this is largely the work of a few key individuals, including a
quite brilliant young organiser who was recently elected national Green
Party deputy leader in the hope that he can apply on the national stage
some of the magic he has worked in our fine city.
The Norwich Greens will soon displace Labour, who have run the council for
most of the last sixty years (including a period as a near ‘one-party
state’ in the late 1980s), with a steady decline in the last ten.
In 2002, Labour lost control to the Liberal Democrats, who had themselves
built support over the previous twenty years. Having had their moment in
the spotlight, and failed to make much difference to what is generally a
‘poorly performing’ local authority, the Lib Dems are now falling
away. Labour have been able to run a minority administration for the last
few years, but their voters and councillors are declining with age and demoralisation.
As my Green wannabe-MEP puts it, ‘the only people voting Labour are
dying, have an occupational interest as trade union officials, or somehow
think it will help them get on life.’ Beyond the elderly diehards,
the professional Labourists and the Blair-era ‘aspirationals’,
the ‘core vote’ no longer exists.
The Greens are benefiting not just from this Labour decline but also from
the ‘secondary erosion’ of the Labour vote which Liberal ‘community
politics’ pioneered. The real damage was done to Labour in the 1970s
and 1980s, locally and nationally, when the party was apparently at its
most disputatious and lively, but its ‘community roots’ were
being torn up by the ‘new times’ of Thatcherism, the temporary
politicisation of the professional middle class (who ‘took over’
the party in a kind of genteel social entryism, then promptly moved on into
the SDP or the ‘political wilderness’ of jokey disillusionment
and private consolation) and, with deindustrialisation, the disorganisation
and dispersal of the working class. Once people stop habitually voting Labour,
it seems, they’ll switch very readily among other options; a kind
of electoral consumerism or, less charitably, promiscuity. Freed of their
tribal loyalties and work-based disciplines, they only very reluctantly
‘return to the fold’ (as in 1997; and doesn’t the term
‘return to the fold’ speak volumes about how they were traditionally
– and now refuse to be – regarded by Labour’s electoral
machine?).
What has happened in Norwich, as in most other Labour ‘heartlands’,
is the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote ‘the Forward
March of Labour’ for much of the twentieth century. This alliance
consisted of most of the organised, waged, culturally unified and overwhelmingly
white, classically ‘subaltern’ working class on the one hand,
and the radical-liberal, ‘progressive’ and well-educated sections
of the salaried middle class on the other, the ‘traditional intellectuals’
of the professions and the public services. While Labour was in the ascendancy,
and able to dictate the terms of the ‘national interest’ and
‘communal purpose’, these two very different and culturally
antagonistic social groups rubbed along pretty well together. The British
working class got its long sought-after ‘voice in parliament’
and a ‘fair share’ in the spoils of capitalism and the Empire.
The progressive ‘salariat’ got a say in government, and a chance
to apply its technical and administrative skills to the running of the country.
For the political and trade union elites of both, there were parliamentary
seats and government posts as incentive and reward. The ‘brothers’
and the ‘toffs’ might get on each others’ nerves, with
their rude or affected manners and language, but they held their noses and
tongues for the sake of the ‘good old cause’.
This arrangement, the political expression of the very British historic
compromise between capital and Labour which gave us the ‘post war
social democratic consensus’, reached its zenith in 1951, when Labour
polled its highest ever vote on the back of its most purposeful and effective
government but still (because of the vagaries of the electoral system) lost
power to the Tories. This is a familiar enough oddity; what’s less
well known is that this was also a near-historic high for the Tories, and
above all for the two-party dominance of British politics. In that election,
the Tories and Labour shared a whopping 96 per cent of the total vote, which
was itself an amazing 82.6 per cent turnout. For all their mutual antipathy,
the two class-based political blocs had reached a kind of weighty accommodation,
reflected in the sense of social harmony and cultural unity, steady prosperity
and widening ‘affluence’, state and public service reform, ‘national-popular’
purpose and communal peace that generally characterised Britain in the 1950s.
The decade has been mythologized for its stultifying blandness and conformism
– to be spectacularly shattered by the ‘swinging sixties’
- but this should not blind us to its overall atmosphere of stability and
recovery, which most British people experienced as real material and familial
progress.
The subsequent story of British society has been the break-up of that consensus,
firstly under the weight of the deep and protracted problems of our capitalist
economy, which date back to the end of the Victorian era, and secondly by
the brutal and superficial resolution of those problems by neo-liberal Thatcherism,
whose primary target was the corporate power of the trade unions. They were
duly tamed; a crucial factor in popular acquiescence to our latest recession
and upsurge in unemployment. With the break-up of Labourism, New Labour
has adapted and modified the neo-liberal model to a more global and consumerist
form, with initial electoral benefits in the ‘boom’ years but
now disastrous effects in the ‘bust’. One of the main victims
of ‘the project’ has been the Labour Party itself, which is
now weaker organisationally and politically than since its emergence as
something like a mass party in the aftermath of the First World War. Labour
has never been an individual membership party (the unruly constituency parties
were always outweighed by the ‘dead souls’ of the union block
vote and the ‘sovereignty’ of the parliamentary party; nowadays
the leadership just does what it wants), but apart from its dwindling coteries
in and around parliament and local government it’s hard to see much
sign of political life.
Its ‘activist base’ has shrivelled with political disillusionment,
especially over Iraq. The spadework of ‘getting out the vote’
has always been done mainly by local councillors, but with every fresh election
a proportion are culled; there are now around 5000 (less than half the Tories),
mostly in impoverished city and district councils (they have been pretty
much wiped out in the counties, where more seats were lost than retained
in the latest elections alone), and whole regions of the country are now
virtually Labour-free. The only things keeping the show on the road are
the patronage of the state (all those less newsworthy ‘expenses’
which sustain the party’s staff and organisation), the grudging and
increasingly conditional support of the trade unions and of a small circle
of ‘progressive’ rich people, the media-political nexus of the
Westminster village and their insatiable hunger for ‘news’,
and an electoral system which militates strongly against innovation.
Nonetheless, new political forces are emerging from among the pieces of
Labourism and of its dialectical twin, popular Toryism, which was surprisingly
strong in the industrial cities and always won around a third of the working
class vote. As a social group, ‘working class Tories’ were generally
beneficiaries of Thatcherism (or liked to think they were), but as a distinct
political constituency an early but neglected victim. All that remains of
that urban Conservatism are a few shabby Conservative clubs (whose main
attraction was always the beer), and a toehold in the suburbs. The Tories,
like Labour, have built new support among the extra-urban middle class,
but the two-party bloc system has been steadily crumbling since its 1951
zenith.
The Greens are benefiting from the disaffection of the progressive middle
class, especially after Blair’s disastrous decision to enlist in Bush’s
‘war against terror’, but also in disgust at New Labour’s
refusal to undo the privateering ‘excesses’ of Thatcherism.
Green electoral growth is based largely in districts around universities
and among public service professionals, who are quietly outraged by deregulation
and ‘outsourcing’ of services they have devoted their careers
to. That’s a relatively benign outcome of the break-up of Labourism,
and helps to address the very real catastrophe of climate change (though
there is a ‘dark side’ to environmentalism, expressed in its
anti-modern, anti-urban and – especially on its animal rights fringe
– anti-human elements, and in its messianic and often apocalyptic
anti-political tone). What I want to turn to now is the rather darker piece
of Labourism represented and cultivated by the British National Party.
The ‘Fascist Possibility’ in English Politics
There has never been a serious fascist party or movement in Britain; our
political and electoral cultures and systems discourage the ‘extremes’
which elsewhere in Europe have at times taken state power and, partially
recovered from their catastrophic defeat in the Second World War, now become
part of the modern mainstream (as most recently in Italy, where Mussolini’s
followers form a major part of Berlusconi’s governing party). In Britain
the distinctive ‘historic compromise’ between capital and labour
neither allowed nor required a formal fascist political organisation to
perform the historical function of ‘disciplining’ the national
working class (though Thatcherism at times came close). Instead, the combined
‘radical liberal’ ideologies of free trade and free collective
bargaining meant the huge and historically ‘advanced’ British
working class was almost uniquely ill-disciplined (the primary reason for
its relative lack of technical skill, its cultural and social ‘backwardness’);
and when necessary, they were disciplined as much by their own institutions
(the trade unions, Labour Party etc.), cultures (sport, light entertainment,
‘mind-numbing routine’) and moralities (respectability, humility,
simplicity, practicality) as anything else.
But there is in any society what we might call a ‘fascist possibility’,
a certain combination of prejudices and interests which receive expression
through particular political methods and stylings, classically based on
a strong hankering after order, uniformity and rules. It’s usually
based among the lower middle class or ‘petty bourgeoisie’ but
crucially requires the sponsorship of more exalted social groups with serious
power and resources, and the acquiescence or fragmentation of the organised
working class (and the willing ‘muscle’ of some of the fragments).
Its classic expressions are of course German Nazism, Italian Fascism and
(to a lesser extent) Spanish Falangism: those over-familiar ‘monsters’
which loom so large in the corrective imaginations of our popular cultures
and school curricula, and create such misleading expectations of what fascism
‘should look like’.
The crucial historical point about the ‘fascist possibility’
in England is that it has no single organisational home, but is instead
dispersed across our society, culture and politics. By and large it has
been subsumed within the Tory/Labour dichotomy that has dominated modern
British politics, but it has always been socially latent and – during
periods of economic turbulence like the 1930s or the 1970s – liable
to organisational expression in noisy, rude and (in several senses) ‘offensive’
movements like the British Union of Fascists or the National Front. Once
it’s served its demonstrative, facilitative or disciplinary purposes,
English ‘fascism’ gets put back in the box till next time. The
examples I’ve just cited are the obvious ones, with their own historical
associations of violence and subversion; what are less often acknowledged
are the ‘fascist’ currents which have formed tributaries within
the dominant modern British ideologies of Conservatism and, more to our
point here, Labourism.
It’s well known that Mussolini started out a revolutionary socialist;
he edited the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! until he broke with them
over the First World War. What is almost completely forgotten is that late
Victorian Britain had an equivalent political shape-shifter in the curious
figure of Henry Myers Hyndman (1842-1921), who also supported the war and
split with much of the left over it. Hyndman deserves fresh study in his
own right, as founder and long time leader of the first avowedly Marxist
and programmatically socialist political organisation with any level of
popular support in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation. Hyndman was
by the far the most effective ‘left wing’ political operator
and orator of his day, equipped ‘with the vehemence of a great soul
and the simplicity of a child’. He associated on equal terms with
Marx, Engels, William Morris, Tom Mann and Edward Carpenter, as well as
numerous politicians in and around government and ruling circles, including
Tory ex-Prime Minister Disraeli - who he tried to persuade to support ‘democratic
reorganisation of the empire’ - and the Salvation Army founder William
Booth, whose momentous study Life and Labour he partly prompted. But Hyndman
seems to have made a habit of falling out with pretty much everyone he knew.
That’s mainly why he’s been derided by memoirists and biographers
as variously ‘an extremely chauvinistic arch-Conservative’ (for
Engels) or ‘a shop with all its goods in the front’ (for Margaret
McMillan). Hyndman also had a propensity for scandal, and never quite got
over a major crisis in the early days of the SDF, when he accepted money
from the Tory Party – delivered by a shadowy ‘bagman’
called Maltman Barry who could have stepped straight out of Conan Doyle
- to put up candidates against Liberal MPs. There is also something inherently
ridiculous – in a deeply English way – about Hyndman the high
Tory scion, convinced Marxist, and one-time gentleman county cricketer,
who in old age ‘reflected wryly on the possibility that if I had kept
clear of socialism, I could have been Secretary of State on the Tory side’.
My favourite image, relayed in Francis Wheen’s excellent biography
of Marx, is of Hyndman the portly businessman dressed in a frock coat and
silk top hat thanking his working class audiences on behalf of his wealthy
family for the surplus value accrued from their labour and redeployed by
him in the cause of revolutionary socialism.
But beyond the anecdotes and caricatures, Hyndman’s true significance
is in the concepts and traditions he tried to combine as a ‘revolutionary
patriot’, ‘Tory Marxist’ (Phillip Blond take note), ‘democratic
imperialist’ and, perhaps most perilously of all, ‘national
socialist’. The SDF itself split and reconstituted itself several
times, including (briefly, in 1917-19) as the National Socialist Party,
and never had more than 12,000 paying members and a few hundred activists,
concentrated in London and Lancashire. It was wary of the trade unions,
which Hyndman regarded as an integral part of the functioning of liberal
capitalism (he was by no means alone; Gramsci said pretty much the same
thing at the same time). It was in and out of the early Labour Party, with
(to quote Hyndman in 1920) ‘No hope but in the Labour Party, and not
much in that’, while its main anti-Hyndman faction (the British Socialist
Party) helped to found the ill-fated Communist Party of Great Britain. The
SDF was eventually disbanded in 1941, and left little to show for its sixty
years of organisational existence.
But its ideological legacy is evident in the history of Labourism, particularly
the central, perennial attempt of the ‘labour movement’ (party
and unions) to reconcile the interests of class and nation. For Pelling,
what distinguished Hyndman (and the SDF under him) from the rest of the
early 20th century Marxist and socialist left was his appeal to the English
working class, who Hyndman regarded as the most advanced in the world. By
contrast, the various other groups and parties were led by ‘immigrants
and exiles from the Continent’ and elements from ‘the Celtic
fringe’. The Labour Party would have more than its share of both,
especially the latter, but the key to its foundation, growth and eventual
establishment as a parliamentary and occasionally governing party was its
social and cultural base among the patriotic, nationalist and imperialist,
socially conservative English masses. The ‘free-born Englishman’,
a progressive stereotype in (say) the historical writings of E.P. Thompson,
could also embody (as Mercer and Schwartz pointed out in their 1981 critique
of Thompson) ‘the notion of English ‘stock’ and ‘birthright’
(which) have informed the radical right and the proto-fascist fringe.’
Labour’s rising star in the 1920s - as it displaced the Liberals as
the main anti-Tory opposition and had its first unhappy taste of government
- was another faintly ridiculous dashing toff, whose politics and rhetorical
power bore ready comparison to the recently deceased Hyndman; a ‘national
socialist’ and ‘democratic imperialist’ and early advocate
of Keynesian responses to capitalist crisis by the name of Oswald Mosley.
Mosley was the early Labour equivalent to Tony Blair, a superficially bright
and over-confident fixer and networker, with an abundance of self-regard
and opinion never quite matched by ability or judgment. Mosley’s appeal
to Labourism is summarised by sympathetic biographer Robert Skidelsky as
‘Workers of the Empire, Unite!’ He served briefly as a Cabinet
Minister in the second Labour government (1929-31), and (Skidelsky argues)
offered up one of the more coherent responses from in and around the Labour
Party to the gathering Depression, before resigning in 1930 to establish
the New Party. The New Party was a kind of early dry run for the SDP or
(arguably) New Labour, an attempt to ‘break the mould’ and apply
a politics of technocratic fix to capitalism in crisis. It foundered, just
like the SDP, on the durability of the established parties and the inertia
of Britain’s institutional framework, not to mention the competing
ambitions and personalities of its leaders around Mosley. He fell in with
the other rising ‘national socialists’ elsewhere in Europe,
and suffered for the basic betrayal of British national interests, ‘decorum’
and decency this represented.
Nowadays Mosley does not even figure on the roll-call of Labourist traitors
- Ramsay MacDonald, Phillip Snowden, Roy Jenkins etc – and very few
Labour people seem to realise that he was once one of them. But when Gordon
Brown advocates ‘British jobs for British workers’, with the
enthusiastic endorsement of Labour heartland ideologues like Phil Woollas
MP (bizarrely our ‘Immigration Minister’, recently seen blushing
beside Joanna Lumley), he is simply giving contemporary expression to a
deep historical current within Labourism. And the fact that it is also a
slogan to be heard at ‘wildcat’ trade union action against factory
closures, and (as Brown was rudely reminded) in BNP literature and broadcasts
(coupled with ‘And we really mean it!’), indicates other horizontal
as well as vertical continuities. The same ideological impulses –
nationalist, xenophobic, residually and nostalgically imperialist, patriarchal,
statist and workerist, angry and aggrieved and potentially violent –
are at work here. They have been there for as long as the British nation-state,
but normally kept underground and nicely ‘out of the way’, in
private attitudes rather than public discourse. However, a particular set
of events – deep recession, military conflict or political scandal,
to take a few recent examples – will occasionally bring them bubbling
nastily back up to the surface; or, as with the current rise of the British
National Party, emboldened into louder and relatively unashamed popular
expression.
How to ‘Deal’ with the BNP?
By way of preface, I need to make a couple of points plain. Firstly, I am
not for one moment suggesting that the Labour Party is or has ever been
a fascist organisation. There was a flurry of controversy a couple of years
ago when an article appeared on the internet by an American academic with
a handy 25-point test of how fascist any individual or group might be (Brown’s
New Labour scored, I seem to remember, 16 or 17, with Blair a few points
behind); ‘political science’ at its most crass. Secondly, I
am not suggesting that anyone should support the BNP either. My own personal
opinion is that the BNP embodies a lumpen little Englanderism, all the more
loathsome for its relative subtlety and effectiveness. But it can neither
be ‘exposed’ nor effectively opposed unless we properly understand
it, and make some imaginative effort to understand why people do support
it.
The BNP’s recent successes have prompted a flurry of liberal agonising,
mostly in and around the Guardian newspaper and BBC Newsnight,
which has done little but demonstrate the distaste of the professional intelligentsia
for what remains of the white working class, and as such affirms my basic
historical point about the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote
Labourism. The Guardian sampled the opinions of ‘top historians’
in the aftermath of the Euro-elections; it was mostly good sense, with much
use of the terms ‘proportion’ and ‘perspective’,
but what struck me was how little these people seemed to know or really
care about the situation in England. To a person (including his eminence
Eric Hobsbawm), these ‘left-leaning’ intellectuals had far more
insight into ‘abroad’ than our own country. One of them went
so far as to suggest that the most effective response to the BNP was ‘ridicule...
an underestimated weapon.’ Yes, I thought, what the disaffected English
white working class really need is a further dose of liberal ridicule...
The British National Party was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall from a faction
of the National Front and (more distantly) the British Union of Fascists.
It grew steadily through the 1990s, in response to the local effects of
burgeoning ‘globalisation’, specifically the effects of rapidly
expanding immigration on the lower-skilled sections of the workforce. Poorly
skilled and resourced whites, especially in the metropolitan hinterlands
of East London, felt their wages and job prospects squeezed and their districts
visibly changing with the influx of Bangladeshis, Africans, Eastern Europeans
and other ‘new migrants’. Nick Griffin took over from Tyndall
in 1999, and set about ‘modernising’ the BNP, playing down its
traditional anti-semitism and thuggery, playing up its anti-Islamism and
its ‘civilized’ values, broadening and deepening its electoral
appeal and taking on the new methodologies of Public Relations-driven politics.
By 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported, the BNP’s was ‘the most
visited website of any UK political party.’ It has more than 10,000
members.
Under Griffin, the BNP has mounted serious local election campaigns and
won dozens of council seats. It now claims over 100 nationwide, mainly in
the old SDF strongholds of East London and the North West, as well as the
traditional far-right stamping grounds of Essex and the West Midlands. They
are almost always former Labour seats, won with ex-Labour votes (likewise
their two new MEP seats). The BNP have had some trouble holding onto council
seats, because successful candidates have been exposed as thugs or morons
(there are plenty of those among other parties’ councillors who generally
go unchallenged) or in some cases unreconstructed Nazis; but as a register
of inchoate protest, voting BNP seems to have growing popular appeal; ‘two
fingers to the establishment’, as a Labour minister recently put it.
In the 2005 general election, it won 192,850 votes, 4.2 per cent of the
votes in contested seats. This is a very real and present electoral threat;
but primarily to Labour.
There is no evidence that standard ‘anti-fascist’ campaigns
- usually in the form of legalistic or procedural challenges, journalistic
exposes, leafleting and demonstrations, or unity-themed pop concerts –
are actually working against the new-style BNP. They might serve to rally
convinced anti-fascists, and to alert others who were unaware of the local
threat, but it’s doubtful that they dissuade anyone already thinking
of supporting the BNP. I watched assorted Trots shouting and gesticulating
at Nick Griffin’s battle-van outside the Euro-election count in Manchester
Town Hall, with (it seemed) a camera crew for every ‘protestor’,
and I imagined him inside laughing his union jack socks off. Prominent and
regular Guardian investigations, I’m sure, achieve a similar
effect.
If anything, theses campaigns can be counterproductive, smacking of ‘victimization’
by the social and cultural ‘establishment’, and fuelling the
BNP and its supporters’ own strong sense of subaltern grievance and
‘martyr complex’. Prohibition is never especially effective
in liberal democratic societies, whether of drink and drugs, gambling, sex
or political affiliation, especially if it’s based on sniffy middle
class censoriousness. The main effect of ‘No Platform for Fascists’
was always unwarranted status and exposure for the ‘fascists’,
apparent denial of their democratic rights, and the implication that anti-fascists
were somehow scared of open debate. Besides, in the modern media age (especially
the internet, of which the BNP has made such effective use) ‘platforms’
cannot actually be denied, except by media boredom and public indifference;
and those are not responses currently evoked by the BNP.
The party’s setbacks, in lost support and seats, are more often down
to candidates’ incompetence or disreputability, or to internal disputes
and splits like a recent, spectacular one over its ‘internal security’.
A number of BNP councillors have quit early or failed to turn up to council
functions and fulfil council duties; but (speaking with some personal experience)
being a councillor can be a big letdown after the brouhaha of election.
You realise fairly quickly that your status is pretty lowly and your powers
strictly limited; at the same time, the expectations of your constituents
(or, as Alan Clark memorably dubbed them, ‘mendicants’) can
be relentless and utterly unrealistic. When your fellow councillors are
shunning you, and excluding you from the ‘official’ posts and
functions that compensate for all the drudgery, you’re bound to wonder
whether it’s worth turning up at all.
And for all the fuss in local and national media about non-attending BNP
councillors, there is no indication that the general public cares much either.
If anything, treating public office as a waste of time may well boost the
BNP’s ‘anti-establishment’ credentials (the same goes,
I’m sure, for being denounced from Church of England pulpits). When
‘democratic politics’ itself is in such widespread disrepute,
at street, council or parliamentary level, it does the BNP no public harm
at all to be seen to be excluded from it. Eventually, the BNP will have
to learn the ropes of municipal politics – backbiting and stitch-ups,
harassing council officers, the creation of networks of patronage and favour
amongst ‘service-users’ and tenants, the manipulation of local
media etc. – but for the moment they can revel in their ‘outsider’
status. And as they grow, they will attract more capable, traditionally
ambitious people.
Likewise, to attack the British National Party as ‘racist’,
as opponents habitually do, somehow misses the point. The BNP is undoubtedly
racist – with more than a few hard-core ‘scientific’ proponents
of white supremacy, including new MEP Andrew Brons - but only in the same
sense as much of the marginalised, fragmented and disaffected white working
class it appeals to. This broader racism is compounded by cack-handed attempts
to deal with it, which derive from a largely middle class conversation about
language and ‘manners’, and from the vested interests and wishful
thinking of institutionalised multiculturalism. When racial tolerance and
diversity are promoted as mainly a matter of using the approved language,
and being generally ‘nice’ to ethnic minorities – and
when multi-faceted poverty and growing inequality inhibit genuine social
interaction between all classes and identity-groups - it’s not surprising
that the less articulate and ‘polite’ elements of the ethnic
majority react against it.
The real problem for Labour is that it cannot ‘deal’ with the
BNP without confronting its own history (which it is generally reluctant
to do, beyond a certain misty-eyed sentimentality) and the deep-dyed racism
of much of its own traditional ‘core’ support (which would require
far deeper social roots and a clearer understanding of the experiential
basis of popular ideologies than Labour has ever actually had). And confronting
the old Labour racists - especially in the language and manners of contemporary
‘anti-racism’, an overwhelmingly educated, ‘progressive’
and liberal, middle class discourse - would simply reaffirm their subaltern
grievance and disaffection (this is the vicious double bind facing Labour
MPs in BNP-inclined constituencies, shuffling between denunciation and endorsement
of underlying white working class grievances). This same popular resentment
about being told what to think is evident in popular reactions to ‘political
correctness gone mad’ (a term the BNP makes much use of), especially
in their more jokey, Sun-type manifestations, which represent a long-established
and very English aversion to pomposity and bossiness.
Beyond the BNP: contemporary ‘fascist possibilities’
If the BNP pose a threat, it is crucial to understand its nature and to
keep it in proportion. They will never win serious power; there are one
or two very bright individuals in the BNP national leadership, but they
have difficulty keeping a grip on the hotheads (a problem for all necessarily
cross-class political organisations, in periods of growth as much as decline).
Their support is strongly concentrated in particular places where there
are long traditions of politically articulated social prejudice, and new
and old forms of ‘bad behaviour’, those parts of the country
which have always been in a certain sense ‘no-go areas’ for
‘respectable’ values. Elsewhere, the ideological complex the
BNP feeds upon is much more diffuse, and to be found in other social or
cultural sites which are explicitly resistant to political exploitation;
football, for example, where beneath the PR gloss and supposed ‘community
roots’ the same old atavism survives, with a very modern motor of
ruthless commercial exploitation.
To sit in a football crowd these days is to be surrounded by gullible, baying
idiots, with little real interest or understanding of the game itself, but
drawn by the showbiz and commerce and the promise of personal and communal
emotional release (anger mostly, with odd moments of ecstatic triumphalism,
fuelled by copious amounts of dis-inhibiting alcohol). The recently and
sadly deceased J.G. Ballard, a far better social critic than novelist, put
it like this: ‘What I think we’re seeing is the white tribes
of England reasserting their identity. This is not necessarily a racist
thing, I don’t think. But there have been so many waves of immigration
into this country - Asians, blacks, Kosovans, Poles. And I can see that
football is one of the ways in which the white working class can say remember
us. It’s a rallying call to the old tribal instincts that multiculturalism
has buried under this tissue-paper eiderdown of correct behaviour.’
If Gramsci was right to regard modern newspapers as proto-parties, then
we might regard the Daily Mail as an all too actual embodiment
of ‘the fascist possibility’. Nick Davies calls the Mail ‘a
perfect commodity, designed to be sold to a particular market, of lower
middle class men and women. If, in order to speak for their interests, the
Mail must attack, it will. Black people, poor people, liberals and all kinds
of lefties, scroungers, druggies, homosexuals, they will all be attacked.
And if it is necessary to attack too the rich and the powerful and any political
party, including the Conservatives, then so be it. It sells its readers
what they want to see in the world.’ The Daily Mail is, according
to Davies’ extraordinary survey of the global media, the most aggressively
spiteful (and successful) newspaper in the world, with an untypically growing
readership amongst the angry, suburban, insecure lower middle class (a crucial
component of classically fascist movements). Who needs a fascist party when
we have a fascist paper with a mass circulation and sphere of political
influence? The Daily Telegraph is not far behind, in tone and sales,
with its extraordinary scoop of MPs’ expenses, however factually and
journalistically questionable it will all turn out to have been. There is
more than a little of the ‘fascist possibility’ in the populist
‘damn ‘em all’ outcry about home-flipping and duck houses.
It has provided an outlet not just for the arcane pointlessness of parliamentary
politics (what are MPs actually for?) but also for public distaste for any
kind of democratic politics (which most people, with little to run beyond
their own lives and households, have very little personal experience of).
The BNP will never get to run anything, not withstanding a total ‘makeover’
(which some of their leaders dream of, complete with a suitably modern ‘feminine
touch’), but they have substantial nuisance value. Sooner or later
some poor Tory, Lib Dem or even Labour council leader with ‘no overall
control’ is going to have to take them into power-sharing coalition,
but the BNP will find it onerous to assume and exercise practical responsibility
for the mundane routines and services of local government. That is not their
historical point; they are not a primary political force, seeking any kind
of social hegemony, but a secondary expression of the break-up of Labourism.
For Labour to ‘deal’ with the BNP – in the sense of destroying
rather than accommodating it - would require reassembling the social alliance
it was based upon, and for the moment that seems unlikely. New Labour was
in large part an attempt at precisely that, but ineptly executed and very
narrowly based; as such, it represented a last gasp rather than a revival
of the Labour tradition. To be fair, some of Labour’s more intelligent
and honourable MPs are trying hard to find new ways of understanding and
engaging with the aggrieved white working class, especially in constituencies
where their own seats are under threat, with some temporary localised success.
But Labour’s decline and fragmentation is an undeniable historical
fact.
It just may be that in the short to medium term – and I have no doubt
that this will be a bitter pill to swallow, especially for Labour –
the ‘political class’ (another phrase which speaks volumes about
the social exclusion of the majority from democracy and the exercise of
power) will have to accept that the BNP articulates and represents a genuine
and widespread popular standpoint towards the modern world. And that by
accommodating this particularly nasty piece of Labourism within the formal
‘democratic’ framework of local councils, European and (eventually)
national parliaments, you can blunt some of its nastier edges and begin
to ‘educate’ people out of it. After all, a similar local accommodation
has been engineered in Northern Ireland with the extremes of republicanism
and loyalism, both of which have had more than their fair share of ‘fascist
possibility’. Whether or not you accept the full reality of ‘the
peace process’, which (on one reading) has simply transferred criminality
from the political and constitutional to the civil and social arenas, it
has to be some kind of progress from the worst of the Troubles. In the Middle
East and elsewhere, ‘democracy’ is edging towards some kind
of accommodation with Islamism; while Italian democrats, including most
of the left, have always accepted (sometimes perhaps too readily) co-existence
with their own (actual) fascists.
Will the BNP Last?
How serious and permanent is the BNP’s surge of popularity and support?
Has its lumpen little-Englanderism found a settled place in the political
undergrowth? Or will it prove to be the same kind of flash in the pan as
the Green vote in the European elections exactly twenty years ago, when
the very young Green Party won a startling 2.4 million votes? That turned
out to be a spectacular example of a one-off ‘protest vote’
among a low turnout in an election not many people were too bothered about.
The European elections, with their peculiar list system, do allow committed
voters the indulgence of voting as they feel at that moment. In the following
general elections, people normally revert to type and tribe and calculation,
albeit within a long-term decline in tribal party affiliations. It has taken
the Greens many years of hard slog ‘community politics’ to get
anywhere near their 1989 result, and their vote is patchy and (I suspect)
vulnerable to new kinds of disillusionment. The professional middle class
is no more ‘constant’ or politically unified than any other
social class; if anything, in this era of ‘shopping around’,
less so. This other, nicer ‘piece of Labourism’ may yet take
its political custom elsewhere.
In the 2009 Euro elections, the Greens actually polled 8.7 per cent, over
two points higher than the BNP on 6.5 per cent, but with their vote more
dispersed across the country, won the same number of seats. The BNP vote
did not increase significantly over the last Euro elections; it was just
better organised. Their two seats, to confirm the argument that they are
capitalising on the break-up of Labourism, are in the post-industrial North
of England, while the Greens are in London and the South East. A lot now
depends on the BNP itself, just as the Greens now recognise that they actively
squandered their 1989 success. So far the BNP is managing its historic opportunity
very effectively; Nick Griffin is a past-master at liberal-baiting. Its
actual European election campaign was very skilfully conducted, with a slickly
produced and in its own way highly impressive party political broadcast
on 13th May.
We might sneer that the BNP’s PPB had the visual style of a regional
ITV daytime game show, but in electoral reality they share the same target
audience. It took up the topical populist tack of ‘professional politicians
with their snouts in the trough’ (by contrast the BNP ‘are not
in it for the money’, though they stand to gain roughly £250,000
for every Euro seat); and the anti-social behaviour themes pioneered by
New Labour, which translate the authoritarian populism of its Thatcherite
inheritance into a local application of low-level vigilantism. In practice
it means uniformed patrols of council estates and now, with the BNP ‘leading
the way in the West Midlands’, mobile CCTV cameras. A hard-faced young
woman read from an autocue that some BNP councillors have been re-elected
for second 4-year terms. It was all strangely effective (especially when
compared to the Green Party’s lamentable effort a few nights later,
which looked like a piece of GCSE Graphics coursework). And as long as Labourism
continues its historical process of disintegration, and Labour suffers the
political and electoral consequences, there will be plenty more rich pickings
for the BNP. In the meantime, we should prepare ourselves for greater ‘offense’,
as bigotry and ignorance become more emboldened; at the same time, we might
try not to be quite so easily offended.
As so often, things are probably going to have to get worse before they
get better, with a general shift to the right in our ‘centre of political
gravity’, in tune with the historical effects of economic recession
(which, at least in Europe, always favours the right). Thatcherism managed
to subsume the ‘fascist possibility’ of the 1970s within its
own historic bloc, in that case the decidedly rural, provincial and identifiably
popular-Tory racism of the National Front and its offshoots on the far right.
But that was in the setting of a new and vigorous ideological construct,
with lots of big ideas that amounted to a genuine strategic vision (whose
most effective advocate Norman Tebbit could be heard recently urging people
‘not to vote for the major parties’). Tebbitt probably helped
to boost the performance of the sleazy Thatcherites of UKIP, but this piece
of popular Toryism only really comes to life at Euro-elections. The single-issue,
anti-EU UKIP represents what we might call ‘the sergeant major’
vote, a ‘Dads Army’-style anti-continentalism, strongest in
the outer suburbs of the home counties. This particular ‘fascist possibility’
will be re-absorbed into the Conservative fold under the allure of imminent
general election victory for Cameron’s neo-Thatcherism, refreshed
from its years of idle, moat-clearing opposition, and ready to drive the
utopian visions of the neo-liberal free market deeper into our personal
lives and public services, with huge public spending cuts universally accepted
as ‘inevitable’.
For all their best efforts and occasional near-misses, nothing in the Labour
past, present or future has ever shown that kind of visionary (if always
slightly bonkers) dynamism. New Labour’s tragedy has been to remain
mired within the ideological morass of Thatcherism (and in fawning awe of
the ‘absolute and unaccountable power’ of the Daily Mail),
while failing to lay permanent claim to its political inheritance. And in
the meantime, the old Labourist working class becomes increasingly dis-‘organised’
in the traditional trade union sense, ‘ill-disciplined’ in its
behaviour and attitudes (thus prompting ever shriller middle class moral
panic), and receptive to modern versions of our less savoury English proletarian
mentalities. Back to my friend the just-failed Green Euro-MP. He told me
that his own prospects largely depended on the BNP; if they got more than
5 per cent, this would split the vote that might just give one ‘minority
party’ a seat. In simple electoral terms, the contest at this level
was about who could grab the largest chunk of the crumbling Labour vote.
On the council estates – those reservations of historic Labour patronage,
still accounting in Norwich for about half the population - there were plenty
of people telling him that if they bothered to vote at all, it would be
Green or BNP. As it turned out, our regional vote pretty much mirrored the
national, with the Greens on 8.8 per cent and the BNP 6.1 per cent, and
neither winning a seat. In a lovely electoral metaphor for the state of
our fractured and fractious country’s social and cultural relations,
they cancelled each other out. Our one regional Labour MEP, an oleaginous
bureaucrat not often seen in these parts, scraped back in, just.
Andrew Pearmain is a Labour historian based at the University of
East Anglia
andrew.pearmain@ntlworld.com
|
|
