The Polite British Far-Right

It's a tragic fact, that the mechanisms of capitalism swing every-closer to 'disaster' setting, political extremism on the right flares up. In Europe, which is straining most under the weight of the ongoing economic crisis, it has been the most noticable. Greece is the obvious example, where Golden Dawn, an openly violent facist party are currently polling third. In France, in Italy, all across Europe, the ugly head of facism rises, spouting Islamophobia.

What about in Britain? Our premier far-right party, the BNP, have disinegrated, but the individual splinters still protrude; the EDL, the British Freedom Party, the National Front - all offering a slight variation on the same old hatred (the EDL claims to be welcoming to non-whites and non-Christians, so if that ain't your thing, you might what to head by the openly white-supremacist NF).

If you look at the trends in the last few years, the rise of the extreme right-wing in Europe has been marked by parties that do embrace a form of facism, but in Britain, where, despite a flurry of electoral successes a few years ago for the BNP, they have made very little gain. Has the UK been spared, the trend passed it by? Not quite.

In Britain it's currently all about Ukip. They've been slowly building on successes in European and council elections, working towards calling themselves the new 'third party' in British politics, taking the place of the Lib Dems (this despite them never actually having won a seat in parliament - their only representation coming after a defection from the Tory party).

Ukip's rise in popularity has worried the Conservatives. They feared that Cameron was too close to the political middle ground to secure the traditional Tory voter base - he was, and many of them defected right to Ukip. In some places the popularity of Ukip has even been blamed for splitting the Tory vote, causing them to lose an estimated 40 seats at the last election. Michael Fabricant, who does something for the Tory party (he's high up, I don't care any more than that) has proposed an election pact between the two parties, as they increasingly seem like star-crossed lovers, split over a need to appeal to the centre vote.

The problem here is that Ukip represent the same ground as the BNP and their ilk - they just have a greater grasp of political PR. Ukip supporters and BNP supporters largely agree on the parties' main electoral points - immigration, British superiority, anti-Europeanism (unless they want to buy our stuff).

From the Guardian article 'Ukip shares more with the far right than it admits':

While they also appear deeply concerned about immigration and Islam, Ukip supporters are less intense and less hostile than their BNP rivals. They are also far more likely to consider violence as "never justifiable".

At the same time, however, Ukip critics tend to ignore the fact that their party does have considerable policy overlaps with the extreme right. Like the BNP, at the last general election Ukip demanded an end to uncontrolled immigration, tighter border controls, the expulsion of illegal immigrants, the removal of benefits for remaining immigrants and an "end the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism by local and national government and all publicly funded bodies". This radical right pitch to voters included an end to political correctness and a ban on the burqa, and led Ukip to invite Geert Wilders to show an anti-Islam documentary in the House of Lords.

Ukip is not a rightwing extremist party, but on the doorsteps of voters it is often pushing the same message as the extreme right.

 What Ukip are able to do is exploit the British love for decent, honest 'chaps' who have little time for the political establishment (which Ukip claim to be outside, but are earnest supporters of). Their leader Nigel Farage smokes and is known to drink pints at lunch (probably British bitter). He is the walking embodiment of people who are just a little bit tired of political correctness and health and safety, and the liberals who push them on society.

Not mentioned in the article is Ukip's homophobic record - during the recent outcry in Rotherham, when the local council removed foster kids from the care of Ukip members because of the racist views of the party, Ukip were playing the victims. The actions of the council were perfect political fodder for the party, who used it to present a case of them being victimised and attacked by 'liberals' for their beliefs, in exactly the same way any far-right party would. (The BNP used to pull the 'they're trying to silence us because we know The Truth' card on several occasions.) What was hardly mentioned was the views of the Croydon North by-election candidate for Ukip, and the party's culture, media and sport spokesman, who said that it was wrong to allow gay couples to foster children. It was the usual stuff about the destruction of the 'traditional' Christian family, of course. Pinknews.co.uk has a further article it's worth reading about several other cases of homophobia in the party.

  Ukip supporters burn picture of openly-gay Lib Dem politican Brian Paddock

 

Listing the idiotic views of Ukip could be an enternal, Sysiphsian task. The crux of this article is this - Ukip differ from the BNP only in style and media presentation. They are slick, unencumbered by the Doc Martin-ed skinheads which are associated with other far-right movements. This makes them more dangerous. They are able to move, clandestine, into the wider political arena, trading on their created identity as a moderate party to come close to securing a place in government, as part of a Tory-Ukip coalition. They exist under the cloak that all 'protest vote' parties use - no one actually pays attention to their policies, they just want an alternative. An alternative Ukip certainly may be, but they are not even better than the Tories.

United Europe: Can #14N be the start of something bigger?

Today is a European-wide day of action against austerity. Trade unions across the continent have called strikes and protests against the actions which have been replicated, to varying degrees, by every government in the EU - actions which pointlessly pump blood into the hemorrhaging veins of the neo-liberal economy. The levels of disruption varies by country - for the most part, it is the southern states which have taken part the most, with general strikes called in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Cyprus and Malta.

The actions follow, for some countries (Greece especially) several years of strikes and protests, each challenging the government spending cuts which were all meant to be the last. The message has been, and will continue to be - the people can take no more. And yet, the governments of Europe do not listen, further pulling their economies down into the abyss. Measly job growth figures for Britain, no matter what the coalition government say, cannot hide this fact. Much of the work created is part-time, in an economy geared towards full-time employment (for full-time consuming). We are set, one day, to join Greece and Spain, and Portugal and Italy, and France and Germany, staring to the abyss. With those 700 million European people there, it might actually be a bit cosy.

Britain sees itself as a European rebel, not even really part of the continent. Physically and mentally it sits aloof, an outcast. There is a seam of anti-Europe sentiment in Britain, stereotypically mined by the political right. Far right parties like the BNP push this agenda, but in the mainstream it is carried by the right-wing of the Tory party (which always finds itself at odds with the less-right-wing faction, a rift which threatens to rupture every few years), and, increasingly, Ukip, which has always done well in the European elections (although less so in strictly domestic polling). The standard is: to oppose Europe is right-wing, to welcome Europe is left-wing.

Europe, in this case, does not particuarlly refer to the continent itself, or the countries which comprise it, but the European Union, and the various facets and organisations through which it governs. In this case, is there any reason for the left to support 'Europe'? Owen Jones recently wrote an article lamenting the tendency of the British left to blindly support Europe and the EU, which, as he says, is 'an institution which both threatens democracy and the interests of working people'.

Democratically, the EU is indeed a worrying sight - it is controlled largely by the Council of Ministers, which is undemocractically elected, being picked by the governments of each country rather than by the European people themselves. European interegration also means submitting to the will of the European Central Bank, which 'obsess[es] over inflation while parts of Europe crumble'. Jones also points out various measures which, if implimented, would make the lives of working people in Britain better - the nationalization of the train network, and the introduction of a living wage - which are blocked by a European Union driven only by free trade and privatisation.

In short, the EU has been a sustained attack on both liberty and workers rights, and yet the left sit on their hands, uninterested in trying anything to change this. People across Europe are unhappy with the current functioning of the EU, but they are not far-right xenophobes who don't own passports and are suspicious of all other cultures. European interegration as a concept is not the problem, merely the current method of it. Mainstream centre-left parties across Europe need to wake up to this realisation, and face down the right-wing who do oppose Europe on paranoid xenophobic grounds.

As these parties are, by definition of being mainstream political parties, vote chasers, it must be the people of Europe which drive this change in the anti-EU discourse. Days of continental solidarity like #N14 are examples of this. The general strikes in the south have been complimented by solidarty meetings and protests across Europe, in places too innumerable to mention. Like the Occupy movement, they share a common, international bond while retaining a focus on local matters. They oppose neo-liberalism austerity in whatever shape it appears to them. The Glasgow march, for example, while titled 'From Scotland To Greece: No Justice, No Peace!' and designed solely as a solidarity meeting was altered to focus on the recently-announced privitisation of George Square.

The European Trade Union Confedertation, which called todays day of action, must push for further integration with unions across Europe. Most of the time when general strikes are called in each country the unions go out on their own. No longer - further solidarity must be shown. The concept of a strike is simple - when the workers stand together, they can win. When scabs begin to drift back to work, the strike is weakened, perhaps not in numbers but in spirit. The site of an open workplace is demoralising to a picket line, essentially a failed task in this case, is hovering about outside.

If Europe is really to be 'shut-down', as some blogs claimed it was, then a greater cohesion of the worker's unions must be achieved. A 24- hour general European strike, comprising of all public and private sectors unions from all countries, would be a start. It would do two things - firstly, reclaim the anti-EU dialogue from the political right, who are currently using it to channel their own jingoistic views.

Secondly, stop the ability of the EU and the ruling class to divide us - "it's the Greeks! They only work for about three hours a day over there! And they retire at fifty!", showing the true nature of an integrated Europe which the EU promises, but could never provide. An EU for the people of each and every country, united against greed, profit and neo-liberalism.

On the fallacy of 'post-ideology'

Frank Turner caused a minor furore recently, when Michael Hann uncovered some anti-left comments Turner made a few years in an interview with Moon and Back Music. A lot of people had mistaken his ‘don’t tread on the little guy, but don’t try to help him either, everything will sort itself out’ as socialist rhetoric, for some reason. This has helped mould Turner into the Billy Bragg of his generation (my generation, sadly), a moniker which apparently applies to anyone with an acoustic guitar and a vague knowledge of current affairs.

Bragg and Turner are friends, you know. Bragg tells us this in a Guardian article, where he shares tales of him and Turner enjoying a few matey beers backstage before a gig at Wembley Arena, and, more to the point, blames Turner’s libertarian views on this post-ideological age.

As you might expect from a ‘socialist’ who owns a huge house in a part of the country dominated by Tory politics, Bragg’s arguments don’t quite hold up.

This ‘post-ideological’ age is a fallacy. The argument that society and politics have moved beyond the need for vastly differing points of view originates in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book 'The End of History and The Last Man'. By disintegrating, the Soviet Union had dragged communism into irrelevance. Given the perceived influence of the USSR in far-left movements worldwide, they too were expected to fall apart at the feet of all-powerful Western capitalism.

 

The votes for communist and socialist parties around the world, especially in Europe, went into an even steeper decline than they already had (a decline which began after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was quelled by Russian tanks and machine guns), and, as Bragg notes, British Labour removed Clause Four from its party legislation. Neo-liberalism had the upper hand, thanks to Thatcher, and Blair followed suit, shifting a once left-wing party into a different brand of Tory.

The idea of capitalism and democracy as intrinsically linked, and the latter not being able to exist without the former, also grew, as a reaction to the horror of Soviet autocracy. It mattered little that Marx never wrote a word that could be seen in being in favour of the persecution of the working class that Stalinism practised – as far as most people were concerned, Stalin could have went through the selected essays of Marx and Engels with Tippex and a biro, whiting out large passages and writing ‘all for me’ over the top.

So then – the twentieth century was battle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy, and capitalist democracy had won in the end. Fascism, of course, died in a bunker with Hitler, after a mortal wound sustained hanging off of a Milan petrol station.

This is a strikingly Atlantacist view to take, of course. In many parts of the world, communism still lives on. Whether China operates a communist country is debatable, but it still calls itself that. Cuba, resting under the nose of the Unites States, continues to follow the guidance of Castro, despite a growing flirtation with consumer capitalism. Elsewhere in South America, the ‘Pink Wave’ continues to gather speed – a series of democratic socialist governments have improved the lives of countless millions of people, from Brazil to Venezuela. The media in Europe and America is largely at a loss to explain why this has happened – as the countries modernised over the past decade, they no doubt expected them to follow the path set out by Europe in achieving short term prosperity.

Ideology did not end – it was stagnant, and the crisis of capitalism has reawakened it. Specifically, the austerity measures which have affected huge areas of Europe. Nowhere has felt the grip of austerity like Greece, and nowhere has seen such a resurgence in anti-capitalist politics either.

The Greek situation is a desperate one – as it drowns in the Mediterranean, the ECB stands on the shore with a fraying rope shouting ‘Swim harder! I’ll throw you the rope if you just swim harder!’ The centre-left party in power at the time, PASOK, has atrophied in the face of public anger, surviving only as a junior power in a rickety pro-austerity campaign headed by centre-right former rivals New Democracy. What was most surprising in the Greek election was not the collapse of the PASOK vote (any left-leaning party who commits itself to such austerity should expect their supporters to baulk) but who replaced them. The Eurocommunist/green activist coalition SYRIZA moved from a tiny share of the vote, pre-austerity, to becoming the official opposition. It flew past the PKK, the parliamentarian communist party who had retained a significant level of support in Greek elections over the past couple of decades.

                                                          SYRIZA election poster

More worryingly, the far-right also experienced a rise in support, as fascist movement Golden Dawn entered parliament for the first time. Its supporters act like the SA and are referred to by the party leadership as ‘stormtroopers’. It is no surprise that some people predict civil war in Greece, perhaps the natural progression from the breakdown that social order has already felt.  Anarchist squatters, who attend protests in black bloc mode, fight with Golden Dawn, who fight with immigrants, while the police attempt, and fail, to keep order.

The Greek situation signals the fallacy of the post-ideological belief in several ways. First, Greek politics sheltered a communist party which still achieved a good level of support in elections. The PKK’s role in Greek politics has added dimensions which are not present in other countries – the party’s role in the Greek revolution of the seventies, for example – but, in any case, there was clearly still an appetite in Greece for radical politics.  

Secondly, the rise of both SYRIZA and Golden Dawn has shown that a strong belief in centrist politics has evaporated. Elsewhere in Europe, both the far-right and the far-left have made gains over the past few years. Ultra-nationalist parties, claiming to counter what they termed a ‘worldwide Jihad’, operated on an Islamaphobic message to make electoral gains – in France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National finished third in the latest French elections. Also at these elections, the UMP of Sarkozy (who styled himself as the French Thatcher, dedicated to union breaking and individualistic pursuits of wealth, and failed) were replaced for the first time in years by the Socialist Party, while forth place was taken by a resurgent Left Front, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who planned to introduce a minimum wage. In the Netherlands, where the far-right’s European figurehead Geert Wilders was enjoying support, the formerly-Maoist Socialist Party has taken back votes.

Even in Britain, where the rise of neo-liberal anti-politics was, arguably, first heralded by the three election victories of Thatcher and the demise of working-class unionism, both radical sides of the political spectrum have began to grow in influence. The BNP, while enjoying success in the last decade, have collapsed in on themselves, suffocating under the weight of voter apathy and lack of funds, but clearing the ground for the EDL and various splinter factions to fight it out. And whatever you think of the man, the Respect Party has got someone who at least claims to be a socialist into Westminster.

The final argument against Fukuyama's optimistic but naive comment is not taken from votes polled or party membership, but from political philosophy:

"They do not know it, but they are doing it"
 

said Marx, originally in relation to false consciousness. Marxism concerns itself greatly with the way in which capitalist ideology worms its way into the mind of the people without them knowing (Gramsci's hegemony, for example). The End of History is not possible because the end of ideology is not possible. Ideology is inescapable, no matter what one you subscribe to - communism, capitalism, fascism etc. It is the way politics is structured, on every level, and, therefore, seeps into everyday life.