The BNP have made great gains out of positioning themselves as being outside and against the old gang of mainstream politicians with their snouts in the trough and I expect the reactions of the other panellists (99% of whom are recongised as careerist scumbags and hated by the general public) will allow him to play the same role – expect across the board personal hostility allied with attempts to appeal to the C1/C2 voters in swing areas that research has shown the BNP particularly successful in attracting- have your ears ready to pick up the dog whistles. Labour will also drop their ‘commitment’ not to appear with the BNP due to the above. Will Griffin come out guns blazing himself though? He is often a very aggressive interviewee and will be aware this opportunity may not present itself again.

Elements of mainstream anti-fascism have already reacted exactly as expected, calling for Griffins removal as the BNP re not a ‘normal politial party’ (Bennet of course*), not like those Tories and Labour who they then hold hands with in defence of proper country-invading, anti-working class, BNP producing democratic principles. The option that this presents an opportunity to attack the BNP as being just another establishment party is not even considered in this scenario – attacking their plans on the things that are driving their vote – social conditions – doesn’t appear in the rush to shout about the holocaust. Shouting and finger wagging is as far as this approach gets. And, of course listing terrible establishment figures who would ‘rip Griffin apart’ – (the way that Paxman and Campbell ripped him apart presumably – I.e they were shown to be totally out of their depth) – Tony Benn, Chakrabarti, Rob Newman(!), Mark Steel and so on.

Of course, the real issue of how they’ve managed to get themselves into a position to be legitimately invited onto the show will now probably get swept away in useless chatter about this meaningless event.

* Weyman has decided to get tough over this:

“We will send the BBC a letter saying that it’s not legitimate to give them a platform of respectability when they have a policy of discriminating against people on grounds of race.”

This helpfully demonstrates the idiocy of the EHCR’s decision to take the BNP to court over their racist constitution, now that the BNP have all but agreed to make the EHCR’s alterations they can claim to be no longer racist and have the succesor body of the Commision for Racial Equality supporting that claim. Think a wee bit harder Weyman, because you’ll be supporting their appearance come October with this logic.

Opposing The Far-Right: More Downs, But A Few Ups…….

The London Mayoral election and the national local elections of May 1st this year saw the BNP continue their steady progress of the last 6 or so years. They could justifiably claim a really significant breakthrough in winning their first ever London Assembly member when Richard Barnbrook was elected to that body on the top-up system. This was not a total shock to those who have been keeping a keen eye on the rise of the far right as they came within a whisker of achieving the feat in the previous election only to be undermined by an unexpectedly strong showing from UKIP. This time around, with the UKIP in public disarray in London, and a consequent collapse in their support, the BNP successfully met the minimum threshold by achieving 5.2% across London – 130 714 individual votes. To this total can be added the 18,020 (9.82%) votes picked up in the City and East ward, where they ran their only candidate. London-wide there was a 0.6% rise in their vote, not amazing but when placed against the across the board attacks from the mainstream parties media hostility, not to mention the resources pumped into ‘Don’t vote Nazi’ style campaigns this figure looks a little more impressive and suggests that they may be on the road to a sustainable vote.

The mayoral election also produced results that the BNP could only see as encouraging if not spectacular. Their candidate (Barnbrook again) picked up 69, 710 (2.84%), not a great performance but with some indications that certain areas are now returning a solid BNP vote on a regular basis (more on that below). Added to this total is 128, 609 second preferences – bringing the combined total of people prepared to vote for a BNP mayor in London to 200, 000. This years election is likely to have seen more people voting for one of the major parties due to the close nature of the battle between Livingstone and Johnson – a factor which also helped to increase turnout and so raised the number of votes that the BNP needed to pick up a top-up seat. This last factor being the main hope of mainstream anti-fascism of stopping the election of an Assembly member and the approach they based their whole London strategy around. Needless to say this approach doesn’t even begin to deal with the motivations of why people are voting BNP, merely seeking to outflank them in a mainstream political game – a tactic that can never and will never effectively deal with the far-right, but conveniently serves to add a boost to the declining fortunes of the Labour party.

A Fascist MP?
Worryingly, ward level data clearly demonstrates that there are now 2 constituencies (Dagenham and Rainham & Morley and Outwood) in which, when votes amongst all the parties are totalled, the BNP are the largest party. This opens up the possibility of a BNP MP being elected in the future in their vote holds up or expands. That said, peoples behaviour in general elections is noticeably different from that of local elections. Nevertheless, this situation would have been dismissed as an utter impossibility at almost any point post-war.

Nationally, the picture was slightly more turbulent with some disappointing regional results in areas that until recently looked very promising but with an overall gain of 13 seats and a further consolidation of votes in the wards stood originally in the 2004 elections. The national average being 13.4%
Again, mainstream anti-fascism argued that any successful candidates would prove utterly incompetent and driven from office at the first opportunity, and developed a strategy of exposing this incompetence (which undoubtedly exists). That people are prepared to vote for BNP candidates despite incessant media attacks is very telling and could indicate a hardening of attitude into a bloody-minded vote for someone who is becoming seen as ‘their’ candidate against the establisment, rather than a simple protest vote.

This might apply to Stoke for example where the BNP now have all 6 councillors in two neighbouring wards and 9 on the Council in total. Voters here seem impervious to the sort of tactics mentioned above, and which are still being put forward despite clear evidence of their ineffectiveness. Stoke is actually a rather good example of where a lot of other areas might be in a few years time if the current dynamics continue. A town where most traditional working class industry has collapsed, where local populations have all but been abandoned by the Labour party – written off as a safe vote or politically worthless and who are struggling to make ends meet, to meet their health needs, their kids schools are failing and so on. As pointed out many times, the BNP can easily enough racialise these frustrations. Locally this has all added up to a collapse in the Labour vote and the BNP successfully filling a large part of the vacuum this has left. This is a microcosm of what is happening in many areas across the county – a rise in inequality (and all that entails) coupled with political abandonment leading to a collapse in the Labour vote and the far-right moving in. We might see one, two many Stokes if this continues.

Going Down?

A few sources have been arguing that the BNP vote actually collapsed regionally, due not only to in-fighting but because of general lack of support and a growing realisation that the BNP will do nothing for those communities that have supported them. The full results show that whilst there was an inability to put up full slates in a couple of areas due to the internal problems, nationally the picture was nothing like that, and instead demonstrated, again, solid growth, and crucially in areas where the BNP were standing for the second or third time (the election cycle meaning this was their return to the seats contested in 2004). A number of new regional bases have appeared almost out of nowhere (Nuneaton and Bedworth, Tameside, Wakefield) and old centres of strength have at the very least consolidated their position. The re-election of councillors is also now more common, though still slightly outnumbered by those losing their seats (13 to 7).

Looking at England alone (London excluded as well) they had 343 seats where their vote was over 10%, the majority of them 15%+, and 82 seats in which they came 2nd. Here’s the city/town percentages in those areas where they’ve either had past success or stood large slates.

Figure in brackets = seats contested, followed by average vote across city .

Pendle (7) 30.43%
Rotherham (5) 27.9%
Amber valley (7) 26.25%
Stoke (11) 25.9%
Burnley (11) 21.89%
Tameside (8) 21.75%
Thurrock (19) 21.7%
Nuneaton and Bedworth (12) 20.77%
Wakefield (12) 20.48%
Barnsley – (21) 17.36%
Sandwell (12) 17.26%
Oldham (5) 16.8%
Carlisle (5) 16.3%
Calderdale (9) AV = 16%
Epping Forest DC (12) 15.5%
Epping Forest Loughton (14) 15%
Broxbourne (12) 15.35%
Sheffield – (8) 14.83%
Basildon (14) 14.6%
Dudley (11) 14.5%
Kirklees (20) 14.3%
Solihull (12) 13.47%
South Tyneside (13) 13.18%
Salford (9) 12.48%
Lincoln (5) 12.14%
Gateshead (12) 11.8%
North Tyneside (5) 11.56%
Newcastle (12) 11.37%
Leeds (34) 11.2%
Coventry (13) 11.2%
Wigan (7) 11.2%
Bury (8) 11.11%
Sunderland (25) 10.97%
Stockport (6) 10.5%)
Durham (30) 10.48%
Southend (17) 10%
Liverpool (11) 9%
St Helens (5) 8.5%
Birmingham (40) 7.5%

Note: we’ve also compared these figures to the results in the 2003 elections, these being the same wards that were up for election then. They bear out our general argument of consolidation or steady growth of level of vote combined with expansion into new areas and that steady vote then also appearing in the newly contested areas.

Where Next ?
The short-medium plans of the BNP now turn to the European and Stoke Mayoral elections next year. They have high hopes of picking up at the least one MEP in the former. They have been picking up 10-15% in local polls for the last few years (the average in the may elections was 13.4%). The highest % needed to pick up a seat in any region in the European election is circa 18%, the lowest around 6%, the others all around 11%.
The BNP picked up an average of 5% last time around, but the now struggling UKIP picked up 16%, a combined total well over every single regional threshold. The BNP in 2004 was just starting it’s upward climb as well – a BNP vote was still pretty much seen as a wasted vote then. Today a BNP vote is well on the way to being normalised. Again, how the UKIP performs is going to be crucial – and all the signs point to their internal disintegration being mirrored at the polls. The UKIP do have a habit of doing well in the European elections regardless of other factors though, so it should not be imagined that anything is writ in stone where they are concerned.

One MEP is do-able, maybe more. Griffin clearly thinks the North-West region is winnable as he’s selected himself to stand there and to make doubly sure of no internal problems has also appointed himself BNP North West England regional organiser – even though he lives in Wales! The three seats where it’s possible they could return MEP’s are:

North West – need 8.5%, scored 6.4% last time
Yorkshire and Humber – need 11.5%, 8% last time
West Midlands – 11.5% and 7.5%

All winnable if enough UKIP voters come across and the rise in a simple pro-BNP vote of the last few years continues.

The Stoke mayoral election is another opportunity for the BNP to put their name on the national map, and one where they have a reasonable chance of doing well. Of course it’s very easy to get caught up in just looking at election results and organisational politics – what happens beyond this, what’s driving these developments is the key. Economically, culturally and so on….

Responses To The BNPs Rise – Us

Any visitor to websites populated by Anarchists such as urban75.com or Meanwhile At The Bar will find hours and hours of debate and discussion about how best to counter the far-right. There are always plenty of people willing to talk the talk! Perhaps the most eccentric contribution from the Anarchist chattering classes came courtesy of an article in issue 2 of Mayday magazine “Anti fascism, the BNP and the local elections”. The gist of the argument here is that the BNP are over-hyped, anti-fascists are giving them and Griffin too much credit, and Anarchists are too sympathetic to the ideas of the Independent Working Class Association.

Apparently written to discuss the BNP’s 2007 electoral performance, Mayday actually came out immediately after the 2008 May elections – where the BNP achieved some of the best results ever by British fascists! Rather than reflect on this, the author has instead continued to work on a theory recognisable not for its sophistication or accuracy, but the dogged persistence with which it is made.

The evening of the election count saw a large attendance by Anarchists outside the Greater London Assembly building. This followed several weeks of hard leafleting and stickering to build a large counter demonstration under the banner “No to the Crook, the Toff, the Cop and the Fascist” reflecting the appalling choice offered to Londoners – Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Brain Paddick or Richard Barnbrook.

At one level the event was a success – the London Anarchist movement was back on the streets, and pretty much all the activists who are able to work with one another did so. A lively picket was held as journalists and politicians entered the GLA for their canapés prior to the results being announced. Significantly a series of all-London Anarchist meetings also emerged from the new found vibrancy.

That should not however deflect from the negatives. Putting Anarchists on the streets also results in large numbers of police officers putting themselves on the streets. Ever since J18 in 1999, the Met has shown itself committed to throwing what appears to be unlimited resources at countering us.

On the evening of May 1st, some 80 odd Anarchists were policed by 21 van loads of officers (yes we counted!) many from the Police’s ‘firm’ – the Territorial Support Group. Out muscled on the day, activists were soon dispersed, along with BNP activists who had come into the area spoiling for a fight.

The second failing is that for all the populist rhetoric, the Anarchist intervention in the Mayoral campaign was marginal. Whether the aim was to counter the Boris and Ken show, or to counter the support for Richard Barnbrook neither was achieved. The number of new faces on the evening of May 1st was also disappointing.

In specific anti-fascist terms, the loudest voices speaking against the BNP were to be heard from the ‘establishment’ anti-racist left – the trades unions, Searchlight and their fellow travelers.

Since Mayday the clearest public response from Anarchists to the BNP has been the campaign, with Antifa heavily involved, against the BNP’s Red, White and Blue festival held on the weekend of August 15-17 in Ripley, Derbyshire at the farm of BNP member Alan Warner. The RWB festival is certainly a pale imitation of that held by the Front National each year in France, but as the biggest gathering of British fascists it is a worthy target.

There is little doubt this years efforts put both the BNP and Derbyshire Police under real pressure. Opposition close to the BNP site on the 16th August saw some 33 anti-fascists arrested (all were bailed to return to Derbyshire Police in November) and by the time the BNP were packing up their belongings the local press was loudly demanding they never be allowed to return. It is tempting to speculate what would have happened had such robust opposition been applied to the RWB when it started……….

There are however limits to this approach. Rattled as both the BNP and Derbyshire police have been (BNP blogs in particular were noticeable for their demands of action on a police force that would clearly prefer them to go away) it is not yet clear to what extent such actions will damage the fascists overall growth, especially in terms of their success at the ballot box.

Take an example from South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the BNP’s town centre stall was smashed up by anti-fascists in October 2007. On another occasion the BNP carelessly lost their newspapers before they could even sell any. Come this years elections one of the other staple methods of countering the far-right was also used in the town – a detailed newspaper expose of Barnsley BNP candidate Simon Goodricke. Not only is Goodricke an ex-cop but he is an ex-cop with convictions for perverting the course of justice and swindling £1000 out of a Pensioner. Just the sort of person you want running services in your community!

Despite these two events the BNP emerged in May 2008 with a strong set of election results in Barnsley, even though the picture was complicated by the candidacy of BIG (Barnsley Independent Group).

Is it that anti-fascist tactics such as the above no longer work, that they do work but need to be sustained, or that they will only work if attached to a more detailed community presence?
Time will tell.

Responses To The BNP’s Rise – Them: The Established Left Wobbles
In June Searchlight published an open letter “Where now for anti-fascism?” Written by Nick Lowles, this recognised the redundancy of much of Searchlight’s political campaigning in recent years. “A simple ‘Don’t vote Nazi’ is an irrelevant slogan that needs to be discarded immediately” – this after years of Searchlight not only doing just that, but using their vast influence over the left and the mainstream media to ensure that others did just that as well!

It is hard not to see Lowles piece as a sign of desperation. Having hitched themselves to the Labour party (and in particular Notting Hill resident and Dagenham MP John Cruddas) Searchlight have worked tirelessly on opposing the BNP in local, national and European elections. They have backed a loser, and the harder they work trying to get the democratic (usually this means Labour) vote out, the more exhausted they are likely to become.

Discredited on much of the left by their admitted links to the police and security services, Searchlight has also been weakened by its historical Zionism. A brief falling out with Unite Against Fascism’s leadership was as much about Searchlight’s inability to tolerate Respect’s pro-Muslim stance as the ostensible fact that Respect is opposed to the Labour party.

Although Searchlight can still use its resources to mop up local anti-fascist initiatives (it seems, disappointingly Lancaster UAF is one example) and several ‘Together” groups emerged in time for the 2008 elections, Searchlight appear stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Unable to develop a radical critique of fascism, and wedded to a political party drowning in front of our eyes, Lowles, Gable et al are perhaps secretly hoping for a general election which repeats that of 1979 – a Tory hammering of Labour, with a collapse of the racist vote, as it heads to the Tories. It may happen, but no one can guarantee it will happen.

Searchlight on Griffin
In their analysis of the failure of the 2007 BNP split, Nick Lowles (Searchlight, July 2008 p.12-13) fails to recognise two of the most important reasons behind the failure of the anti-Griffin forces.

Lowles may be correct that the rebels over-egged their claims against Griffin, and failed to press the flesh with the organisation’s rank and file. Yes Griffin could not be defeated by blogging alone. But other factors were crucial.

The first is clearly Griffin’s high degree of national public recognition – his is the (rather bloated) face of the BNP. Matt Single hardly compares. Knowing this Griffin was able to simply ride out any ‘split’, content in the knowledge that the party would still be achieving some strong election results, membership enquiries, merchandise sales, donations and as many web hits as ever.

The second is the political confusion of the rebels. Although united by the fact they disliked Griffin, they came from both Nazi and euro-nationalist wings of the party. (Something Searchlight could hardly point out, given their eagerness to brief interested observers that the split was between those who wanted a Euro-nationalist party and those who were basically Nazis) Those dependent on Searchlight for their understanding of fascism (such as Unite Against Fascism’s Weyman Bennett) were to be heard repeating this line ad nauseum.

Building a coherent political strategy, or even a new organisation was always likely to be beyond forces as diverse the stiff right-armers in Scotland around Warren Bennett and those in the east Midlands, like Sadie Graham, who had always looked to modernise the party at virtually all costs.

Our Enemies In The North
One tactic for the BNP in towns like Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham, and even whole counties such as Durham or Cumbria may be to gradually build up support and to simply “wait out” the old left. Those radicalised by events like the miners strike of 1984-5, or the fight against Thatcherism in the 1980s are not getting any younger.

To many people of that generation the BNP will always be anathema – one of the few things worse than Mrs Thatcher’s Tory party. When the BNP tried to book the Thorne Social Club in Doncaster for a meeting in September 2006, the steward threatened to resign and the bar staff refused to work if the meeting went ahead. It was quickly cancelled. The same year the landlord of the Kings Arms in Maryport, Cumbria took similar action after the BNP booked his upstairs room without admitting who they are. Buy that man a pint!

Welcome as these instances are, only a fool would bet on such principled acts being the norm in 20 or 30 years time.

Labour is undergoing a catastrophic haemorrhage in its former heartlands. The wider left is in as bad a state, if not worse. This is evident not just in Labour by-election defeats in places like Crewe and Glasgow East, but perhaps more importantly in the long term in party membership. To take one example in Cumbria, membership of Workington Constituency Labour Party, was around 860 in the late 1990′s but is now approximately 140. That is a lot of canvassers to lose.

Putting aside the new Labour careerists, if you consider the core of the trades union movement and ‘old’ Labour, it is clearly ageing. This is particularly true of groups closest to the revolutionary left such as Durham Miners Association. Anyone hanging their hat on an old Labour/trades union revival to see off the BNP is certainly taking a gamble. There is not a 50 year old version of Dave Douglass out there, or a 40 year old version, nor a 30 year old version and there sure as hell is not a 20 year old version. That world has gone, and it is not coming back.

It is also the case that some of the ‘old Labour’ heartlands targeted by the BNP lack the sort of multi-cultural social scene that so undermined the National Front in the late 70s and early 80s. Instead of an easy interaction of young black and white people around music and football, many such towns either have tiny ethnic populations, or Asian communities with far lower degrees of integration, interaction and inter-marriage than we saw between white and West Indian communities thirty years ago. What will undermine the BNP culturally in old Labour heartlands?

There is some hope, but so far it comes from outside of the revolutionary left, and outside of the Anarchist movement. Cumbrian blogger Duncan Money makes the point that in the previously staunch Labour town of Barrow, the May elections saw four seats fall to the local Socialist Peoples Party, and another four to the Our Schools Are Not For Sale group. Significantly the BNP flopped in the midst of this activist wave. Could such developments, coupled with well placed militancy from groups like Antifa, plus continued exposure of the fact that the BNP are not a radical alternative, shift things significantly away from the fascists?

Lost In The Wilderness
For the neo-Nazi right, 2008 has so far been a disaster. There appears no steady stream of recruits seeking refuge from a ‘reformist’ BNP. Although the National Front performed well electorally in the London Assembly elections totalling 26,901 votes in 5 constituencies, with two votes over 5%, (outpolling the SWP’s Left List front by 10 000 votes in one seat and by 5000 in two others in their three head-to-head contests)
This appears to have been based solely on the historical appeal of the groups name in certain parts of the city, but also highlights that even unrepentant racist groups are capable of profiting from the ongoing disgust and alienation with mainstream politics. Other political interventions appear unlikely – a march by NF Youth in south London on April 19th pulled in less than 20 people, and the NF appears incapable of functioning as anything like a political organisation. Those wishing to pursue electoral politics may as well join the BNP and be done with it.

Under pressure from opponents such as Antifa, the British Peoples Party has at least been consistent – consistently second best. On the same day as the National Front were humiliating themselves, the BPP were turned over by anti—fascists in Victoria. As usual with the flakier elements of Nazism, bitter recriminations soon followed, as did needless arrests of Nazis seeking ‘revenge’.

With former head honcho Sid Williamson pushed out, Adrian Brookes led an attack on what he claimed was “Anti-Fascist Action” in Manchester, but was in fact the Marxist-Leninists of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), selling their newspaper Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism! Even this was far from convincing as the RCG fought back, and the police grabbed the retreating Nazis. A BPP ‘show of strength’ in London on 27 July merely resulted in a days harassment by the Met, plus further time in the cells, with Antifa wisely allowing the BPP to roam London in a huff.

Most disastrously of all for the neo-Nazi right was the conviction of BPP member Martyn Gilleard. Receiving 11 years for bomb making may have been expected to boost the BPP’s credentials, but for the 5 years also received for possessing 39,000 indecent images of children. This later conviction was skilfully kept quiet until the end of Gilleard’s terrorist trial, resulting in several fascists making even bigger fools of themselves than usual by attaching their wagon to Gilleard right up until the moment he was found guilty of the terrorist charges.

The last few years have now seen a steady trickle of fascists being arrested and/or convicted for terrorist offences, most notably the BNP’s Robert Cottage in October 2006.

What is not clear yet is whether such incidents represent isolated cases of oddballs attempting to fulfil their fantasises, a response to political hopelessness from a position of abject defeat and weakness, or that a small minority of Nazis are responding to a more charged racial atmosphere by looking to carry out terrorism as a viable tactic. Should Nazis look to match the involvement of British Muslims in terrorist outrages by successfully carrying out attacks of their own, things could become very unpleasant indeed.

Conclusions
It is not hard to find apocalyptic tendencies within the BNP. Usually these concentrate on race, but they also centre on issues such as peak oil and environmental collapse, and, as the credit crunch bites, on the economy. Certainly the BNP themselves see great opportunities unfolding.

In April their newspaper Voice of Freedom (sic) commented “The awakening of the British people will spread across the country in direct response to the decline in the availability of easy credit. Once again money will have to be earned and the fact that migrant workers are taking the lion’s share of the jobs available will become the political issue of the day. Then there will only be one political party that will have the policies that the British people will be demanding – the British National Party”.

Those predicting imminent economic collapse often make themselves look idiots (look at any old issue of the WRP’s Newsline paper from the late 1970s to see this) but there is little doubt we are heading for some difficult times with rising unemployment, inflation and ever more pressure on affordable housing.

The BNP’s solutions to these issues are, in our opinion, wrong. But they do actually propose solutions. The question is, apart from a vague call for revolution and solidarity – do we?

Why Right is Beating Left: The Rise of the Nationalists

Six years ago the BNP appeared to be following in the well worn footprints of the post-war British far-right – pitifully small votes, a tiny unreliable membership with a very high turnover, and a public profile that either didn’t really exist (apart from some limited areas) or was on a par with that of Ian Brady. This is borne out by the fact that the whole far-right combined had only managed to win 3 council seats in total since 1945 and the total shock with which the last of these – the fleetingly famous Derek Beackon in Millwall in 1993 – was met.

Today they have around 50 elected councillors, a national profile that allows them to operate in areas previously closed to them, a steadily rising and far more reliable membership (around 7,000) and crucially, voting BNP is no longer seen as the action of nutters and misfits – it has become a normalised reaction to social conditions across many parts of the country, achieving around 800 000 votes nationally in the combined euro/local and London elections 3 years ago followed by the highest ever total for a far right far party in the 2007 local elections, with a very regular and healthy 10-25% vote being achieved in council elections in just about every region.

What has happened in those ten years to bring this situation about? Why have the BNP apparently shook off the various curses of the British far-right – the Hitler worship, the elitism, the overt anti-Semitism, the inept attempts at paramilitary games, the social pariah status etc and gone on to become the most electorally successful far-right group in this country’s history? Why and how have they managed to consolidate themselves and their politics in these last 10 years? What has changed, and why? These are the questions we’ll be looking at in this article. We’ll start with a brief historical introduction to the roots of the far-right following the formation of the National Front in 1967 in order to provide background and context for the differences between traditional British Fascism and the present day BNP before moving on to examine their latter day modernisation.

The National Front – united at last!

The National Front was born in 1967 out of the merger of The League of Empire Loyalists, a fast fading conservative group based on virulent anti-Semitism led by AK Chesterton, and the British National Party (not the same group as today) headed by John Bean (who recently popped up on the present day BNP’s South East list) and individual members of immigration pressure groups. The big hitters of the far-right scene at the time were Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and Martin Webster and all were openly neo-nazi, leading to them being refused membership of the NF for some years. The NF at that time appeared to be an incoherent mix of positions all joined together by the recognition that overt neo-nazism was never going to be a vote-winner in the UK after World War Two.

The public outcry around immigration at this time added weight to the idea that all on the far-right should be brought together in order to make political capital out of the issue. Tyndall accordingly toned down his rhetoric and was allowed to join, along with Webster, and the two quickly set about achieving control of the Party’s main bodies and forcing a series of internal challenges until Tyndall emerged victorious as leader in 1973. (Jordan on the other hand went ever further into neo-nazism and Hitler worship via his National Socialist Movement).

This 1973-78 period was the height of the NF’s influence – they claimed to have over 17 000 members, helped along by an influx of ex-Tories angry about what they saw as Prime Minister Heath’s liberal stance on immigration, particularly on the entrance of thousands of Asian-Ugandans into the country. These disillusioned Tories brought valuable electoral and organisational experience to the group which helped in achieving some noticeable election results including a 16.9% in a Parliamentary by-election in West Brom – the only time the far-right had saved an election deposit until that point.

Yet, in process that seems to be played out time and time again, the newcomers led by John Kingsley Read believed that they were largely behind the current success and so led a challenge to Tyndall, in which they won a brief pyrrhic victory but eventually lost, although not without taking 3000 members with them. They then formed the National Party which itself soon disappeared, after winning two council seats in Blackburn in 1976 – the only instances of electoral success the far-right had ever had. It should be remembered that the NF, at the very zenith of it’s size and influence never won a single council election, whereas the BNP now have around 50 elected councillors.

Tyndall then lead the NF to a crushing defeat in the 1979 election in which Thatcher stole the populist clothes of the entire far right. Tyndall was ousted and after falling out with his old Lieutenant Webster he formed the New National Front which in 1982 merged with some elements of the British Movement, the old NF and the British Democratic Party. The present day BNP was born.

Tyndall kept the BNP on a fairly straight political path throughout the 80s – battling with the NF (and usually losing) for the mantle of being top-dogs on the far right. He maintained the traditional Mosley derived protectionist policies (mixed with a brief and internally contested turn to free market liberalism in a belated populist attempt to catch the Thatcher wave) allied with the covert neo-nazism and anti-Semitism that was essential to appeal to the younger elements of the movement in this period. But they were merely treading water and Tyndall was finally deposed from the leadership by Nick Griffin who had joined in 1995 after time leading the ‘political soldiers’ wing of the remaining NF – ironically enough by shamelessly adopting the same approach as Tyndall has utilised against Jordan and others back in the 60s, arguing for an up-to-date presentation and change of emphasis. Griffin then set about the modernisation process that will be the subject of the next section.

Learning the lessons?

Griffin emerged as Party leader after a gruelling and vicious battle with Tyndall in September 1999 and almost immediately used the momentum of his victory to introduce a series of constitutional changes that made the Party Leader’s position significantly more secure, effectively writing his modernisation plans into the party structure for the foreseeable future. This also had the added bonus of keeping a lid on any serious internal dissent by ensuring that any challenge to his position would almost certainly split the party permanently – a step many of those who would like to challenge Griffin have been unwilling to take. To date only Chris Jackson has challenged Griffin’s leadership and he was comprehensively beaten with Griffin receiving over 90% of the vote.

Griffin decided to grasp the nettle and focused his first big changes on the issues that would cause most controversy – race and repatriation. The BNP abandoned one of their, and the far right’s historical core commitments – the compulsory repatriation of all non-whites from Britain. The scale and importance of this change cannot be under-estimated. At a stroke it undermined one of the core arguments against the BNP – the injustice of blanket, compulsory repatriation. It allowed people to vote BNP who had black friends, got on well with their local Asian newsagent, or who quite fancied the woman at their local Chinese takeaway, without believing they were sending such people to their deaths. The whole point of racism is that it is contradictory and hypocritical – by adopting a policy that was partial and would inevitably mean different things to different people, Griffin advanced the cause of racism far more successfully than the “Send ‘Em Back” policies of Tyndall.

This also demonstrated the fast developing political nous of a core of key strategist around Griffin who were learning lessons about political representation and how to appeal to different groups on different issues from the mainstream parties. On top of this it allowed the BNP to oppose immigration on what they could claim were non-racial grounds – they were merely defending the culture of the indigenous population – and in a country where a substantial proportion of the population consistently report that they are opposed to mass immigration but who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as racist, this opened up a very useful new seam of potential supporters.

Tied to this change was the move away from a position of explicit racism to one of emphasising cultural difference and using arguments developed by the top down multi-culturalist approach of the political establishment (left and right). If everyone ‘belongs’ to a particular culture and that culture needs and deserves defending or ‘understanding’ then surely so did the culture of the white people of this country – to deny this was to deny the logic of the official multi-culturalists or to give non-whites privileges over and above those the ‘white community’ could expect. Different but equal – the far right finally grasped hands with elements of the left. This move allowed the BNP to both argue that they were not racist, they were in fact entirely mainstream on the issue and to tie their opponents up in knots thereby exposing the assumptions behind their approaches – unfortunately, unlike others, this was in order to agree with those separatist assumptions rather than to highlight the anti-working class nature of them.

The floundering of the political establishment when faced with this approach was highlighted perfectly by the Newsnight interview Jeremy Paxman conducted with Griffin in 2001 – the liberal left’s favourite attack dog was left lost and mumbling to himself after suddenly finding himself out of his depth and drowning – like many of his type, he clearly hadn’t been following the evolution of the far right and lazily expected to be tearing apart some bonehead moron with a swastika tattooed on his face.

These two policy changes combined to allow a crucial organisational change to be put in place – the removal of the bonehead element and the silencing (in public at least) of the Hitler-worship society who still remained in the party in substantial numbers. Those who wanted to continue down that road were either forced out of the party or put on notice that they should be except to be disciplined if they stepped out of line in the future and jeopardised the new direction.

These measures were key first steps to repositioning the BNP as a respectable non-extremist common sense party speaking up for those the mainstream parties had abandoned – an approach which was then applied via a new electoral strategy. The first run out for the new approach was the 2001 General Election which saw a targeted campaign with fewer candidates, identifying a number of areas and key issues which would then be returned to for further work after the national election. The results were encouraging. Despite standing nearly half the number of candidates as the previous election they raised their total vote by around 300% and increased their average votes per candidate from 640 to 1428 – a sizable jump. Griffin had passed the first test and now they moved onto putting the local strategy in place as widely as possible.

Griffin had been very impressed by the performance of Le Pen’s Front Nationale during the 1980s and 1990s and had taken much of his inspiration from them, particularly their use of local elections to build up power bases and national legitimacy. This was now the BNP’s tactic – identify an outstanding local issue, set up a front campaign around it, talk to locals and uncover what other issues were worrying them, and adopt them as your own. Simple – the BNP can then pose as the only real defenders of the local community on these issues. The fact that the mainstream parties have no intention of sorting out these issues means that they’re actually acting in combination with the BNP and providing the conditions for their future growth. The BNP then racialises these and other social issues and colonises the non-mainstream space.

So how has the local approach worked? The BNP in the 2007 local elections achieved the highest ever vote for a far-right party in this country and have achieved a 97-fold increase in total vote since 2000 – up from 3022 to 292 919 and now have around 50 seats with at least 100 other seats in which they’ve come a close second. It’s fair to say that this localised approach has been very effective despite the limitations imposed on what elected BNP councillors can practically achieve as councillors – this isn’t the point of the tactic though, as the main aim is to normalise a BNP vote and bump the BNP into political respectability in the eyes of the electorate. This, combined with concentration of resources on winnable seats and local elections being used as a group building exercise for the following round of elections means that there is considerable mileage left in this approach yet.

A few facts and figures should emphasise this:

Votes in local elections:

BNP votes: local elections 2000-07

Nationally the picture is not quite so rosy but still shows a clear upward trend in every important area:

The European elections of 2004 also saw the BNP score 808,200 votes nationally – 4,9% of the total vote. At the same time in the London elections they achieved 4.8% with 90,365 votes in the Assembly election and 3.04% with 58,405 votes in the mayoral election – plus 70,736 (3.68%) 2nd preference votes.

Who’s Voting BNP?  Where?

The image of the BNP voter amongst the left is often that of a tattooed yob – infamously characterized as ‘scum off the estates’ by Julie Waterson some years back. This is by no means the case though. Research has established that the BNP does better the higher up the social scale in the area they’re contesting and that the poorer the ward the worse they do with ‘a significant positive correlation only for group C1’ (traditionally the lower middle class). The BNP seem aware of this fact as well – after years of targeting wards at the lower end of the social scale, they are now targeting previously ignored middle class areas. This fits in well with the long-term aims of the modernizers to make voting BNP ‘respectable’- and importantly, having support in well off areas can bring in much needed financial support.

The BNP were trapped in a few regional strongholds for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Traditionally the far right had been able to rely on residual levels of support in areas of east London, the west midlands and Yorkshire. Today those area still retain their importance but have been joined by a raft of other areas – the east Midlands, east England and the north west have all had councillors elected and seen the formation of numerous active local branches. Even previously impregnable areas like Wales have seen rises in BNP votes and activity. In the last round of national elections the BNP missed out on gaining Assembly members in North Wales, South Wales East and South Wales West by 0.6%, 0.9% and 1.3% respectively.

Why This Success?

There is no single over-riding factor that has allowed the changes mentioned above to met with success, rather, it’s a coming together of a series of ingredients to create a toxic mix, some of the most important include:

The BNP have been able to articulate feelings of a general unease about Islam in Britain to outright opposition to it. It is worth noting that these feelings pre-date both 9/11 and 7/7 e.g. the conflict over schooling in Dewsbury in the late 1980s, that led to a major riot in the town in1989, or the racial violence between whites and Muslims in various northern towns in the summer of 2001.

It might not be something that people from Anarchist or Socialist traditions are comfortable with, but the fact is huge numbers of people (of all colours) are deeply uncomfortable with the development of Islam in Britain. Allowing those views to be largely articulated by the tabloid press and the far-right has benefited no one – save the BNP and those British Muslims who wish to live as separate an existence as possible.

Only certain voters count – mainstream politics now revolve around what is euphemistically called ‘middle England’ – that is, a core of swing voters in a handful of well off seats whose vote is crucial to the winning of a General Election. The need to appeal to these voters above all means that their needs are those at the top of the political agenda. Social housing, well funded non-segregated education, a functioning health service and the whole range of social services that most of the working class rely on in one way or another is rarely what these key voters are concerned about, and consequently they’re no longer what the mainstream parties are concerned with either. This abandonment leaves the BNP room to move in and claim that people’s communities are being run down, not because of Labour’s obsession with the rich, but because Muslims or some other group have been allocated all the locally available resources. A class issue is once more racialised.

No credible left challenge to Labour has emerged. The Socialist Alliance came and went. Respect has only really flourished in two cities, and then has been largely dependent on Muslim voters. When queries were raised about selecting slates entirely consisting of males of Pakistani origin in Birmingham, the party began a process leading to a split.

The Greens successes have been partial and largely dependent on middle class votes in cities like Oxford and Brighton. The IWCA, despite remarkable success in one working class area of Oxford, has not spread as a model, and indeed remains smaller now than its creator, Anti-Fascist Action, when it slowly imploded. # Anarchist groups have remained at broadly the same level over the past 10 years, or arguably progressed slightly. None have the prominence now that Class War did 15 years ago. The BNP has swept up protest votes.

No credible right challenge to the BNP has emerged. The implosion of the National Front and the continuing obsession of the remnants with racial purity and Hitler has meant that for serious far-right activists the BNP is today the only show in town.

The BNP has also profited from the Tories shifting to the left, and Labour shifting to the right. On economic issues, the protectionist BNP can say it is more left wing than New Labour. The Conservative party traditionally mopped up votes on certain issues – capital punishment, anti-European Union, opposition to gay rights etc, without actually implementing the views of many of its voters. Cameron’s Conservative Party no longer even pretend that they wish to bring back hanging, reinstate Clause 28, or lead Britain out of the EU. Voters who wish to choose those policies are left with either UKIP, the BNP or parties further to the right.

Success Breeds Success. Once the BNP started winning seats, and getting strong votes in previously uncontested areas, it became clear they were a party worth joining, and worth voting for. Fascists who had largely dropped out of politics – such as Martin and Tina Wingfield, or John Bean have returned to the fray. NF splinter The Third Way began to forget the efforts they had made to distance themselves from fascism, with Patrick Harrington heading the BNP’s Solidarity ‘union’.

The BNP vote has proved brittle. Despite a strong base, the BNP has failed to win council elections in Oldham and Sunderland. In places like Bradford and Burnley, electoral successes have not been maintained, and seats have been lost. Three explanations emerge here:

Firstly the prospect of a BNP councillor can harden local opposition, bringing out the Labour and ethnic minority vote that might otherwise stay at home. Secondly many BNP councillors have either proved to be poor in office (cite examples) or when elected have clearly had little idea as to what their agenda actually was. The startling success in Barking and Dagenham resulted in 13 councillors, many of whom appeared to be astonished by their own election. Thirdly, having been elected, the question of “What Now?” has loomed large, and it appears to be one the BNP has been unable to answer. Whilst local authorities arguably have less power than ever before, the BNP has not been able to manipulate the levers of power that remain to achieve anything. The whole point of a protest vote is once the protest has been made, people move on. At least some of the BNP’s voters appear to have moved on and whether they return or not remains to be seen.

Worryingly though, there have been recent cases of the BNP actually increasing their vote in wards where they were expected to lose support following the poor performance of their councillors – most notably in Gooshays in March.

The BNP has failed to impress the establishment. In the 1970s a certain section of the British ruling class actively considered that a military coup may be necessary to stop the country’s decline. Individuals like Peter Wright of MI5 and George Kennedy Young of MI6 considered acting against the Labour government, producing a sense of fear in Harold Wilson that never left him. (We should not call it paranoia, because they really were out to get him). There was however no party for them to attach their wagon to, and they were to decline in influence even before Margaret Thatcher arguably met one of their main objectives – defeating the unions.

A reliable far-right party, with serious support at all levels of society, was lacking then, and it is thankfully still lacking now. In France, the Front Nationale has serious support in sections of the police and military. In the UK, no matter how unpleasant some of our cops may be, it is hard to imagine there are thousands of BNP card carrying members in uniform. At leadership level, the Police, like much of the establishment, prefers to court ‘community leaders’ rather than antagonise them. Business and City leaders know full well how much they have benefited from the cheap labour of migrants. Fascism may well be a threat held back by the ruling class to attack the working class but Mr Griffin should not expect a call from the CBI any day soon.

The BNP has been prone to arguments, and air of sleaze hangs around Griffin. Rumours of Griffin’s financial untrustworthiness have been circulating for years and have proven fertile ground for those inside and outside the BNP who would like to see him toppled. This generally is hinted at rather than substantiated, but the range of areas in which it’s claimed he’s had his fingers in the pie must surely make some of those involved with the BNP think twice – from setting up ‘print farming’ operations where the party rips off it’s own groups for printing that they’ve had done cheaper commercially, to party money being spent on improvements to Griffin’s farm. The BNP annual accounts are unfailingly late in being supplied to the electoral commission and appear to leave out substantial donations. This air of sleaze that has hung around Griffin since the mid 1980s at least will probably not dent their electoral hopes at this point, it will however mean that internal and external opponents have a ready made issue on which to base their attacks, extending the infighting into the foreseeable future – but unless some real dirt appears in public, these are unlikely to have the potential to do terminal damage.

The Winter War

In December of 2007, Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith, two of the brightest young stars of the party. Were expelled for setting up a ‘treasonous’ blog, which among other things, featured a vicious profiling of leading member Mark Collet. Their expulsions triggered a purge of malcontents within the party, and several resignations as a fight broke out within the party.

The winter 2007/08 divisions in the BNP have to seen in the context of two other factors. Firstly the contradictions inherent in nay far right organisation, and secondly, the sustained attack upon the BNP by the secret state/Searchlight.

Griffin’s BNP has been under sustained attack from Searchlight and its associates. Indeed before Griffin was even appointed The Cook Report got together a scam, in association with Searchlight, to attempt to lure Griffin into creating a series of kickboxing gyms across Britain for nationalists.

It is tempting to conclude that having made a huge mess with the Secret Agent fiasco, the state/Searchlight/Labour nexus got it right next around with the winter 2007 ‘split’.

Either way, genuine anti-fascists should take note that the BNP has not been seriously weakened by an attack by progressive forces , but by its own divisions, contradictions and quote possibly secret state shenanigans.

The material conditions that led to the BNP’s relative success remain in place. Indeed if we are dependent on the likes of Searchlight and MI5 to ‘protect’ us from fascism those conditions are arguably now stronger, not weaker.

Where now?

Griffin remains their best bet and the more serious members of the far right know this. Whilst the internal faction fighting might well rumble on (though the expulsion of the main rebels earlier this year has undermined the structural basis for a real damaging internal fight) Griffin’s position is secure. Past far-right breakthroughs have invariably been undone (in part) by the existence of a handful of ‘stars’ all fighting each other for the credit. Griffin can credibly claim that he and his team have single-handedly dragged the BNP into the political mainstream and at the minute very few of his disgruntled members want to undo this despite their personal dislike of Griffin and key members of his team (yes Collett, we do mean you). If they do, Griffin has already introduced a system of ideological training and two tier voting in order to harden the centre around him and ensure continuity of approach.

Demographic factors might help the BNP vote in the future. Thus far their most successful area has been Barking and Dagenham, a classic ‘white flight’ area of the type that is now springing up around many towns and cities – middle and upper-working class areas. This is important as it’s been established that it is in exactly these areas with this type of social mix (Social groups C1 and C2 in the government’s own classifications) in which the BNP votes are highest.

There is also significant evidence of a hardening of popular opinion on race and immigration. In a period in which the Tories are emphasizing their liberal credentials and moving away from old school, conservative social authoritarianism, those people who might traditionally have been expected to vote Tory on a covertly racist basis have nowhere else to go than the BNP, a wasted vote or inactivity.

Demographics – non-white majorities are emerging in certain cities. This is a change that has occurred even though many mainstream politicians in the 1960s and 1970s ridiculed such a possibility as nonsense – there is potential there for the BNP to make hay around social fears.

The May elections (London Mayor and Assembly and 1/3 of local council seats) is going to be crucial testing ground for the BNP’s new approach. The local elections are the 2004 cycle of seats being fought again – that time they stood 312 candidates, this time they‘ve managed to double that to 625. The 2004 elections was where the BNP vote really took off, so these seats are ones where they’ve done well in before and would have been trying to put down real local roots in. This time we’ll see if they can move onto the 2nd stage of their local strategy. The splits discussed above seem not to have negatively impacted on their ability to stand candidates too much – the only area in which there appears to have been any disruption in Yorkshire which has effectively lost its status as the most important area to Eastern region and the East Midlands.

In London, they are very confident of gaining at least one seat on the London assembly. They only require 5% for one member and came very close to that with little effort last time around – the momentum they’ve picked up in the intervening years should see them over the threshold easily enough – the real question is whether they can pick up a second or even a third member – 8% and 11% being targets.

Learning Lessons

It is ironic that the ‘nationalists’ of the BNP arguably have far more advanced international links with like-minded organisations than the ‘internationalist’ Anarchist organisations do. Given the dramatic rise in importance of English– to the status of being the world’s second language – UK based anarchist organisations and websites should really have far more influence internationally than they currently have. The Libcom website could have been a valuable resource here, but within the UK at least has all too often proved to be controversial at best, divisive at worst. Whilst dozens of Anarchists travel to Britain for the annual London Anarchist Bookfair, only a handful of Britons make the journey to bookfairs in continental Europe.

The above factors can only lead us to the conclusion that there is great potential within the existing social situation for the BNP to expand upon their current social success. Mainstream parties are not suddenly going to start representing working class needs. The danger is not that of the BNP forming a government but of establishing themselves in precisely those areas that anarchists and communists recognize as being key to social change – once this happens it will take years to remove them and even longer to deal with effect of their racialisation of social issues – this is where the real danger lies, not in hyperbole about death camps, but in acting as a block on effective independent working class political organization.

The method to combat this is pretty straightforward but requires actual real life on-the-ground-application. The traditional negative methods of disruption of far-right activities, of physical no-platform, of making it unsafe or counter-productive for the far right to operate openly must be allied to positive methods of political activity, of methods of directly intervening in working class struggles in ways that cut the ground out from the BNP and occupy the political space that they’ve made already inroads on. This requires dedicated work in our communities and workplaces around working class needs and encouraging working class communities to act for themselves in pursuit of those needs. And that means taking on small activities to win confidence building measures as well as spectacular ones – it means being concerned with local issues as well as what’s happening in the middle east, and it means serious long term political commitment to those working class communities. As things stand there is no other option – this is where we are today.

Some brief facts and figures to situate the debate first. The BNP now has 60 local councillors and around the same number of Parish councillors. By comparison previous fascist groups had managed 3 councillors in total in the previous 80 years – this is without  counting the seats won and lost by the BNP. It has one member on the London Assembly, and it has two MEPs. It’s vote in Local, General and European elections has risen from a non-existent level to averaging around 15% in the first, winning deposits in the second (there are three constituencies where the aggregate ward votes at the 2008 local elections puts them in first place) and polling  a million votes in the last. They had 10 000 members at the end of 2007 – a figure that will have risen since then, providing them with an expanding national activist base. They are, by national standards not a huge party, they are ‘a large small party’ – at best the 6th biggest in the country. They are not an immediate threat, they have zero chance of gaining any serious power – their real danger lies elsewhere – as will be outlined later. If their absolute vote is giving pause for concern it is its trajectory that is truly worrying, indeed, one anti-fascist group in 2007 estimated that it’s vote in local elections had risen 97-fold since 2000. [1] This trend has continued in the elections since then – the European elections seeing a circa 20% rise in their national vote from 800 000 to 950 000 – them and the Greens being the only serious national parties to actually increase their votes, and this in a falling turnout. The tiny meaningless fall in the two areas in which they returned MEPs (2000 and 6000 votes) is more than compensated for by the successful elections themselves and the large rises in their other target areas.

Failed approaches

Contemporary anti-fascism is represented by two main groups with broadly similar approaches. Firstly, Hope not Hate, an umbrella group for unions and individuals within the broad area of the labour movement but open to all. This group was formed by the Searchlight Network. Secondly, Unite Against Fascism (UAF) an SWP front group designed to continue in the same vein as the now mothballed Anti-Nazi League (though not shy of relying on the ANL’s reputation). Both groups concentrate their activities on two main activities/approaches; 1) exposing the criminal records and political beliefs of leading BNP members and local candidates and activists and 2) calling on people not to ‘vote Nazi’ – to vote anyone but BNP (with slight differences in how this is interpreted by each group) in an attempt to raise turnout and block the BNP electorally this way – this approach formed the basis of both groups failed intervention into the London Mayoral and European elections.

What is wrong with these two approaches? The most obvious objection to an anti-BNP strategy centred around these tactics is that they don’t work today and they haven’t worked for some time. This isn’t to say that they haven’t worked in the past, just that they cannot form the central core of an anti-BNP strategy in today’s conditions.

Exposing the BNP’s various criminal and political records has had no discernible impact. In  a country in which over 40%  of all males have a criminal conviction [2] pointing out to voters in the sort of areas the BNP targets that  a candidate has a conviction for assault or theft is likely to have zero impact. If this were not the case then we would today be seeing declining BNP votes and councillors not being returned post-exposure. But we’re not, we’re seeing a steadily rising vote and increasing re-elections.

This tactic has been pursued over the last 10 years on a scale never seen before – every section of the mass media has got in on the game, every candidate has been hammering home their oppositions convictions. If it was ever to make an impact it would have done so in these almost ideal conditions, instead the far right vote continues to rise. We have to conclude that this approach is ineffective.

Exposing past political views  - for instance, Griffins flirting with Holocaust denial in the 90s – has suffered the same fate. Griffin simply points out that he no longer believes what he once did, that he was wrong to do so. Issue effectively neutralised, but at this point the interviewer is likely to press on regardless allowing griffin to turn the tables and ask the interviewer if they want to talk about politics. The same thing happens on a larger scale electorally. As above, if this approach of bringing up death camps or Nazi Germany was going to have any impact it would have done so in the especially favourable conditions of current fevered mass media scrutiny of the BNP by now. This approach did find success in the 3 or 4 decades post WW2 when a real folk memory of the sacrifices made by millions was kept alive – today, in different conditions, it cannot, has not and will not make any inroads.

Appealing to the status quo

These, though, are merely tactical problems, bred by past success and turned into conservative substitutes for real active intervention – but precisely as such, they can be developed into more substantive forms of exposure. (More on that later) Far more damaging on a strategical level is the second approach, calling on the electorate to ‘vote anyone but BNP’. This is a de facto status quo position that effectively calls on people to support the social conditions that have given rise to their radical discontent and to support the very same parties that have introduced and are pledged to maintain these conditions. In the bluntest terms, people will simply not vote for the parties they now blame for their situation and no amount of cajoling or mentions of the holocaust will change that. The collapse in the labour vote over last 5 years makes this patently clear (figures here). This position helps ensure that the conditions which are producing the BNP are going to remain in place and we’re back at square one. And it allows the BNP to make all the running as the anti-establishment party during a once in a lifetime time opportunity for anti-establishment parties to make a real breakthrough.

The way to undercut this is to work towards dealing with the root causes of the BNP support – the political abandonment of much of the working class in pursuit of a tiny C1/C2 swing electorate and their interests (interests that are rarely the same as those of traditional labour voting areas), the deliberate setting of parts of the same community at each others throats in the fight for resources under the name of multi-culturalism, the closing down of schools, hospitals, wages being driven down, debt, sub-standard housing, rising rent, under funded services –  all the conditions of our social life being attacked and commercialised by a class that’s shown itself incapable in the most basic terms of being able to run the system for the benefit of all. This what needs to be challenged as a priority, not peoples reactions to those planned and deliberate failures know as neoliberalism

And this is where pro-status quo anti-fascism is falling down and demonstrating both a misunderstanding of where we are today and a real lack of political courage. A call to ‘Vote Anyone But BNP’ or Vote to Stop the BNP’ is, in most areas where it is raised, a disguised call to vote Labour – that is why the unions are funding the millions of leaflets delivered by Hope Not Hate. (We can dismiss the suggestion that this slogan is also a call to vote Green, the BNP and Greens are not competing for the same vote. Nor will we dwell on those areas where the slogan translates into ‘Vote Tory’ or ‘Lib-Dem’ beyond asking you to imagine how an implied call to ‘Vote Thatcher to Stop The National Front!’ would have been met?) An anti-fascism tied to support for the parties that have imposed the conditions people are protesting at is already a failing anti-fascism that is sacrificing all credibility by joining hands with the very establishment that people are fed up of and working to get rid of. In conditions where large sections of the electorate have abandoned all the mainstream parties, (combined party membership of mainstream parties has dropped from over 3 million in the late 60s to barely half a million today and is still falling, whilst the drop in labour party votes is not met with substantial rises from the lib-dems and Tories, whilst popular participation in  non-formally political organisations is skyrocketing [3]) for anti-fascists not be supporting or initiating local projects that confront rather than support the labour party is to politically abandon these communities to the BNP in the same way as the Labour party already have – albeit they’re now belatedly waking up to the dangers. Being involved in those activities aside from election times does not square the circle either, the same contradictions are there writ just as large. Open participatory public confrontation with these conditions, not collaboration or lesser-evilism,  is the key to re-energising the political life of working class communities on a path that logically and dynamically leads to squeezing the BNP out. Sharply put, it’s time to shit or get off the pot.

No platform?

This brings us onto ‘No Platform’ – since Griffin’s egging the day after being elected it’s become evident that beyond the confines of those already politically opposed to the BNP this has very little popular support, and in a country where the myth of democracy has a great hold over public political imagination it’s potentially dangerous in a number of ways. Firstly it, via the functioning of that democratic myth, associates the left with authoritarianism, violence and telling people what they can and cannot hear/read – exactly the sort of high handed arrogance that many people are rejecting the mainstream parties for. Secondly, it acts as cover and support for top-down or state led manoeuvres such as the closure of the BNP’s bank accounts by Barclays, which led to a Palestinian Solidarity Committee’s accounts being closed as well, or the plans by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the parties constitution and membership rules. How easy to turn these initiatives against us? Already there are calls for a Berufsverbot for public sector workers, this plays directly into the hands of the establishment. Of course, a community led and supported refusal to allow the BNP to operate in their area is a very different matter, but we’re currently seeing the first two forms of ‘No Platform’ substituted for this effective one.

On a related note Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) are an attempt to continue the cultural fight of the ANL by holding music festivals and similar type events – again, questions need to be asked. The problem being that today they simply attract those who are already against the BNP. In the past they were real arenas of conflict, battle grounds for the hearts of young people, and they were battlegrounds because the fascists, at that point, clung to their ‘control the streets’ strategy, to staging highly provocative marches that were attracting sections of young people. Today that context no longer exists and the far-right has no hold whatsoever over the young – they lost that battle years ago. Energy and resources channelled in LMHR would be better off directed at helping deal with the problems working class communities face as part and parcel of squeezing the BNP.

Missing the real danger

What the current anti-fascist approaches  have in common is in missing the real danger here. It doesn’t lie in the BNP taking power, in the possibility of concentration camps or any of the other scare stories we’ve been hearing recently. It lies in them colonising the anti-mainstream parties vote and loyalty, thereby blocking the development of an independent working class politics capable of defending our conditions and of challenging neo-liberalism. Their approach is the one that is being normalised nationally at the minute with the consequent racialisation of social issues and a  massive shift to the far right as the default starting position for politics. Each step they take forwards knocks the ‘left’ backwards. This situation represents an immense defeat for the left one that could take us decades to recover from and leaving us as outsiders (even more so than today) in working class communities – the very places that we all recognise as being key to real social change, unless the job of defending the needs of working class communities is seriously taken on and a counter-productive out-dated anti-fascism is discarded. And this needs to be done now whilst the BNP is till soft in many areas – although being rapidly hardened by the economic climate, a situation which is not going to go away for years yet.

So, can we tie these brief criticism together some positive suggestions?

1) The formation of ‘community unions’ not connected to labour, possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational independence assured, that work directly on helping to meet the needs of those politically abandoned working class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. Based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities – which can only pit them head to head against the BNP and the rest of the political mainstream. The types of small victories than can be won on this terrain should be viewed not only as being worthwhile in themselves but also as contributing to the re-emergence of community confidence in its political self assertion, the necessary first steps towards rebuilding a meaningful change. The are already existing groups engaged in this practical activity such as LCAP, Haringey Solidarity, the IWCA and so on.

The need for these to be open membership union type organisations rather than party membership type groups is a simple practical one. People will join unions at work as they recognise collective needs that exist over and above the heads of political disagreements, and the same is true of community needs. And once there is widespread identification (even passive) of the needs of the area/workplace with the existence of the union it becomes very hard to shift, that identification becomes a power in itself. Parties are too narrow to play this role under today’s conditions – they exist on a different level – there’s no reason why they cannot play a role within these broader open groups though.

2) Developing the ‘expose them’ model into one that instead of revealing ineffective details instead concentrates on why their polices will not deal with the social problems driving people into their arms – if we cannot make this clear to those already intensely concerned with these issues then our propaganda is failing and is at best talking to those who would never vote BNP anyway. This will require a direct challenge to Searchlight/UAF and other mainstream anti-fascists as they continue to empty their publications of all but the most inane type of content we’ve criticised above. This, of course, needs to be linked to the activity of the ‘community union’ type groups mentioned above.

3) Searchlight need to abandon their default pro-labour position and use their existing networks and resources to get behind local campaigns, actively challenging the conditions that are breeding support for the far right. This is unlikely to happen.

4) Stop the marches/labelling/shouting etc Marching into an area that you do not know and have no continuing interest in, shouting what’s right for that area is alienating and counter-productive. People do not like being told what’s best for them and will kick back against or simply ignore this sort of activity.

All of this can be performed without capitulating to racism of any kind whatsoever and without writing off vast swathes of the population. It has to be.

Notes

1) The BNP and the 2007 Elections – Unite Against Fascism
2) Social Policy Research #93, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
3) Power Inquiry, Power, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 2006.