Pieces of Labourism and the Fascist Possibilty

A friend of mine very nearly became an MEP in June. He was top of the Green Party list in the East of England, and while the electoral maths was complicated, he basically needed ten per cent of the regional vote to win a seat in the European parliament. He had always been reasonably hopeful; the Greens have been steadily building their vote in local elections and winning council seats across the region. In our home city of Norwich, they are now the main opposition council group, with a realistic chance of becoming the largest party and forming a minority administration in the next year or two. As so often, this is largely the work of a few key individuals, including a quite brilliant young organiser who was recently elected national Green Party deputy leader in the hope that he can apply on the national stage some of the magic he has worked in our fine city.
The Norwich Greens will soon displace Labour, who have run the council for most of the last sixty years (including a period as a near ‘one-party state’ in the late 1980s), with a steady decline in the last ten. In 2002, Labour lost control to the Liberal Democrats, who had themselves built support over the previous twenty years. Having had their moment in the spotlight, and failed to make much difference to what is generally a ‘poorly performing’ local authority, the Lib Dems are now falling away. Labour have been able to run a minority administration for the last few years, but their voters and councillors are declining with age and demoralisation. As my Green wannabe-MEP friend reports, “the only people voting Labour are dying, have an occupational interest as trade union officials, or somehow think it will help them get on life.” Beyond these elderly diehards, professional Labourists and Blair-era ‘aspirationals’, the ‘core vote’ no longer exists.
The Greens are benefitting not just from this Labour decline but also from the ‘secondary erosion’ of the Labour vote which Liberal ‘community politics’ pioneered. The real damage was done to Labour in the 1970s and ‘80s, locally and nationally, when the party was apparently at its most disputatious and lively, but its ‘community roots’ were being torn up by the ‘new times’ of Thatcherism, the temporary politicisation of the professional middle class (who ‘took over’ the party in a kind of genteel social entryism, then promptly moved on into the SDP or the ‘political wilderness’ of jokey disillusionment and private consolation) and, with deindustrialisation, the disorganisation and dispersal of the working class. Once people stop habitually voting Labour, it seems, they’ll switch very readily among other options; a kind of electoral consumerism or, less charitably, promiscuity. Freed of their tribal loyalties and work-based disciplines, they only very reluctantly ‘return to the fold’ (as in 1997; and doesn’t the term ‘return to the fold’ speak volumes about how they were traditionally – and now refuse to be – regarded by Labour’s electoral machine?).
‘Labourism’, however you define it, is now pretty much exhausted on every level: industrial and economic (with the break-up of what was once the largest and most powerful proletariat in the world), ideological and moral (with the displacement of class as our primary source of personal identity), programmatic and strategic (with the failure to devise a modern and distinctively British social democracy), as a ‘movement’ (with the loss of trade union corporate and political power), and as a foothold in the institutions of the state (with the self-willed isolation of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the New Labour coup d’etat). The Labour Party persists, mainly because of the few hundred people (and the ruling class) who have a vested interest in its organisational survival, but Labourism is now little more than nostalgic yearning for a past that was itself never much more than a woolly dream.
What has happened in Norwich, as in most other Labour ‘heartlands’, is the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote ‘the Forward March of Labour’ for much of the twentieth century. This alliance consisted of most of the organised, waged, culturally unified and overwhelmingly white, classically ‘subaltern’ working class on the one hand, and the radical-liberal, ‘progressive’ and well-educated (and –intentioned) sections of the salaried middle class on the other, the ‘traditional intellectuals’ of the professions and the public services. While Labour was in the ascendancy, and able to influence the terms of the ‘national interest’ and ‘common purpose’, these two very different and culturally antagonistic social groups rubbed along pretty well together. The British working class got its long sought-after ‘voice in parliament’ and a ‘fair share’ in the spoils of capitalism and the Empire. The progressive ‘salariat’ got a say in government, and a chance to apply its technical and administrative skills to the running of the country. For the political and trade union elites of both, there were parliamentary seats and government posts as incentive and reward. The ‘brothers’ and the ‘toffs’ might get on each others’ nerves, with their rude or affected manners and language, but they held their noses and tongues for the sake of the ‘good old cause’.
This arrangement, the political expression of the very British historic compromise between capital and Labour which gave us the ‘post war social democratic consensus’, reached its zenith in 1951, when Labour polled its highest ever vote on the back of its most purposeful and effective government but still (because of the vagaries of the electoral system) lost power to the Tories. This is a familiar enough oddity; what’s less well known is that this was also a near-historic high for the Tories, and above all for the two-party dominance of British politics. In that election, the Tories and Labour shared a whopping 96 per cent of the total vote, which was itself an amazing 82.6 per cent turnout. For all their mutual antipathy, the two class-based political blocs had reached a kind of weighty accommodation, reflected in the sense of social harmony and cultural unity, steady prosperity and widening ‘affluence’, state and public service reform, ‘national-popular’ purpose and communal peace that generally characterised Britain in the 1950s. The decade has been mythologized for its stultifying blandness and conformism – to be spectacularly shattered by the ‘swinging sixties’ - but this should not blind us to its overall atmosphere of stability and recovery, which most British people experienced as real material and familial progress.
The subsequent story of British society has been the break-up of that consensus, firstly under the weight of the deep and protracted problems of our capitalist economy, which date back to the end of the Victorian era, and secondly by the brutal and superficial resolution of those problems by neo-liberal Thatcherism, whose primary target was the corporate power of the trade unions. They were duly tamed; a crucial factor in popular acquiescence to our latest recession and upsurge in unemployment. With the break-up of Labourism, New Labour has adapted and modified the neo-liberal model to a more global and consumerist form, with initial electoral benefits in the ‘boom’ years but now disastrous effects in the ‘bust’. One of the main victims of ‘the project’ has been the Labour Party itself, which is now weaker organisationally and politically than since its emergence as something like a mass party in the aftermath of the First World War. Labour has never been an individual membership party (the unruly constituency parties were always outweighed by the ‘dead souls’ of the union block vote and the ‘sovereignty’ of the parliamentary party; nowadays the leadership just does what it wants), but apart from its dwindling coteries in and around parliament and local government it’s hard to see much sign of political life.
Its ‘activist base’ has shrivelled with political disillusionment, especially over Iraq. The spadework of ‘getting out the vote’ has always been done mainly by local councillors, but with every fresh election a proportion are culled; there are now around 5000 (less than half the Tories), mostly in impoverished city and district councils (they have been pretty much wiped out in the better funded counties, where more seats were lost than retained in the latest elections alone), and whole regions of the country are now virtually Labour-free. The only things keeping the show on the road are the patronage of the state (all those less newsworthy ‘expenses’ which sustain the party’s staff and organisation), the grudging and increasingly conditional support of the trade unions and of a small circle of ‘progressive’ rich people, the media-political nexus of the Westminster village and their insatiable hunger for ‘news’, and an electoral system which militates strongly against innovation.
Nonetheless, new political forces are emerging from among the pieces of Labourism and of its dialectical twin, popular Toryism, which was surprisingly strong in the industrial cities and usually won around a third of the working class vote, and sometimes more. As a social group, ‘working class Tories’ were generally beneficiaries of Thatcherism (or liked to think they were), but as a distinct political constituency an early but neglected victim. All that remains of that urban Conservatism are a few shabby Conservative clubs (whose main attraction was always the beer), and a toehold in the suburbs. The Tories, like Labour, have built new support among the extra-urban middle class, but the two-party bloc system has been steadily crumbling since its 1951 zenith.
The Greens are benefitting from the disaffection of the progressive middle class, especially after Blair’s disastrous decision to enlist in Bush’s ‘war against terror’, but also in disgust at New Labour’s refusal to undo the privateering ‘excesses’ of Thatcherism. Green electoral growth is based largely in districts around universities and among public service professionals, who are quietly outraged by deregulation and ‘outsourcing’ of services they have devoted their careers to (and made disproportionate and canny use of for themselves and their families). That’s a relatively benign outcome of the break-up of Labourism, and does a little bit to address the very real catastrophe of climate change (though there is a ‘dark side’ to environmentalism, expressed in its anti-modern, anti-urban and – especially on its animal rights fringe – anti-human elements, and in its messianic and often apocalyptic anti-political tone). What I want to turn to now is the rather darker piece of Labourism represented and cultivated by the British National Party.
There has never been a serious fascist party or movement in Britain; our political and electoral cultures and systems discourage the ‘extremes’ which elsewhere in Europe have at times taken state power and, partially recovered from their catastrophic defeat in the Second World War, now become part of the modern mainstream (as most recently in Italy, where Mussolini’s followers form a major part of Berlusconi’s governing party). In Britain the distinctive ‘historic compromise’ between capital and labour neither allowed nor required a formal fascist political organisation to perform the historical function of ‘disciplining’ the national working class (though Thatcherism at times came close). Instead, the combined ‘radical liberal’ ideologies of free trade and free collective bargaining meant the huge and historically ‘advanced’ British working class was almost uniquely ill-disciplined (the primary reason for its relative lack of technical skill, its cultural and social ‘backwardness’). When necessary, they were disciplined as much by their own institutions (the trade unions, Labour Party etc.), cultures (sport, light entertainment, ‘mind-numbing routine’) and moralities (respectability, humility, simplicity, practicality) as anything else.
But there is in any society what we might call a ‘fascist possibility’, a certain combination of prejudices and interests which receive expression through particular political methods and stylings, classically based on a strong hankering after order, uniformity and rules. It’s usually based among the lower middle class or ‘petty bourgeoisie’ but crucially requires the sponsorship of more exalted social groups with serious power and resources, and the acquiescence or fragmentation of the organised working class (and the willing ‘muscle’ of some of the fragments). Its classic expressions are of course German Nazism, Italian Fascism and (to a lesser extent) Spanish Falangism: those over-familiar ‘monsters’ which loom so large in the corrective imaginations of our popular cultures and school curricula, and create such misleading expectations of how fascism should look and behave.
The crucial historical point about the ‘fascist possibility’ in England is that it has no single organisational home, but is instead dispersed across our society, culture and politics. By and large it has been subsumed within the Tory/Labour dichotomy that has dominated modern British politics, but it has always been socially latent and – during periods of economic turbulence like the 1930s or the 1970s – liable to organisational expression in noisy, rude and (in several senses) ‘offensive’ movements like the British Union of Fascists or the National Front. Once it’s served its demonstrative, facilitative or disciplinary purposes, English ‘fascism’ gets put back in the box till next time. The examples I’ve just cited are the obvious ones, with their own historical associations of violence and subversion; what are less often acknowledged are the ‘fascist’ currents which have formed tributaries within the dominant modern British ideologies of Conservatism and, more to our point here, Labourism.
It’s well known that Mussolini started out a revolutionary socialist; he edited the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! until he broke with them over the First World War (he also had his own Labour admirers, like Evan Durbin and John Strachey, right through into the 1930s). What is almost completely forgotten is that late Victorian Britain had an equivalent political shape-shifter in the curious figure of Henry Myers Hyndman (1842-1921), who also supported the war and split with much of the left over it. Hyndman deserves fresh study in his own right, as founder and long time leader of the first avowedly Marxist and programmatically socialist political organisation with any level of popular support in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation. Hyndman was by the far the most effective ‘left wing’ political operator and orator of his day, equipped “with the vehemence of a great soul and the simplicity of a child”. He associated on equal terms with Marx, Engels, William Morris, Tom Mann and Edward Carpenter, as well as numerous politicians in and around government and ruling circles, including Tory ex-Prime Minister Disraeli - who he tried to persuade to support “democratic reorganisation of the empire” - and the Salvation Army founder William Booth, whose momentous study Life and Labour he partly prompted. But Hyndman seems to have made a habit of falling out with pretty much everyone he knew.
That’s mainly why he’s been derided by memoirists and biographers as variously “an extremely chauvinistic arch-Conservative” (for Engels) or “a shop with all its goods in the front” (for Margaret McMillan). Hyndman also had a propensity for scandal, and never quite got over a major crisis in the early days of the SDF, when he accepted money from the Tory Party – delivered by a shadowy ‘bagman’ called Maltman Barry who could have stepped straight out of Conan Doyle - to put up candidates against Liberal MPs. There is also something inherently ridiculous – in a deeply English way – about Hyndman the high Tory scion, convinced Marxist and one-time gentleman county cricketer, who in old age “reflected wryly on the possibility that if I had kept clear of socialism, I could have been Secretary of State on the Tory side”. My favourite image, relayed in Francis Wheen’s excellent biography of Marx, is of Hyndman the portly businessman dressed in a frock coat and silk top hat thanking his working class audiences on behalf of his wealthy family for the surplus value accrued from their labour and redeployed by him in the cause of revolutionary socialism.
But beyond the anecdotes and caricatures, Hyndman’s true significance is in the concepts and traditions he tried to combine as a “revolutionary patriot”, “Tory Marxist” (Phillip Blond take note), “democratic imperialist” and, perhaps most perilously of all, “national socialist”. The SDF itself split and reconstituted itself several times, including (briefly, in 1917-19) as the National Socialist Party, and never had more than 12,000 paying members and a few hundred activists, concentrated in London and Lancashire. It was wary of the trade unions, which Hyndman regarded as an integral part of the functioning of liberal capitalism (he was by no means alone; Gramsci was saying pretty much the same thing at the same time). It was in and out of the early Labour Party, with (to quote Hyndman in 1920) “No hope but in the Labour Party, and not much in that”, while its main anti-Hyndman faction (the British Socialist Party) helped to found the ill-fated Communist Party of Great Britain. The SDF was eventually disbanded in 1941, and left little to show for its sixty years of organisational existence.
But its ideological legacy is evident in the history of Labourism, particularly the central, perennial attempt of the ‘labour movement’ (party and unions) to reconcile the interests of class and nation in its historic aims of representing the former and running the latter. For Pelling, what distinguished Hyndman (and the SDF under him) from the rest of the early 20th century Marxist and socialist left was his appeal to the English working class, who Hyndman regarded as the most advanced in the world. By contrast, the various other groups and parties of the left were led by “immigrants and exiles from the Continent” and elements from “the Celtic fringe”. The Labour Party would have more than its share of both, especially the latter, but the key to its foundation, growth and eventual establishment as a parliamentary and occasionally governing party was its social and cultural base among the patriotic, nationalist and imperialist, socially conservative English masses. The “free-born Englishman”, a progressive stereotype in (say) the historical writings of E.P. Thompson, could also embody (as Mercer and Schwartz pointed out in their 1981 critique of Thompson) “the notion of English ‘stock’ and ‘birthright’ (which) have informed the radical right and the proto-fascist fringe.”
Labour’s rising star in the 1920s - as it displaced the Liberals as the main anti-Tory opposition and had its first unhappy taste of government - was another faintly ridiculous dashing toff, whose politics and rhetorical power bore ready comparison to the recently deceased Hyndman; a ‘national socialist’ and ‘democratic imperialist’ and early advocate of Keynesian responses to capitalist crisis by the name of Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the early Labour equivalent to Tony Blair, a superficially bright and over-confident fixer and networker, with an abundance of self-regard and opinion never quite matched by ability or judgment. Mosley’s appeal to Labourism is summarised by sympathetic biographer Robert Skidelsky as “Workers of the Empire, Unite!” He served briefly as a Cabinet Minister in the second Labour government (1929-31), and (Skidelsky argues) offered up one of the more coherent responses from in and around the Labour Party to the gathering Depression, before resigning in 1930 to establish the New Party. The New Party was a kind of early dry run for the SDP or (arguably) New Labour, an attempt to ‘break the mould’ and apply a politics of technocratic fix to capitalism in crisis. It foundered, just like the SDP, on the durability of the established parties and the inertia of Britain’s institutional framework, not to mention the competing ambitions and personalities of its leaders around Mosley. He fell in with the other rising ‘national socialists’ elsewhere in Europe, and suffered for the basic betrayal of British national interests, ‘decorum’ and decency this represented (though as late as 1939 he still managed to draw the largest ever crowd in Britain for an indoor political rally).
Nowadays Mosley does not even figure on the roll-call of Labourist traitors - Ramsay MacDonald, Phillip Snowden, Roy Jenkins etc – and very few Labour people seem to realise that he was once one of them. But when Gordon Brown advocates “British jobs for British workers”, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Labour heartland ideologues like Phil Woollas MP (recently seen blushing beside Joanna Lumley), he is simply giving contemporary expression to a deep historical current within Labourism. And the fact that it is also a slogan to be heard at ‘wildcat’ trade union action against factory closures, and (as Brown was rudely reminded) in BNP literature and broadcasts (coupled with “And we really mean it!”), indicates other horizontal as well as vertical continuities. The same ideological impulses – nationalist, xenophobic, residually and nostalgically imperialist, patriarchal, statist and workerist, angry and aggrieved and potentially violent – are at work here. They are as old as the British nation-state, but normally kept underground and nicely ‘out of the way’, in private attitudes rather than public discourse. However, a particular set of events – deep recession, military conflict or political scandal, to take a few recent examples – will occasionally bring them bubbling nastily back up to the surface; or, as with the current rise of the British National Party, emboldened into louder and relatively unashamed popular expression.
How to ‘Deal’ with the BNP?
By way of preface, I need to make a couple of points plain. Firstly, I am not for one moment suggesting that the Labour Party is or has ever been a fascist organisation. There was a flurry of controversy a couple of years ago when an article appeared on the internet by an American academic with a handy 25-point test of how fascist any individual or group might be (Brown’s New Labour scored, I seem to remember, 16 or 17, with Blair a few points behind); ‘political science’ at its most crass. Secondly, I am not suggesting that anyone should support the BNP either. My own personal opinion is that the BNP embodies a lumpen little Englanderism, all the more loathsome for its relative subtlety and effectiveness. But it can neither be ‘exposed’ nor effectively opposed unless we properly understand it, and make some imaginative effort to understand why people do support it.
The BNP’s recent successes have prompted a flurry of liberal agonising, mostly in and around the Guardian newspaper and BBC Newsnight, which has done little but demonstrate the distaste of the professional intelligentsia for what remains of the white working class, and as such affirms my basic historical point about the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote Labourism. The Guardian sampled the opinions of ‘top historians’ in the aftermath of the Euro-elections; it was mostly good sense, with much use of the terms ‘proportion’ and ‘perspective’, but what struck me was how little these people seemed to know or really care about the situation in England. To a person (including his eminence Eric Hobsbawm), these ‘left-leaning’ intellectuals and ‘Nazi experts’ had far more insight into ‘abroad’ than our own country. One of them went so far as to suggest that the most effective response to the BNP was “ridicule... an underestimated weapon.” Yes, I thought, what the disaffected English white working class really need is a further dose of liberal ridicule...
The British National Party was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall from a faction of the National Front and (more distantly) the British Union of Fascists. It grew steadily through the 1990s, in response to the local effects of burgeoning ‘globalisation’, specifically the effects of rapidly expanding immigration on the lower-skilled sections of the workforce. Poorly skilled and resourced whites, especially in the metropolitan hinterlands of East London and Lancashire, felt their wages and job prospects squeezed and their districts visibly changing with the influx of Bangladeshis, Africans, Eastern Europeans and other ‘new migrants’. Nick Griffin took over from Tyndall in 1999, and set about ‘modernising’ the BNP, playing down its traditional anti-semitism and thuggery, playing up its anti-Islamism and its ‘civilized’ values, broadening and deepening its electoral appeal and taking on the new methodologies of Public Relations-driven politics. By 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported, the BNP’s was “the most visited website of any UK political party.” It has more than 10,000 members and a wider social base far beyond its traditional right-wing core.
Under Griffin, the BNP has mounted serious local election campaigns and won dozens of council seats. It now claims over 100 nationwide, mainly in the old SDF strongholds of East London and the North West, as well as the traditional far-right stamping grounds of Essex and the West Midlands. They are almost always former Labour seats, won with ex-Labour votes (likewise their two new MEP seats). The BNP have had some trouble holding onto council seats, because successful candidates have been exposed as thugs or morons (there are plenty of those among other parties’ councillors who generally go unchallenged) or in some cases unreconstructed Nazis; but as a register of inchoate protest, voting BNP seems to have growing popular appeal; “two fingers to the establishment”, as a Labour minister recently put it. In the 2005 general election, it won 192,850 votes, 4.2 per cent of the votes in contested seats. This is a very real and present electoral threat; but primarily to Labour.
There is no evidence that standard ‘anti-fascist’ campaigns - usually in the form of legalistic or procedural challenges, journalistic exposes, leafleting and demonstrations, or unity-themed pop concerts – are actually working against the new-style BNP. They might serve to rally convinced anti-fascists, and to alert others who were unaware of the local threat, but it’s doubtful that they dissuade anyone already thinking of supporting the BNP. I watched assorted Trots shouting and gesticulating at Nick Griffin’s battle-van outside the Euro-election count in Manchester Town Hall, with (it seemed) a camera crew for every ‘protestor’, and I imagined him inside laughing his union jack socks off. Prominent and regular Guardian investigations, I’m sure, achieve a similar effect.
If anything, these campaigns can be counterproductive, smacking of ‘victimization’ by the social and cultural ‘establishment’, and fuelling the BNP and its supporters’ own strong sense of subaltern grievance and ‘martyr complex’. Prohibition is never especially effective in liberal democratic societies, whether of drink and drugs, gambling, sex or political affiliation, especially if it’s based on sniffy middle class censoriousness. The main effect of ‘No Platform for Fascists’ was always unwarranted status and exposure for the ‘fascists’, apparent denial of their democratic rights, and the implication that anti-fascists were somehow scared of open debate. Besides, in the modern media age (especially the internet, of which the BNP has made such effective use) ‘platforms’ cannot actually be denied, except by media boredom and public indifference; and those are not responses currently evoked by the BNP.
The party’s setbacks, in lost support and seats, are more often down to candidates’ incompetence or disreputability, or to internal disputes and splits like a recent, spectacular one over its ‘internal security’. A number of BNP councillors have quit early or failed to turn up to council functions and fulfil council duties; but (with some personal experience of my own) being a councillor can be a big letdown after the brouhaha of election. You realise fairly quickly that your status is pretty lowly and your powers strictly limited; at the same time, the expectations of your constituents (or, as Tory MP Alan Clark memorably dubbed them, ‘mendicants’) can be relentless and utterly unrealistic. When your fellow councillors are shunning you, and excluding you from the ‘official’ posts and functions that compensate for all the drudgery, you’re bound to wonder whether it’s worth turning up at all.
And for all the fuss in local and national media about non-attending BNP councillors, there is no indication that the general public cares much either. If anything, treating public office as a waste of time may well boost the BNP’s ‘anti-establishment’ credentials (the same goes, I’m sure, for being denounced from Church of England pulpits). When ‘democratic politics’ itself is in such widespread disrepute, at street, council or parliamentary level, it does the BNP no public harm at all to be seen to be excluded from it. Eventually, the BNP will have to learn the ropes of municipal politics – backbiting and stitch-ups, harassing council officers, the creation of networks of patronage and favour amongst ‘service-users’ and tenants, the manipulation of local media etc. – and (as has already happened to longer-serving BNP councillors) be domesticated by its dull grind, but for the moment they can revel in their ‘outsider’ status. And as they grow, they will attract more capable, traditionally ambitious people.
Likewise, to attack the British National Party as ‘racist’, as opponents habitually do, somehow misses the point. The BNP is undoubtedly racist – with more than a few hard-core ‘scientific’ proponents of white supremacy, including new MEP Andrew Brons - but only in the same sense as much of the marginalised, fragmented and disaffected white working class it appeals to. This broader racism is compounded by cack-handed attempts to deal with it, which derive from a largely middle class conversation about language and ‘manners’, and from the vested interests and wishful thinking of institutionalised multiculturalism and ‘the race relations industry’. When racial tolerance and diversity are promoted as mainly a matter of using the approved language, and being generally ‘nice’ to ethnic minorities – and when multi-faceted poverty and growing inequality inhibit genuine social interaction between all classes and identity-groups - it’s not surprising that the less articulate and ‘polite’ elements of the ethnic majority react against it.
The racism of the BNP’s new support is not what we might call a ‘core belief’, and is always amenable to exceptionalism among personal acquaintances (‘he might be black but he’s a nice bloke’); and the blatant racism of the BNP’s constitution is likely to be tempered under legal challenge for the sake of public funding. Rather, the popular value-base the BNP appeals to is all those feelings of having been ‘left behind’ by the modern world, felt at times (I’d suggest) by many of us; that’s why it tends to pop up in relatively marginal places like Burnley or Sunderland or Thurrock, with little presence in London or our other big bustling cities. There has been a lot of good recent history into internal English migration, which was a major feature of our capitalist economy and society during its most vibrant periods. It is only more recently, with the post-war social settlement of the welfare state, full employment and council housing, that our indigenous population has ‘settled’ into its own ‘colonies’ (‘reservations’ might be a better term). Perhaps we should see the BNP as a reflection of social stagnation rather than upheaval. And ‘we’ (by which I mean the liberal intelligentsia) need to be much more attuned to the class dimension of our public discourse. When we call ‘these people’ racist or fascist – or ‘chav’ or ‘underclass’ – are we actually saying they are stupid? There is a bourgeois distaste for fellow humanity here that goes all the way back to Gulliver’s disgust at the Yahoos of Houyhnhnmland. And there are plenty of historical variants on the Yahoos’ own customary response “to discharge their excrements on my head”.
The real problem for Labour is that it cannot ‘deal’ with the BNP without confronting its own history (which it is generally reluctant to do, beyond a certain misty-eyed sentimentality) and the casual racism of much of its own traditional ‘core’ support (which would require far deeper social roots and a clearer understanding of the experiential basis of popular ideologies than Labour has ever actually had). And confronting the old Labour racists - especially in the language and manners of contemporary ‘anti-racism’, an overwhelmingly educated, ‘progressive’ and liberal, middle class discourse - would simply reaffirm their subaltern grievance and disaffection. This is the vicious double bind facing Labour MPs in BNP-inclined constituencies, shuffling between denunciation and endorsement of underlying white working class grievances. This same popular resentment about being told what to think is evident in popular reactions to ‘political correctness gone mad’ (a term the BNP makes much use of), especially in their more jokey, Sun-type manifestations, which represent a long-established and very English aversion to pomposity and bossiness.
Beyond the BNP: contemporary ‘fascist possibilities’
If the BNP pose a threat, it is crucial to understand its nature and to keep it in proportion. They will never win serious power; there are one or two very bright individuals in the BNP national leadership, but they have difficulty keeping a grip on the hotheads (a problem for all necessarily cross-class political organisations, in periods of growth as much as decline). Their support is strongly concentrated in particular places where there are long traditions of politically articulated social prejudice, and new and old forms of ‘bad behaviour’, those parts of the country which have always been in a certain sense ‘no-go areas’ for ‘respectable’ values. Elsewhere, the ideological complex the BNP feeds upon is much more diffuse, and to be found in other social or cultural sites which are explicitly resistant to political exploitation; football, for example, where beneath the PR gloss and supposed ‘community roots’ the same old atavism survives, with a very modern motor of ruthless commercial exploitation.
To sit in a football crowd these days is to be surrounded by gullible, baying idiots (Yahoos indeed), with little real interest or understanding of the game itself, but drawn by the showbiz and commerce and the promise of personal and communal emotional release; anger mostly, with odd moments of ecstatic triumphalism, fuelled by copious amounts of dis-inhibiting alcohol. The recently and sadly deceased J.G. Ballard, a far better social critic than novelist, put it like this: “What I think we’re seeing is the white tribes of England reasserting their identity. This is not necessarily a racist thing, I don’t think. But there have been so many waves of immigration into this country - Asians, blacks, Kosovans, Poles. And I can see that football is one of the ways in which the white working class can say remember us. It’s a rallying call to the old tribal instincts that multiculturalism has buried under this tissue-paper eiderdown of correct behaviour.”
If Gramsci was right to regard modern newspapers as proto-parties, then we might regard the Daily Mail as an all too actual embodiment of ‘the fascist possibility’. Nick Davies calls the Mail “a perfect commodity, designed to be sold to a particular market, of lower middle class men and women. If, in order to speak for their interests, the Mail must attack, it will. Black people, poor people, liberals and all kinds of lefties, scroungers, druggies, homosexuals, they will all be attacked. And if it is necessary to attack too the rich and the powerful and any political party, including the Conservatives, then so be it. It sells its readers what they want to see in the world.” The Daily Mail is, according to Davies’ extraordinary survey of the global media, the most aggressively spiteful (and successful) newspaper in the world, with an untypically growing readership amongst the enraged, suburban, insecure lower middle class (a crucial component of classically fascist movements). Who needs a fascist party when we have a fascist paper with a mass circulation and sphere of political influence? The Daily Telegraph is not far behind, in tone and sales, with its extraordinary scoop of MPs’ expenses, however factually and journalistically questionable it will all turn out to have been. There is more than a little of the ‘fascist possibility’ in the populist ‘damn ‘em all’ outcry about home-flipping and duck houses. It has provided an outlet not just for the arcane pointlessness of parliamentary politics (what are MPs actually for?) but also for public distaste for any kind of democratic politics (which most people, with little to run beyond their own lives and households, have very little personal experience of).
The BNP will never get to run anything, not withstanding a total ‘makeover’ (which some of their leaders dream of, complete with a suitably modern ‘feminine touch’), but they have substantial nuisance value. Sooner or later some poor Tory, Lib Dem or even Labour council leader with ‘no overall control’ is going to have to take them into power-sharing coalition, but the BNP will find it onerous to assume and exercise practical responsibility for the mundane routines and services of local government. That is not their historical point; they are not a primary political force, seeking any kind of social hegemony, but a secondary expression of the break-up of Labourism. For Labour to ‘deal’ with the BNP – in the sense of destroying rather than accommodating it - would require reassembling the social alliance it was based upon, and for the moment that seems unlikely. New Labour was in large part an attempt at precisely that, but ineptly executed and very narrowly based; as such, it represented a last gasp rather than a revival of the Labour tradition. To be fair, some of Labour’s more intelligent and honourable MPs are trying hard to find new ways of understanding and engaging with the aggrieved, ‘left behind’ white working class, especially in constituencies where their own seats are under threat, with some temporary localised success. But Labour’s decline and fragmentation is a larger, undeniable historical fact.
It just may be that in the short to medium term – and I have no doubt that this will be a bitter pill to swallow, especially for Labour – the ‘political class’ (another phrase which speaks volumes about the social exclusion of the majority from democracy and the exercise of power) will have to accept that the BNP articulates and represents a genuine and widespread popular standpoint towards the modern world. And that by accommodating this particularly nasty piece of Labourism within the formal ‘democratic’ framework of local councils, European and (eventually) national parliaments, you can blunt some of its nastier edges and begin to ‘educate’ people out of it. After all, a similar local accommodation has been engineered in Northern Ireland with the extremes of republicanism and loyalism, both of which have had more than their fair share of ‘fascist possibility’. Whether or not you accept the full reality of ‘the peace process’, which (on one reading) has simply transferred criminality from the political and constitutional to the civil and social arenas, it has to be some kind of progress from the worst of the Troubles. In the Middle East and elsewhere, ‘democracy’ is edging towards some kind of accommodation with Islamism; while Italian democrats, including most of the left, have always accepted (sometimes perhaps too readily) co-existence with their own (actual) Fascists.
Will the BNP Last?
How serious and permanent is the BNP’s surge of popularity and support? Has its lumpen little-Englanderism found a settled place in the political undergrowth? Or will it prove to be the same kind of flash in the pan as the Green vote in the European elections exactly twenty years ago, when the very young Green Party won a startling 2.4 million votes? That turned out to be a spectacular example of a one-off ‘protest vote’ among a low turnout in an election not many people were too bothered about. The European elections, with their peculiar list system, do allow committed voters the indulgence of voting as they feel at that moment. In the following general elections, people normally revert to type and tribe and calculation, albeit within a long-term decline in party affiliations. It has taken the Greens many years of hard slog ‘community politics’ to get anywhere near their 1989 result, and their vote is patchy and (I suspect) vulnerable to new kinds of disillusionment. The professional middle class is no more ‘constant’ or politically unified than any other social group; if anything, in this era of ‘shopping around’ for everything from holiday insurance to topical opinion, less so. This other, nicer ‘piece of Labourism’ may yet take its political custom elsewhere.
In the 2009 Euro elections, the Greens actually polled 8.7 per cent, over two points higher than the BNP on 6.5 per cent, but with their vote more dispersed across the country, won the same number of seats. The BNP vote did not increase significantly over the last Euro elections; it was just better organised. Their two seats, to confirm the argument that they are capitalising on the break-up of Labourism, are in the post-industrial North of England, while the Greens are in the middle class ‘heartlands’ of London and the South East. A lot now depends on the BNP itself, just as the Greens now recognise that they actively squandered their 1989 success. So far the BNP is managing its historic opportunity very effectively; Nick Griffin is a past-master at liberal-baiting. Its actual European election campaign was very skilfully conducted, with a slickly produced and in its own way highly impressive party political broadcast on 13th May.
We might sneer that the BNP’s PPB had the visual style of a regional ITV daytime game show, but in electoral reality they share the same target audience. It took up the topical populist tack of “professional politicians with their snouts in the trough” (by contrast the BNP “are not in it for the money”, though they stand to gain roughly £500,000 for every Euro seat) and the anti-social behaviour themes pioneered by New Labour, which translate the authoritarian populism of its Thatcherite inheritance into a local application of low-level vigilantism. In practice it means uniformed patrols of council estates and now, with the BNP “leading the way in the West Midlands”, mobile CCTV cameras. A hard-faced young woman read from an autocue that some BNP councillors have been re-elected for second 4-year terms. It was all strangely effective (especially when compared to the Green Party’s lamentable effort a few nights later, which looked like a piece of GCSE Graphics coursework).
As long as Labourism continues its historical process of disintegration, and Labour suffers the political and electoral consequences, there will be plenty more rich pickings for the BNP. In the meantime, we should prepare ourselves for greater ‘offense’, as bigotry and ignorance become more emboldened; at the same time, we might try not to be quite so easily offended. As so often, things are probably going to have to get worse before they get better, with a general shift to the right in our ‘centre of political gravity’, in tune with the historical effects of economic recession (which, at least in Europe – Euro election night ‘commentators’ take note - always favours the right). Thatcherism managed to subsume the ‘fascist possibility’ of the 1970s within its own historic bloc, in that case the decidedly rural, provincial and identifiably popular-Tory racism of the National Front and its offshoots on the far right. But that was in the setting of a new and vigorous ideological construct, with lots of big ideas that amounted to a genuine strategic vision (whose most effective advocate Norman Tebbit could be heard recently urging people “not to vote for the major parties”). Tebbitt probably helped to boost the performance of the sleazy Thatcherites of UKIP, but this piece of popular Toryism only really comes to life at Euro-elections. The single-issue, anti-EU UKIP represents what we might call ‘the sergeant major’ vote, a ‘Dads Army’-style anti-continentalism, strongest in the outer suburbs of the home counties. This particular ‘fascist possibility’ will be re-absorbed into the Conservative fold under the allure of imminent general election victory for Cameron’s neo-Thatcherism, refreshed from its years of idle, moat-clearing opposition, and ready to drive the utopian visions of the free market deeper into our personal lives and public services, with huge public spending cuts universally accepted as ‘inevitable’ alongside the hegemonic nostrum that ‘business knows best’.
For all their best efforts and occasional near-misses, nothing in the Labour past, present or future has ever shown that kind of visionary (if always slightly bonkers) dynamism. New Labour’s tragedy has been to remain mired within the ideological morass of Thatcherism (and in fawning awe of the “absolute and unaccountable power” of the Daily Mail), while failing to lay permanent claim to its political inheritance. And in the meantime, the old Labourist working class becomes increasingly dis- ‘organised’ in the traditional trade union sense, ‘ill-disciplined’ in its behaviour and attitudes (thus prompting ever shriller middle class moral panic), and receptive to modern versions of our less savoury English proletarian mentalities. Back to my friend the just-failed Green Euro-MP. He told me that his own prospects largely depended on the BNP; if they got more than 5 per cent, this would split the vote that might just give one ‘minority party’ a seat in our region. In simple electoral terms, the contest at this level was about who could grab the largest chunk of the crumbling Labour vote.
On the council estates – those reservations of historic Labour patronage, still accounting in Norwich for about half the population - there were plenty of people telling him that if they bothered to vote at all, it would be Green or BNP. As it turned out, our regional vote pretty much mirrored the national, with the Greens on 8.8 per cent and the BNP 6.1 per cent, and neither winning a seat. In a lovely electoral metaphor for the state of our fractured and fractious country’s social and cultural relations, a seething brew of mutually hostile minorities, they cancelled each other out. Our one regional Labour MEP, an oleaginous bureaucrat not often seen in these parts, scraped back in, just.