A proudly diverse nation

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Daniel Pitt. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Britain is a land built by migrants. After all, there was no one inhabiting these islands 50,000 years ago, and for most of human history there were no international borders. The emergence of the modern British nation state and the advent of a global economy brought with it the movement of capital in search of profit and the movement of people in search of work. Britain, home of the industrial revolution, saw successive waves of immigration from the 19th century onwards. It was driven by the needs of capitalists to find an adequate supply of workers. However, from the beginning, the capitalist class also grasped that the migration of cheap labour into the country provided them with a ready mechanism for dividing working people.. This was not automatic; it depended on an invented common identity of Britishness, which offered a false sense of solidarity between workers and bosses, while dividing native born from “foreign workers”. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the treatment of Irish workers who came to Britain in the 19th century to work on the canals and railways. They were forced to leave their homes—much like Roma people in Slovakia today—because of impoverishment or oppression, and usually both.

Our rulers have always tried to sow divisions among workers but there is a powerful history of class solidarity.The next time you walk down a canal towpath or ride a train think of the thousands of Irish labourers—the navvies—who died building the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, housed in the most squalid living conditions imaginable. Textile mill bosses also imported Irish workers. Initially this was often to use them as strikebreakers. In situations of sharpened competition in the labour market among low-skilled workers, it is not difficult to see how tensions arose. Karl Marx observed the process and got straight to the heart of the matter: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps… The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his own country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” Marx went on to explain how this antagonism was kept alive by “the press, the pulpit and the comic papers” in much the same way that the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express do today, with their relentless attacks on migrants and Muslims. But there was another process cutting aganist the divisions between workers. The bringing together of workers in the factory system created a need for unity against the common enemy exploiting their labour. Despite the best efforts of the capitalists to stoke racism, the impulse to class solidarity was often stronger. Many leading members of the Chartists, Britain’s first mass workers’ movement in the mid 19th century, came from the ranks of Irish labourers. Class fighters such as Feargus O’Connor and James Bronterre O’Brien led British workers into struggle, as did other “foreign” workers like the black Chartist organiser William Cuffay. Unfortunately the Chartists were defeated, and racist ideas were able to fester.

The New Unionism of the 1880s brought a new wave of Irish activists into politics. Ireland was officially part of Britain at this time so there was no issue of immigration controls—it was the availability of work not controls that adjusted the flow. At the end of the 19th century millions of Jews from the economically undeveloped parts of eastern Europe fled poverty and persecution. State-sponsored anti-semitic pogroms killed thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland. Three million largely poor Jews migrated to the US and perhaps a quarter of a million to Britain. Ruling class figures responded with racism. Tory MP William Evans Gordon said in parliament in 1902, “Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders.” This racism paved the way for the Aliens Act of 1905, the first to limit immigration and which defined some groups of migrants as “undesirable”. It made it easier for racists to argue that Jewish people were a problem in British society - however, Jewish workers came together with other sections of the working class. In the 1930s fascist attempts to turn “native” Britons against Jews were defeated on the streets. The long economic boom after the Second World War saw capitalists respond to increasing demand for labour by again looking to workers from overseas.

This time they looked further afield in the British Empire—to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent—for workers to plug the shortages in areas such as public transport and the hospitals. Black people soon found that the land of opportunity was also a land of racism. Some landlords and pubs in places like London and Birmingham put up signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. But socialists and trade unionists organised reception committees to welcome the new workers and to help them settle in. However there was no automatic unity among the oppressed. Some established migrants, who had become assimilated into British society, came to view more recent immigrants as outsiders, and at times as a threat.

Some British people of Irish backgrounds could be among the most antagonistic towards Black people, seeing their own “whiteness” as making them superior to African-Caribbeans. Post-war Britain’s open door policy wasn’t to last as the boom ebbed and turn into crisis towards the end 1960s. The Tory politician Enoch Powell who had once implored Jamaicans and others to come to find work in the “mother country”, now scapegoated black and Asian immigrants for the mounting problems faced by a British economy in decline. This was even though many so-called immigrants were in fact born in the country. The 1971 Immigration Act brought a shuddering halt to “primary” immigration to Britain. Future migrants would be the dependants of those already here and not new workers. But the rising racism, especially in the mid 1970s, led to a powerful anti-racist response that reached a crescendo with the formation of the Anti Nazi League (ANL). The ANL drove the predecessors of the Nazi British National Party (BNP), the National Front, off our streets. Today asylum seekers, living in forced destitution, are blamed for “ruining areas” and bringing crime. Or in the case of “economic migrants”, like those from new European Union countries in eastern Europe like the Irish before them, lowering wages.

It can sometimes appear easier to kick the “foreign” worker next to you, especially during times of low class struggle, such as after the defeat of the Chartists in the 19th century. Equally however, during times of rising struggle, divisions are overcome time and time again. A key task of socialists today is to harness that class solidarity to fight both against the bosses and in defence of the rights of all working people, regardless of spurious notions of nation and race. Socialists must act as “tribunes of the oppressed”, as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it. We must oppose all racism and bigotry. Today that means standing up against Islamophobia and racism, and breaking the back of the organisations these twin poisons are breeding, the Nazi BNP and the English Defence League.

Hain appeals for huge turnout to oppose ‘fascist’ weekend march

Fascism must be opposed in Wales this weekend when the Welsh Defence League (WDL) descends on the capital, according to anti-apartheid veteran and Labour MP Peter Hain

The former Welsh Secretary and Neath MP insists that the league, which plans to demonstrate in Cardiff on Saturday, is a racist organisation. The league claims it is a “peaceful protest group” but Wales Unite Against Fascism will stage a rival march in the city. Mr Hain, who is honorary president of the anti-fascist organisation, said the WDL would be “strutting its poison in an anti-Muslim demonstration”.

A peace vigil supported by Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan and the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Wales, Saleem Kidwai, will be held at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay tomorrow evening. The two men have described the league’s protests as “crude, dangerous and unhelpful”. The Senedd event is organised by the Interfaith Council for Wales and will celebrate the different cultures in Cardiff.

Mr Hain called for a “big turnout of people” to join the anti-fascist march on Saturday. A Facebook group organised by anti-racist Cardiff City supporters, Bluebirds vs the Nazis, yesterday had 122 members. Mr Hain believes Wales must be vigilant against fascism at a time of economic difficulty.

“After the BNP’s utter failure to make electoral headway in the General Election, racists and fascists are increasingly resorting to their age-old tactic of violence they deployed during the 1930s when Mosley’s Blackshirts attacked Jews, and again in the 1970s and 1980s when the National Front went on the rampage against black Britons. Now they are focusing on their latest scapegoat: Muslims.”

He continued: “And this is a fertile period for scapegoat extremism, with all the classic hallmarks for racism and fascism: the aftermath of an economic recession and a new government bent upon big cuts in jobs and public services. In the 1930s Welsh miners and others volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

“In the 1970s and 1980s the Welsh anti-apartheid movement mobilised a broad section of Welsh society, and in the same period the Anti-Nazi League took on and destroyed the BNP’s predecessor, the National Front.”

Describing a recent EDL event in Stoke-on-Trent in January, he said: “Hooligans rampaged through the streets. Prominent British National Party activists, and an assorted bunch of racists and fascists, joined them. Marauding thugs tried to attack a counter-protest called by Unite Against Fascism, smashing their way through two police lines, overturning riot vans, but were blocked by a third police line. They then directed their anger on the Asian community, smashing up shops and attacking Asian people and a local mosque. Much the same happened in Dudley last month.”

At the age of 19, Mr Hain became the chairman of Stop the 70 protest group which aimed to prevent the 1969-70 South African rugby and cricket tours of the UK. Saturday’s marches coincide with South Africa’s match with Wales at the Millennium Stadium.

He said: “If it were not so sinister it would be ironic.”

South Wales Police officers have attended EDL marches in Newcastle and Aylesbury to prepare for Saturday. Extra police will be on patrol but the force anticipates a peaceful day. It has contacted people involved on both sides and wants to see a “family-friendly event”.

Mr Hain said: “It is vital that the decent progressive majority in Wales rejects the poison of the Welsh Defence League which does not speak for, let alone defend, Wales.”

The Unite Against Fascism march will start at 11am at Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff Bay and is supported by leading trade unions including Unite and the CWU.

The emergence of the English, Welsh and Scottish defence leagues has fascinated and appalled opponents of fascism who fear that an alliance of football hooligans and supporters of far-right politics could be about to bring violence and intolerance to British streets. However, the English Defence League insists that people of all races and religions are welcome in its ranks and it is only opposed to militant forms of Islam. The EDL’s website refers to our “Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Hindu friends”.

It blames violence at marches on “self-proclaimed yet clearly misguided anti-fascists and gangs of Muslim youth”.

The sight of street protests descending into violence has alarmed observers who fear there is the potential for confrontations on a scale not seen since the days when the National Front clashed with the Anti-Nazi League. Reports of former Welsh football hooligans joining a “ready-made army” in opposition to Islamist ideology will send a shiver down the spine of anyone who fears for social cohesion.

Anti-asylum badges are for sale on the Welsh Defence League website. Its Facebook page has a logo: “No More Mosques in Wales”. These groups have harnessed the internet to communicate. The question is whether a group with bigger political ambitions will harness this growing number of people who feel their society is under threat.

Wales Online

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

The Mayer of Pigtown

Why does pop star John Mayer think racism is funny? asks Alexander Billet

John Mayer (pictured left) is the musical equivalent of Wonderbread: flashy packaging covering a complete lack of taste, substance and anything vaguely nourishing. And very, very white.

There are plenty of media outlets trying to downplay Mayer's comments in a recent Playboy interview. For the likes of TMZ and Rolling Stone, Mayer's crack about having a "nigger pass" and the disturbing notion that he has a "David Duke cock" are "all in good fun." To most of the mainstream press, the fact that he was supposedly making a joke that he is now sorry for is where the matter ends.

None of them are getting at the heart of the issue. To them, the fact that Mayer made a public apology at his concert on February 10 is enough, and time to let bygones be bygones. They're willing to accept his argument that the majority of his touring group is African American, which must be the pop-star version of "I can't be a racist because some of my best friends are Black."

None are willing to point out that his idea of "wit" is likely to offend the very people whose music laid the groundwork for Mayer's entire catalog. In recent years, his music has become much more influenced by blues and R&B (albeit in their most watered-down forms).

If today's music industry treated these musical genres with any respect, this fact alone might have made for a double indictment against Mayer. But that's not the case, so the singer was let off the hook. But this is par for the course for the mainstream media. For them, history and current events happen separately, and comments like Mayer's are best swept under the rug because they're ultimately harmless and have little to do with the rest of the world.

It's an outlook that even seems to have influenced some on the left. Jay Smooth, host of WBAI's Underground Railroad and one of the best alternative pop culture commentators out there, posted a video blog on his Nil Doctrine Web site in which he insists that focusing so much on Mayer's comments can mean that we're likely to "forget that a whole bunch of the biggest race questions - the ones that impact our lives the most and that we most need to change - are the ones that don't manifest in the form of words or people's emotions. A lot of the most important race issues are institutional, systemic, structural issues."

In one sense, Smooth is right. Racism, sexism and homophobia run a lot deeper than just bad ideas or insensitive words. But letting John Mayer's frat-talk fall by the wayside is to miss the connection between the institutional and the day to day. They may just be the words of a camera-hungry rock star, but in an economically unstable world where race can easily become the new fault line, they can have much wider ramifications.

In fact, entire movements have been touched off by similar comments. During the summer of 1976, when an economic slump had most of the planet in its grip, rock god Eric Clapton took the stage of the Odeon Theater in Birmingham, England, and launched into a drunken racist screed. Blaming Black immigrants for the sorry state of the Empire, he insisted that Britain was on its way to becoming a "black colony," and vowed support for arch-racist and former Member of Parliament Enoch Powell. (A favorite slogan of British racists back in that time was "I'm with Enoch!")

For Clapton, whose career was built on Black music, to make such a statement was the worst kind of rank and hateful hypocrisy. His career had hit a slump before his cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff." But given that a fascist group like the National Front was at the time trolling the streets of Britain and gaining votes at the ballot box, Clapton's comments were especially dangerous.

This spurred a group of music lovers and activists to write an open letter to Clapton published in Britain's largest music rags. The letter lambasted Clapton: "Come on, Eric. Half your music is black. You're rock music's biggest colonist...P.S. Who shot the sheriff, Eric? It sure as hell wasn't you!"

The letter also called for the formation of a grassroots group mobilized against the "racist poison music" that would become Rock Against Racism. RAR managed to organize a full-on movement, joining forces with the Anti-Nazi League to push back the National Front and bring out some of music's most militant voices - from the Clash to the Specials to X-Ray Spex.

Now, Mayer didn't call for everyone to vote for Sarah Palin. Clapton, drunk though he might have been, was being serious, while Mayer intended his comments as a joke. But it would be irresponsible to say there aren't consequences for what Mayer said in these volatile times. Barack Obama's frustrating inability to deliver on any of the "change" he promised has opened the door for some of this country's less savory elements to exploit the presence of a Black president.

In their heads, the debilitating recession is the fault of affirmative action, "illegal" immigrants, "welfare queens" and entitlement programs. The momentum that their thinly veiled racism can be seen clearly at everything from Minutemen patrols to Tea Party conventions.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that far-right hate groups are growing right now. Fascist groups have become increasingly brazen in staking a public presence from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Recently, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Front announced their intention to demonstrate in Chicago on March 21--a date originally chosen by the anti-apartheid movement to highlight South Africa's oppression of Blacks.

Legitimate anger in times of economic crisis can easily be taken advantage of by bigots. Music, far from being separated from the rest of the world, is bound to reflect these kinds of contradictions. What we need is a movement that can challenge racism, sexism and homophobia head on--a movement that can mobilize the power of beats against bigotry in the streets, on the stage and in the music press.

Alexander Billet's music blog is Rebel Frequencies.

Socialist Worker

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

2000 posts and a treat - Young Nazi and Proud, starring naziboy Mark Collett

As it's the 2000th post on the current incarnation of the blog, we thought it was time to remind you of what a dickhead Mark Collett can be. Therefore, we have a treat for you, in the form of a repeat of the video Young, Nazi and Proud, followed by the Searchlight review.

Young Nazi and Stupid!

The man tipped to become the next leader of the British National Party has admitted he is a nazi sympathiser and is inspired by images of German nazis "sieg heiling" in the streets.

Mark Collett, leader of the Young BNP and a member of the party's ruling Advisory Council, made the admission to Channel Four last month. In a revealing documentary, he boasted of his support for Hitler's Germany, said he would prefer to live in 1930s Germany than in many cities of northern England today and declared that he could not understand why people should find images of German soldiers giving nazi salutes upsetting.

The BNP leadership moved swiftly to limit the fallout by publicly sacking Collett as leader of the Young BNP and announcing a tribunal to consider his very membership of the party. However, Searchlight has learnt that this is a scam to reduce political damage to the party. On Sunday 10 November, less than a week after the programme was broadcast, Collett shared a platform with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, at a party meeting in Bradford.

Young, Nazi and Proud was an hour-long documentary that examined the new, respectable face of the BNP. For eight months, programme maker David Modell chronicled Collett's political and personal life. What emerged was an intriguing insight into the mind of a man who hopes one day to lead the party.

Collett was shown squaring up to Anti Nazi League protesters at Leeds town hall, confidently canvassing voters in Bradford and giving articulate interviews to television stations. Yet we also witnessed the real Mark Collett: insecure, vain and a social misfit.

"Collett was a case study in artless, idiotic arrogance. Pumping iron semi-naked in his basement and getting a little too animated about watching 'a brain-dead white slag' snogging a black man suggested there was something a little repressed about the boy," noted Gareth McLean in his review of the programme for The Guardian.

"We saw a swaggering young man high on self-delusion," wrote Andrew Anthony in The Observer. "A shot of him strutting manfully in front of Anti Nazi League demonstrators seemed to capture his almost pathological vanity ... What I found most shocking, though, were not Collett's views - as predictable as they were reprehensible - but the knowledge that he was a fan of Alan Partridge. How could he appreciate the absurdity of Partridge, you wondered, without recognising his own?"

In one of the most revealing insights into his character, Collett discussed with much bitterness the break-up of a relationship. After attacking his former girlfriend, he told Modell: "I like to break people. When you've broken them and sucked that last bit of life out of them. That's it.

"When people say that I am evil, yeah I am. But it all depends. I'm either the sweetest angel or the most evil being you've ever encountered. It just depends which side you push me. Never kill people. Push them to the point of despair where they do it themselves because that's when you've really won."

In another scene, the arrogant Collett told the reporter: "Hitler will live on forever and maybe I will too".

Searchlight had long known that Collett was a hardline nazi. He began his political life in the National Front and became its student organiser before switching his allegiance to the BNP. For the past two years he has been a regular on the nazi Blood and Honour music scene and, during a personal dispute with the former Yorkshire NF organiser, Tony White, boasted of a close connection with Whitelaw, a band linked to the British Movement. At the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival last year, Collett made a hardline speech in favour of "white power".

Despite his obvious nazi credentials, Collett became leader of the Young BNP after engineering the removal of its previous leader, Paul Golding. In the local elections last May, Collett coordinated the BNP campaign in Bradford and in June, as he finished his studies at Leeds University, he became a full-timer for the party.

Last spring he was approached by Channel Four with the idea of the programme. Despite the historical antipathy of previous programmes on Channel Four to the BNP and only six months after the damaging Panorama documentary, Collett needed little persuading to co-operate. A man whose ego is probably matched only by that of his leader, Collett believed it was an opportunity to become a household name. Unfortunately for the little Hitler, his eagerness to impress was his own downfall.

Among his more illuminating quotes were:

"National Socialism was the best solution for the German people in the 1930s."

"I honestly can't understand how a man who's seen the inner city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era [Hitler's Germany] with a certain nostalgia and think yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing."

"Honestly now, would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany? It would be better for your child to grow up there."

"I'm going to level with you. I'd never say this on camera, yeah, and you can say this to whoever you want, 'cos it's true. The Jews have been thrown out of every country, including England. There's not a single European country the Jews have not been thrown out of. And let's face it, David, when it happens so many times it's not just persecution. There's no smoke without fire."

The BNP's decision to sack Collett as leader of the Young BNP and consider his future membership has been presented as an example of the new BNP discarding its nazi past.

"To journalists who have alleged over the past couple of years that 'the BNP hasn't really changed', this action provides the proof that it really has," Nick Griffin announced the day after the programme. "Because extremist sentiments which would once have been commonplace and accepted - even flaunted - within the BNP have now led us to sack one of our best, most capable and organisationally most useful young assets."

In reality Griffin has no intention of losing someone who he sees as a possible replacement. Collett has had to stand down, but this is probably temporary or only for public consumption. Indeed, Collett and Griffin are believed to have watched the programme together.

Only days after the programme, when Collett was allegedly facing an internal tribunal, the two shared a platform at a BNP meeting in South Bradford. Collett apologised for the political damage he might have caused the party but heaped the blame on a disreputable programme maker.

Griffin has taken a similar line. In a statement on the BNP website he declared: "Despite its dismay at some of his comments and determination not take tough action over them, the party leadership does recognise and value the self-restraint Mr Collett showed when an individual he had somewhat naively come to regard as a friend revealed the extent to which he had betrayed both his personal confidence and his professional word about how he would conduct the filming for the programme.

"Then again, it would have been a thousand times better if Mark had not put himself - and hence the party - in such a position in the first place."

In behaviour now typical of him, Griffin absolves himself of any responsibility for this debacle. Being leader he should have had some control over the entire project but he overlooks that in his attack on the programme makers.

Collett's admissions reveal the true nazi beliefs of many in the BNP leadership. Griffin's public repudiation of him while privately backing him exposes the lizard-type nature of the leader himself. The reality is, as many BNP members privately concede, Young, Nazi and Proud will return to haunt the party in the future.

Searchlight

Tribune: Stop the fascists from celebrating

We need to fight hard to keep Britain’s far right out of the European Parliament, says Glyn Ford

The European elections are less than three months away and the labour and trade union movement is in denial about the extent of the threat posed by the British National Party. While anti-fascist organisations such as Unite Against Fascism and Searchlight have been trying to desperately to sound a warning, the danger is that the response will be too little, too late.

But the warnings signs have been evident for some time. In May last year, Richard Barnbrook increased the BNP vote to 5.3 per cent from 4.7 per cent in 2004. Creeping over the 5 per cent threshold meant he won a seat on the Greater London Assembly.

The alarming prospect now is not that BNP leader Nick Griffin might just scrape a seat in the North West of England where he failed so narrowly five years ago. Rather, it is that the BNP will win half a dozen or more seats across the length and breadth of England.

The reason for this is the fatal conjuncture between these particular elections, the economy and the electorate. First, European elections are contextual. Voters treat them as less important and increasingly different from general elections where you chose the government for the next five years. “Less important” means lower participation. “Different” means an opportunity to lash out against the established parties.

This tendency has shown itself twice before in European elections in England. The Greens went from 1 per cent five years earlier to 15 per cent in 1989 – a result that would have netted them more than a dozen seats under Jack Straw’s proportional representation system introduced a decade later. Instead, the first-past-the post system gave them nothing.

In 1994, the UK Independence Party got 1 per cent of the votes and no seats. In 1999, with the convenient arrival of the cavalry in the form of proportional representation, UKIP got 7 per cent of the vote and three seats. In 2004, boosted by Robert Kilroy-Silk’s apostasy, UKIP got 16 per cent and 12 seats. In contrast the BNP got 1 per cent of the vote in 1999 and 5 per cent in 2004.

Second, we have a financial and economic crisis that is a product of an absurd casino economy born of deregulation and greed, mating with cowardice and complacency. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was the trigger, not the cause. The smoking gun is a derivatives market totally alien from the real economy and one run in a manner that would put the average Las Vegas casino to shame.

The financial crisis has precipitated an economic collapse. Recently published figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for the last quarter of 2008 suggest that European economies will shrink by between 6 per cent and 8 per cent this year. In Japan and Korea it will be double that. Millions will be left jobless. Yet we are spending twice as much and more on bank bailouts compared to labour market measures to protect jobs, homes and families. As a result, ordinary people are angry, afraid and vengeful.

In France in 1981, after more than a quarter of a century in power, the right was ousted by Francois Mitterrand’s Socialists. By 1983, the left was struggling without conspicuous success to cope with a sharp economic downturn. In December that year, there was a by-election in Dreux, a small industrial town to the north of Paris. With left and right discredited, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National picked up 17 per cent of the vote. It went on to get 11 per cent nationally in the following June’s European elections, winning 10 seats and establishing the party as a permanent fixture on the French political scene.

A quarter of a century on, we face an identical scenario Britain. Having been in power for more than a decade, it is difficult for Labour to escape the blame entirely for the current fiasco. True, Gordon Brown reacted faster and more effectively than other world leaders. True, it’s a global problem. Yet all politics is local and national as well as international, and voters are looking for retribution. The only politicians they are able topunish are their own.

Even if the roots of the current crisis started with Margaret Thatcher’s “big bang” in 1986, Labour shares the blame. Folk memories of Thatcher still inoculate many Labour-leaning voters from ever voting Tory, so disgruntled former Labour supporters are now saying for the first time that they will vote for the BNP.

It has all been made worse by wildcat strikes in support of “British jobs for British workers”. There is a real problem, but it’s not the one whose flames are being fanned by the likes of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and The Sun. The problem is not foreigners stealing our jobs or Brits stealing theirs. The problem involves unscrupulous employers using loopholes in the Posted Worker Directive to import low wages, long hours and poor health and safety conditions. The answer is not xenophobia, whether this involves the Italian media reporting demands for British workers to be sent home or vice versa. The answer lies in the strength of the labour movement to demand that the legislation be amended to correct the anomalies.

Yet the main beneficiaries so far have been the BNP. This has been compounded by the tabloid campaign of denigration against all politicians and the implosion of UKIP since 2004, losing three MEPs: Robert Kilroy-Silk to narcissism, Ashley Mote to prison and Tom Wise to alleged fraud.

The result is a febrile political environment made for a BNP breakthrough unless the campaign against it is given a priority that is currently lacking. We need to get the message across to the electors. The BNP includes men and women with criminal convictions for race hatred, racial attacks and grievous bodily harm. David Copeland – the bomber found guilty of a series of terrorist attacks against the black, Bangladeshi and gay communities in London which killed three people, including a pregnant women, and injuried 129 – is a former member of the BNP.

We need to expose the kind of people they are in the BNP and what they stand for. In fact, this has already been well documented in the South West TUC’s pamphlet Who makes up the BNP. Published at the beginning of the month, it is available from South West TUC, Bristol, southwest@tuc.org.uk and should be publicised as widely as possible.

The kind of future we face from the far right is shown all too well in Claudio Lazzaro’s documentary from Italy, Nazirock (www.nazirock.it), where the fascist Forza Nuova thugs make the streets of many Italian cities and the terraces of their football clubs no-go areas for the left.

Nick Griffin can say what he likes about the BNP’s new image, but actions speak louder then words. Who is the BNP travelling with? Jean-Marie Le Pen recently stated that the Nazi occupation of France was essentially benign – apparently forgetting the 77,000 Jews who went to the concentration camps, with less then 10 per cent surviving. In April 2004, Le Pen came to Britain to speak alongside Griffin at a fundraising dinner for the BNP.

Forza Nuova’s leader, Roberto Fiore, is now an MEP, after Alessandra Mussolini – Il Duce’s granddaughter – went to work with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government in Rome. For many years, Fiore was skulking in London to avoid arrest for his role in the Bologna bombing which killed 85 people in August 1980. Although he was cleared of direct involvement in the atrocity, he was convicted of subversive association and jailed for nine years. This was reduced to five-and-a-half years on appeal and he returned to active politics in April 1999. While in Britain, Fiore and Griffin worked together with extremists from the Terza Posizione (Third Position) organisation.

So, on June 8 2009, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Glyn Ford is Labour MEP for South West England and Gibraltar, national Treasurer for the Anti-Nazi League and a member of Unite Against Fascism’s steering committee,


Tribune Comment: We must stop a BNP breakthrough

The British National Party is insidiously seeping into the body politic of Britain. Although its achievements in terms of getting elected are limited, and its performance in office risible, the racist party with its roots in fascism is becoming a household name, for all the wrong reasons.

A smattering of councillors and a cunning strategy to disguise its true nature have allowed the BNP a veneer of respectability that has resulted in its leading figures being interviewed as credible, legitimate politicians speaking on, for example, the economy on prestigious BBC current affairs programmes.

Now the European elections to be fought under the d’Hondt system of proportional representation offer the BNP the chance of the biggest breakthrough in British elections. It is a classic example of where PR can hand disproportionate representation to small, extremist parties. But it is not the system that needs to be fought, but the racists and the political and economic conditions which give succour to their sinister cause.

A broad alliance of the British Left, media and anti-fascist campaigns such as Unite Against Fascism, the indefatigable Searchlight, and notably the trade unions, has done much to contain the growth of support for the BNP. In many places where it had its recent breakthroughs – such as Bradford, Sandwell, Oldham and Kirklees – the party hardly exists on the ground anymore. But in many others, Barking and Dagenham being the most prominent, they are a present and gathering force.

As Glyn Ford starkly outlines on pages 10-11, and as MPs such as Jon Cruddas justly and relentlessly warn us, the political and economic climate is playing to the BNP’s advantage The party needs only a slight improvement on its 2004 vote to break onto the European stage. Every electorally successful member of the European Parliament would give it up to £250,000 a year in salaries, office costs and other resources.

In the north west, where its leader Nick Griffin is standing, Searchlight calculates that the BNP needs just an additional 2 per cent of the vote on its 2004 6.4 per cent to be virtually guaranteed a seat. Only a slight increase is required in the West Midlands and in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The threat is real, but remains dangerously underestimated throughout the country in spite of the efforts of campaigners. It is exacerbated by the traditionally low interest and turnout in European elections, by the collapsing support for the UK Independence Party and by the widespread lack of knowledge of what the BNP really stands for and what it does not. In his book Fatherland, author Robert Harris painted a nightmare picture of a defeated Britain under Nazi rule after the Second World War.

It is worth every canvasser confronted by a potential BNP supporter pointing out that at the very least the BNP does not stand in the great British tradition of tolerance, equality and compassion.

And at the worst, what it does stand for: an apartheid-style rule under which all those not born in Britain would suffer persecution and eventual expulsion from the country, where whites would be given first preference in housing, education and jobs. Where mixed-race relationships would be outlawed and where the answer to what would be a vastly escalating crime rate would be to allow every household to have a gun.

The abandonment of the white, working class traditional Labour voter by “new” Labour has regrettably turned into support for what the voters in Barking and Dagenham see as a redressing of the balance of opportunity. But it cannot be denied that the Labour Party and the Government were in denial for too long about the threat from the BNP.

Recent local elections have been a wake-up call and the movement has mobilised. But it needs more people to stand up and be counted, to take these European elections seriously and to stop the BNP in its tracks at this critical point in British political history. They must be denied this breakthrough and it can be done.

Tribune

Crowds attend anti-racism festival

Thousands of music lovers were undeterred by bad weather and flocked to a free anti-racism festival.

Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) took place in Victoria Park, East London, with music acts including The Good The Bad and The Queen, Hard-Fi and The View. Organisers estimate 90,000 to 100,000 people attended the event, which singer Morrissey helped to make possible by donating £28,000 when one of the festival's sponsors pulled out at the last minute.

It was preceded by an anti-racism procession from Weavers Fields in Bethnal Green where campaigners and trade unionist marched with banners and a brass band.

The events replicated the first Rock Against Racism carnival, organised by the Anti-Nazi League 30 years ago, which saw 80,000 people march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park and watch The Clash perform. The Clash's ex-bassist Paul Simonon now plays with The Good, The Bad and The Queen, fronted by Blur's Damon Albarn, who headlined this year's celebrations.

There were also appearances from other stars of the 1978 event including The Specials' Jerry Dammers, Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and Clash collaborator Don Letts. The eclectic line up also included contemporary acts Roll Deep, R&B singer Jay Sean, rockers Hard-Fi, acoustic indie act Get Cape.Wear Cape.Fly, and rock and roll band The Paddingtons who played across two stages and a DJ marquee.

Speakers included Tony Benn, Derek Simpson of the Unite trade union and Weyman Bennett of LMHR. Organisers said they hope this year's event inspired people to vote against the BNP in the Greater London Assembly and local council elections which will take place on Thursday.

Chester Evening Leader