Red Pepper magazine is running a debate on the future of anti-fascism, one we'd like to bring to the Lancaster Unity community. With Red Pepper's agreement we have republished two of the three articles here and here, each with a different take on the way forward. Belatedly, here is the third and (for the moment) final article...
There is certainly a need for new ways of taking on the BNP, says Paul White, but that doesn’t mean ditching the old ways as well
In the build up to the recent elections in Barnsley, we distributed both UAF and Hope Not Hate leaflets to a much larger section of the electorate. These were the standard-issue ‘Vote Anyone but Nazi’ literature, highlighting the Nazi backgrounds and criminal activities of the BNP’s leading members and candidates. In addition, we held two rallies in the town centre as part of our ‘Reclaim our Town for Democrats’ campaign. This was a response to the BNP having had a regular presence in the main shopping precinct for the past few years on a Saturday, with a stall distributing literature and selling their newspaper. On top of all this, we had established a regular Love Music Hate Racism event at a local club in an attempt to bring young people into the campaign, and to raise awareness.
Despite our best efforts, Barnsley has found itself labelled the fascist capital of Britain, with the BNP achieving its highest percentage of the vote here. Disregarding the factor of the collapse of the Labour vote, it became obvious that simply saying ‘don’t vote BNP/they’re Nazis’ plainly hadn’t worked – again!
There is certainly a need for new ways of taking on the BNP as they become an increasingly more serious threat to everything we have been fighting for all these years. We’ve begun this reflection in Barnsley.
First, while in the past we were just active around elections, we will be active all year round, in the market place, on the streets, on Facebook, in the local press, around football matches – really involving the people of Barnsley. We’ve set up a Barnsley FC supporters group against the BNP, and we are reclaiming the market place.
Second, we are becoming much more deeply engaged with local campaigns addressing the root causes of the many social issues and problems in Barnsley that allow the BNP to capitalise on people’s disaffection. This means defending the health service, campaigning for affordable/social housing, defending jobs. We marched through the city centre last month against job cuts. The BNP had nothing to say.
It would obviously be great if we had candidates standing in the next elections who could offer an alternative, but this is something that will no doubt be discussed in the future.
However, for those of us in localities like Barnsley where the BNP is active and visible, we cannot afford to completely ditch our existing structures, contacts and networks in order to start afresh. We need to maintain our relationship with local trade unions, regardless of what we feel about the Labour Party (I, for one, would not be actively encouraging people to vote for them). The unions provide a vital link to organised workers within the area – significantly, this is something the BNP does not like. We need to learn from what hasn’t (and what has) worked, and develop new strategies and methods, hopefully involving a wider layer of campaigners. We need to be realistic about what works, and what doesn’t. The stakes are far too high to be dogmatic.
Paul White is a trade unionist, socialist and Green Party member
Red Pepper
Showing posts with label Red Pepper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red Pepper. Show all posts
September 16, 2009
September 04, 2009
A winning formula
Red Pepper magazine is currently running a debate on the future of anti-fascism, one we'd like to bring to the Lancaster Unity community. With Red Pepper's agreement we will be republishing three articles over the next few days, each with a different take on the way forward. Read on...
Paul Meszaros of Hope not Hate says that Keiron Farrow’s analysis of the BNP threat is complacent and self-indulgent
We recognise that there needs to be a debate concerning the efficacy of different approaches to undermining support for the far right if we are to refine our intervention. Unfortunately, Keiron Farrow offers little in terms of a positive way forward. His piece casually runs together the Hope not Hate (HNH) and Unite Against Fascism (UAF) campaigns, two organisations he says have ‘broadly similar approaches’, and in doing so blatantly confuses their methods and approaches.
The first important thing to say regarding HNH is that it is a constantly evolving campaign. Because we are not stuck with any old dogma we are able to gauge what works, refine those elements that are helpful and move away from tactics that do not work. For a long period, especially during the 1990s, anti-fascism was something of a minority interest, with a few committed groups and individuals either spying on or beating the far right. This approach might be described as proportional as the BNP offered no political threat in those days, although they posed a physical threat to those they targeted. This changed in the early years of this decade as the BNP for a number of reasons was able, under Nick Griffin’s leadership, to present itself increasingly as a political solution to the problems faced in certain communities.
Since that time we have seen a growth in the far-right vote that is without precedent. During this period the anti-fascist movement has had to learn how to deal with a party that knows how to win elections. We have also had to deal with an organisation that has moved out of its traditional strongholds and is able to gather a sizeable vote almost anywhere. The BNP vote can now longer be dismissed as a protest; rather, the BNP has become the first choice for a significant number of voters.
Certainly, 10 or 15 years ago, the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight would highlight the criminal convictions of far-right activists and candidates. However, this tactic is used far more sparingly these days as we know it has a limited appeal. Rather what we have seen is a growing realisation and understanding that anti-fascism has to address the political, social and economic issues that are giving rise to the far right.
At HNH we know that most people who vote BNP are not Nazis, and we also know that there is a whole host of issues on which they feel ignored. Even here, though, there is an ongoing debate about what these social issues are. We are told often that it revolves around job and housing insecurity. These clearly play a part, but it is also about other less tangible discontents. We are sometimes told that the question is about identity and in particular English and working-class identities ... but are we really being told, in a polite way, that the big issue is immigration? The BNP has managed to give racial ideology and, in particular, fear of immigration a growing political outlet. It is tapping into large reservoirs of racism that have for too long gone unchallenged.
For HNH, taking on the BNP is primarily about working with those communities under threat from the BNP. We have seen in some of our exemplary work, such as in Keighley, that grass-roots campaigning where local people take ownership of the fight against the BNP can be absolutely effective in defeating them. Keighley went from being a BNP ‘capital’ in 2004 to having no BNP organisation or even candidates by 2007. This was achieved by some old-fashioned proper community development work with residents on the threatened estate. Ironically, the leaders of that particular community came from the mums at the local Sure Start, which suggest to me that it is vital to defend what working-class communities have gained what has been gained over recent years, something Farrow neglects to mention. It is through this careful and patient work that the broad-based alliances necessary to defeat the BNP can be built.
There is also the point that third-party campaigning is limited in what it can achieve. For the BNP to lose an election, another party has to win. Hope not Hate is not an appendage of the Labour Party, but clearly it is often the case that Labour that needs to get more votes than the BNP for the BNP to lose! We disagree entirely with the claim that the BNP can never fulfil its programme and that its real crime is delaying the rise of independent working-class opposition. This seems both complacent and self-indulgent. It almost seems that Farrow believes that voting Labour is a worse crime than voting BNP. What is astonishing is that our hard-left critics have not managed to make any headway over the past few years; their derisory election scores are indicative of how irrelevant they are to the working class of which they speak so much and understand so little.
Farrow is right to suggest that the battle for hearts and minds continues on the estates devoid of the far left. But if at the end of this the working people reject the hate of the BNP and vote Labour it will be called a victory. The election of Griffin and Brons as MEPs is devastating, but we must bear in mind that there was no massive surge to the BNP. Rather, the Labour vote collapsed. It is worth remarking, however, that in Bradford, for example, where HNH is long established, the BNP vote went down while the Labour vote went up. Intelligent community-based campaigning exposes the BNP for what it is, as well as providing a defence of civil society.
Paul Meszaros, Hope Not Hate Yorkshirehq[at]hopeyorks.org.uk
With thanks to Red Pepper
Paul Meszaros of Hope not Hate says that Keiron Farrow’s analysis of the BNP threat is complacent and self-indulgentWe recognise that there needs to be a debate concerning the efficacy of different approaches to undermining support for the far right if we are to refine our intervention. Unfortunately, Keiron Farrow offers little in terms of a positive way forward. His piece casually runs together the Hope not Hate (HNH) and Unite Against Fascism (UAF) campaigns, two organisations he says have ‘broadly similar approaches’, and in doing so blatantly confuses their methods and approaches.
The first important thing to say regarding HNH is that it is a constantly evolving campaign. Because we are not stuck with any old dogma we are able to gauge what works, refine those elements that are helpful and move away from tactics that do not work. For a long period, especially during the 1990s, anti-fascism was something of a minority interest, with a few committed groups and individuals either spying on or beating the far right. This approach might be described as proportional as the BNP offered no political threat in those days, although they posed a physical threat to those they targeted. This changed in the early years of this decade as the BNP for a number of reasons was able, under Nick Griffin’s leadership, to present itself increasingly as a political solution to the problems faced in certain communities.
Since that time we have seen a growth in the far-right vote that is without precedent. During this period the anti-fascist movement has had to learn how to deal with a party that knows how to win elections. We have also had to deal with an organisation that has moved out of its traditional strongholds and is able to gather a sizeable vote almost anywhere. The BNP vote can now longer be dismissed as a protest; rather, the BNP has become the first choice for a significant number of voters.
Certainly, 10 or 15 years ago, the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight would highlight the criminal convictions of far-right activists and candidates. However, this tactic is used far more sparingly these days as we know it has a limited appeal. Rather what we have seen is a growing realisation and understanding that anti-fascism has to address the political, social and economic issues that are giving rise to the far right.
At HNH we know that most people who vote BNP are not Nazis, and we also know that there is a whole host of issues on which they feel ignored. Even here, though, there is an ongoing debate about what these social issues are. We are told often that it revolves around job and housing insecurity. These clearly play a part, but it is also about other less tangible discontents. We are sometimes told that the question is about identity and in particular English and working-class identities ... but are we really being told, in a polite way, that the big issue is immigration? The BNP has managed to give racial ideology and, in particular, fear of immigration a growing political outlet. It is tapping into large reservoirs of racism that have for too long gone unchallenged.
For HNH, taking on the BNP is primarily about working with those communities under threat from the BNP. We have seen in some of our exemplary work, such as in Keighley, that grass-roots campaigning where local people take ownership of the fight against the BNP can be absolutely effective in defeating them. Keighley went from being a BNP ‘capital’ in 2004 to having no BNP organisation or even candidates by 2007. This was achieved by some old-fashioned proper community development work with residents on the threatened estate. Ironically, the leaders of that particular community came from the mums at the local Sure Start, which suggest to me that it is vital to defend what working-class communities have gained what has been gained over recent years, something Farrow neglects to mention. It is through this careful and patient work that the broad-based alliances necessary to defeat the BNP can be built.
There is also the point that third-party campaigning is limited in what it can achieve. For the BNP to lose an election, another party has to win. Hope not Hate is not an appendage of the Labour Party, but clearly it is often the case that Labour that needs to get more votes than the BNP for the BNP to lose! We disagree entirely with the claim that the BNP can never fulfil its programme and that its real crime is delaying the rise of independent working-class opposition. This seems both complacent and self-indulgent. It almost seems that Farrow believes that voting Labour is a worse crime than voting BNP. What is astonishing is that our hard-left critics have not managed to make any headway over the past few years; their derisory election scores are indicative of how irrelevant they are to the working class of which they speak so much and understand so little.
Farrow is right to suggest that the battle for hearts and minds continues on the estates devoid of the far left. But if at the end of this the working people reject the hate of the BNP and vote Labour it will be called a victory. The election of Griffin and Brons as MEPs is devastating, but we must bear in mind that there was no massive surge to the BNP. Rather, the Labour vote collapsed. It is worth remarking, however, that in Bradford, for example, where HNH is long established, the BNP vote went down while the Labour vote went up. Intelligent community-based campaigning exposes the BNP for what it is, as well as providing a defence of civil society.
Paul Meszaros, Hope Not Hate Yorkshirehq[at]hopeyorks.org.uk
With thanks to Red Pepper
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September 01, 2009
Which way for anti-fascism?
Red Pepper magazine is currently running a debate on the future of anti-fascism, one we'd like to bring to the Lancaster Unity community. With Red Pepper's agreement we will be republishing three articles over the next few days, each with a different take on the way forward. Read on...
Anti-fascism isn’t working
The British National Party’s continuing electoral advances have propelled the party onto the national stage and initiated a debate about why it is achieving historically unprecedented results for the far right in Britain. What is driving its recent successes, how might it be stopped and what is the role of the left in this effort? This debate is essentially over strategy: about our relation to anti-fascism and what it ought to be in today’s conditions. There is one question that is not being asked, though: is ‘anti-fascism’ the answer to the BNP? Keiron Farrow says it isn’t
The statistics are telling. The BNP now has 60 local councillors and a similar number of parish councillors. By comparison, previous fascist groups had managed three councillors in total in the previous 80 years (this is without counting the seats won and subsequently lost by the BNP). The party has one member on the London Assembly, and now two MEPs in Europe.
Its overall vote has risen in successive local, general and European elections. At locals it has risen to an average of around 15 per cent, while in the European elections the party polled 943,598 votes nationally, 6.2 per cent of the total (up 1.3 per cent on 2004). At Westminster level there are three constituencies where the aggregate ward votes at the 2008 local elections put it in first place.
The BNP had 10,000 members at the end of 2007 – a figure that is likely to have risen since – providing it with a large and expanding activist base. It is not, by national standards, a huge organisation; it is a ‘large small party’ – at best the sixth biggest in the country. Nor, despite its advances, does it pose any immediate threat of gaining serious power. The real danger lies elsewhere, as will be outlined later.
Nonetheless, if the BNP’s absolute vote is giving pause for concern, it is its trajectory that is truly worrying. The European elections saw its national vote rise by almost a fifth against a background of falling turnout. The small falls in its absolute vote in some areas, including the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, where it won its seats, are misleading as they ignore the lower turnout and factors such as the impact of moving from an all-postal ballot to a traditional election. To exaggerate the significance of these absolute figures risks obscuring the party’s continued increase in its vote nationwide and breakthrough successes in county council level.
Failed approaches
Contemporary anti-fascism is represented by two main groups, with broadly similar approaches. First, there is Hope not Hate, an umbrella group for unions and individuals within the broad labour movement but open to all. This group was formed by the Searchlight Network. Second, Unite Against Fascism (UAF), an organisation set up by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and National Assembly Against Racism, which also has some union and other backing. For the SWP, UAF is clearly designed to continue in a similar vein to the Anti-Nazi League, and is not shy of drawing on the ANL’s reputation and experience.
Both groups concentrate their activities on two main approaches: first, exposing the criminal records, past activities and political beliefs of leading BNP members, candidates and activists; and second, calling on people not to ‘vote Nazi’. Instead electors are urged 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 approach formed the basis of both groups’ failed interventions into the London mayoral and European elections.
What is wrong with these two approaches? The most obvious objection is that they don’t work. 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 more than 40 per cent of all men can expect to have some form of criminal conviction during their lifetime, 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 a limited impact. If this were not the case 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 past decade on a scale never seen before. Every section of the media has got in on the game, every candidate has been hammering home their BNP opponents’ convictions. If this strategy 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, BNP leader Nick Griffin’s association with Holocaust denial in the 1990s and earlier – has suffered a similar fate. Griffin has proved adept at moderating his most extreme opinions for the benefit of the media. He will now acknowledge the Holocaust as a historical ‘fact’ and, as he put it to the Observer in 2002, he claims that the only reason ‘people like me’ are not always ‘polite and reasonable’ on the subject is ‘frustration with how it is used to prevent any genuine debate on questions to do with immigration, ethnicity and the cultural survival of the western nations’.
In doing so, he can effectively neutralise the issue. If, despite his denial of Holocaust denial, an interviewer presses on regardless, it permits Griffin to turn the tables and ask if he or she wants to talk about politics. The same thing happens on a larger scale electorally
As with the exposure of BNP candidates’ criminal convictions, if this approach of bringing up the death camps and Nazi Germany was going to have any impact it would have done so in the especially favourable conditions of recent fevered mass media scrutiny of the BNP. This approach did find success in the three or four decades after the second world war, when a real folk memory of the sacrifices made by millions was still alive. Today, in different conditions, it cannot, has not and will not make the same inroads on BNP support.
Appealing to the status quo
These, though, are merely tactical problems, bred by past success and turned into conservative substitutes for effective intervention. Far more damaging on a strategic level is the second approach, calling on the electorate to ‘vote anyone but BNP’.
This position is a de facto appeal to support the status quo. It effectively calls on people to support the social conditions that have given rise to their radical discontent – to support the very same parties that have introduced and are pledged to maintain those 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 the past few years makes this patently clear. The ‘anyone but BNP’ approach helps ensure that the conditions that are producing the BNP are going to remain in place. So 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: in particular, the political abandonment of much of the working class in pursuit of the narrow section of the electorate classified as ‘swing voters’. Parties have privileged the interests of a section of the electorate that rarely shares the same interests as ‘core’ Labour voters in working-class areas. And this has led to the setting of parts of the same communities at each other’s throats in the fight for resources under the name of multiculturalism; the closing down of schools and hospitals; wages being driven down; debt; sub-standard housing; rising rents; under-funded services – all the conditions of our social life being attacked and commercialised by a class that has shown itself incapable, in the most basic terms, of being able to run the system for the benefit of all. This is what needs to be challenged as a priority, not people’s reactions to those planned and deliberate failures known 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 to stop the BNP’ is, in most areas where it is raised, a barely-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 need we dwell on those areas where the slogan translates into voting Tory or Lib Dem beyond imagining 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 against is a failing anti-fascism. It is sacrificing all credibility by joining hands with the very establishment that people are so fed up with.
The combined party membership of mainstream parties has dropped from more than three million in the 1960s to barely half a million today and it is still falling. In conditions where large sections of the electorate are abandoning all the mainstream parties, for anti-fascists not to be supporting or initiating local projects that are prepared to confront rather than support the Labour Party is to politically abandon those communities to the BNP.
No platform?
Other aspects of current anti-fascist activism should also be questioned. This includes the widespread policy of ‘no platform for fascists’. Following the egging of Nick Griffin on College Green, at Westminster, the day after his election as an MEP, it has become evident that – beyond the confines of those who are already politically opposed to the BNP – ‘no platform’ has very little popular support.
In a country where the myths of democracy and freedom have a great hold over the public political imagination, a ‘no platform’ approach to the BNP is dangerous in a number of ways. First, via the functioning of that democratic myth, it associates the left with authoritarianism, violence and telling people what they can and cannot hear or read – exactly the sort of high-handed arrogance that is leading many people to reject the mainstream parties. Second, 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 account being closed as well, or the plans by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the party’s constitution and membership rules.
How easy would it be to turn these initiatives against us? Already there are calls for a Berufsverbot for public sector workers, banning BNP members from those professions. 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 a top-down version of ‘no platform’ substituted for this effective grass-roots one.
On a related note, Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) is an attempt to continue the cultural fight of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism by holding music festivals and similar events. Again, questions need to be asked. The problem is that today they simply attract those who are already against the BNP. In the past they were real arenas of conflict, battlegrounds for the hearts of young people. Today that context no longer exists and the far right has no hold over the young – it lost that battle years ago. Energy and resources channelled into LMHR would be better off directed at helping to deal with the problems working-class communities face as part and parcel of squeezing the BNP.
Missing the real danger
What all the current anti-fascist approaches have in common is that they miss the real danger. This 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 more immediately in the far right colonising the anti-mainstream vote and developing party loyalty, thereby blocking the development of an independent working-class politics capable of defending our conditions and challenging neoliberalism.
The BNP’s politics is being normalised, with the consequent racialisation of social issues and a massive shift to the right. Each step they take forwards knocks the ‘left’ backwards. This represents an immense defeat for the left – one that could take us decades to recover from and leave 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. That is what will happen unless the job of defending the needs of those communities is seriously taken on and our counter-productive, outdated ‘anti-fascism’ is discarded.
I offer a few positive suggestions towards a new approach.
1 Community unions
We could form ‘community unions’, unconnected to Labour, possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational independence assured, that would work directly on helping to meet the needs of those politically abandoned working-class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. These would be based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities – which can only pit them head-to-head against the BNP and the political mainstream.
The types of small victories that 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 political self-assertion, the necessary first steps towards achieving further-reaching change. There are already existing groups engaged in this sort of practical activity, such as the London Coalition Against Poverty, Haringey Solidarity and the Oxford and Islington Working Class Associations (see Red Pepper Oct/Nov 2007).
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 an area/workplace with the existence of a 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 – but there is no reason why they cannot play a role within these broader open groups.
2 Focus on policy
We should develop the ‘expose them’ model into one that, instead of revealing ineffective details about individuals, 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 criticised above. This, of course, needs to be linked to the activity of the ‘community union’ type groups mentioned above.
3 Abandon Labour
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 seems unlikely to happen.)
4 End the marches
Stop the marches, labelling, shouting, and so on. Marching into an area that you do not know and have no continuing interest in and 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 and without writing off vast swathes of the population. It has to be.
With thanks to Red Pepper
Anti-fascism isn’t working
The British National Party’s continuing electoral advances have propelled the party onto the national stage and initiated a debate about why it is achieving historically unprecedented results for the far right in Britain. What is driving its recent successes, how might it be stopped and what is the role of the left in this effort? This debate is essentially over strategy: about our relation to anti-fascism and what it ought to be in today’s conditions. There is one question that is not being asked, though: is ‘anti-fascism’ the answer to the BNP? Keiron Farrow says it isn’t
The statistics are telling. The BNP now has 60 local councillors and a similar number of parish councillors. By comparison, previous fascist groups had managed three councillors in total in the previous 80 years (this is without counting the seats won and subsequently lost by the BNP). The party has one member on the London Assembly, and now two MEPs in Europe.
Its overall vote has risen in successive local, general and European elections. At locals it has risen to an average of around 15 per cent, while in the European elections the party polled 943,598 votes nationally, 6.2 per cent of the total (up 1.3 per cent on 2004). At Westminster level there are three constituencies where the aggregate ward votes at the 2008 local elections put it in first place.
The BNP had 10,000 members at the end of 2007 – a figure that is likely to have risen since – providing it with a large and expanding activist base. It is not, by national standards, a huge organisation; it is a ‘large small party’ – at best the sixth biggest in the country. Nor, despite its advances, does it pose any immediate threat of gaining serious power. The real danger lies elsewhere, as will be outlined later.
Nonetheless, if the BNP’s absolute vote is giving pause for concern, it is its trajectory that is truly worrying. The European elections saw its national vote rise by almost a fifth against a background of falling turnout. The small falls in its absolute vote in some areas, including the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, where it won its seats, are misleading as they ignore the lower turnout and factors such as the impact of moving from an all-postal ballot to a traditional election. To exaggerate the significance of these absolute figures risks obscuring the party’s continued increase in its vote nationwide and breakthrough successes in county council level.
Failed approaches
Contemporary anti-fascism is represented by two main groups, with broadly similar approaches. First, there is Hope not Hate, an umbrella group for unions and individuals within the broad labour movement but open to all. This group was formed by the Searchlight Network. Second, Unite Against Fascism (UAF), an organisation set up by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and National Assembly Against Racism, which also has some union and other backing. For the SWP, UAF is clearly designed to continue in a similar vein to the Anti-Nazi League, and is not shy of drawing on the ANL’s reputation and experience.
Both groups concentrate their activities on two main approaches: first, exposing the criminal records, past activities and political beliefs of leading BNP members, candidates and activists; and second, calling on people not to ‘vote Nazi’. Instead electors are urged 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 approach formed the basis of both groups’ failed interventions into the London mayoral and European elections.
What is wrong with these two approaches? The most obvious objection is that they don’t work. 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 more than 40 per cent of all men can expect to have some form of criminal conviction during their lifetime, 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 a limited impact. If this were not the case 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 past decade on a scale never seen before. Every section of the media has got in on the game, every candidate has been hammering home their BNP opponents’ convictions. If this strategy 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, BNP leader Nick Griffin’s association with Holocaust denial in the 1990s and earlier – has suffered a similar fate. Griffin has proved adept at moderating his most extreme opinions for the benefit of the media. He will now acknowledge the Holocaust as a historical ‘fact’ and, as he put it to the Observer in 2002, he claims that the only reason ‘people like me’ are not always ‘polite and reasonable’ on the subject is ‘frustration with how it is used to prevent any genuine debate on questions to do with immigration, ethnicity and the cultural survival of the western nations’.
In doing so, he can effectively neutralise the issue. If, despite his denial of Holocaust denial, an interviewer presses on regardless, it permits Griffin to turn the tables and ask if he or she wants to talk about politics. The same thing happens on a larger scale electorally
As with the exposure of BNP candidates’ criminal convictions, if this approach of bringing up the death camps and Nazi Germany was going to have any impact it would have done so in the especially favourable conditions of recent fevered mass media scrutiny of the BNP. This approach did find success in the three or four decades after the second world war, when a real folk memory of the sacrifices made by millions was still alive. Today, in different conditions, it cannot, has not and will not make the same inroads on BNP support.
Appealing to the status quo
These, though, are merely tactical problems, bred by past success and turned into conservative substitutes for effective intervention. Far more damaging on a strategic level is the second approach, calling on the electorate to ‘vote anyone but BNP’.
This position is a de facto appeal to support the status quo. It effectively calls on people to support the social conditions that have given rise to their radical discontent – to support the very same parties that have introduced and are pledged to maintain those 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 the past few years makes this patently clear. The ‘anyone but BNP’ approach helps ensure that the conditions that are producing the BNP are going to remain in place. So 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: in particular, the political abandonment of much of the working class in pursuit of the narrow section of the electorate classified as ‘swing voters’. Parties have privileged the interests of a section of the electorate that rarely shares the same interests as ‘core’ Labour voters in working-class areas. And this has led to the setting of parts of the same communities at each other’s throats in the fight for resources under the name of multiculturalism; the closing down of schools and hospitals; wages being driven down; debt; sub-standard housing; rising rents; under-funded services – all the conditions of our social life being attacked and commercialised by a class that has shown itself incapable, in the most basic terms, of being able to run the system for the benefit of all. This is what needs to be challenged as a priority, not people’s reactions to those planned and deliberate failures known 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 to stop the BNP’ is, in most areas where it is raised, a barely-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 need we dwell on those areas where the slogan translates into voting Tory or Lib Dem beyond imagining 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 against is a failing anti-fascism. It is sacrificing all credibility by joining hands with the very establishment that people are so fed up with.
The combined party membership of mainstream parties has dropped from more than three million in the 1960s to barely half a million today and it is still falling. In conditions where large sections of the electorate are abandoning all the mainstream parties, for anti-fascists not to be supporting or initiating local projects that are prepared to confront rather than support the Labour Party is to politically abandon those communities to the BNP.
No platform?
Other aspects of current anti-fascist activism should also be questioned. This includes the widespread policy of ‘no platform for fascists’. Following the egging of Nick Griffin on College Green, at Westminster, the day after his election as an MEP, it has become evident that – beyond the confines of those who are already politically opposed to the BNP – ‘no platform’ has very little popular support.
In a country where the myths of democracy and freedom have a great hold over the public political imagination, a ‘no platform’ approach to the BNP is dangerous in a number of ways. First, via the functioning of that democratic myth, it associates the left with authoritarianism, violence and telling people what they can and cannot hear or read – exactly the sort of high-handed arrogance that is leading many people to reject the mainstream parties. Second, 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 account being closed as well, or the plans by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the party’s constitution and membership rules.
How easy would it be to turn these initiatives against us? Already there are calls for a Berufsverbot for public sector workers, banning BNP members from those professions. 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 a top-down version of ‘no platform’ substituted for this effective grass-roots one.
On a related note, Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) is an attempt to continue the cultural fight of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism by holding music festivals and similar events. Again, questions need to be asked. The problem is that today they simply attract those who are already against the BNP. In the past they were real arenas of conflict, battlegrounds for the hearts of young people. Today that context no longer exists and the far right has no hold over the young – it lost that battle years ago. Energy and resources channelled into LMHR would be better off directed at helping to deal with the problems working-class communities face as part and parcel of squeezing the BNP.
Missing the real danger
What all the current anti-fascist approaches have in common is that they miss the real danger. This 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 more immediately in the far right colonising the anti-mainstream vote and developing party loyalty, thereby blocking the development of an independent working-class politics capable of defending our conditions and challenging neoliberalism.
The BNP’s politics is being normalised, with the consequent racialisation of social issues and a massive shift to the right. Each step they take forwards knocks the ‘left’ backwards. This represents an immense defeat for the left – one that could take us decades to recover from and leave 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. That is what will happen unless the job of defending the needs of those communities is seriously taken on and our counter-productive, outdated ‘anti-fascism’ is discarded.
I offer a few positive suggestions towards a new approach.
1 Community unions
We could form ‘community unions’, unconnected to Labour, possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational independence assured, that would work directly on helping to meet the needs of those politically abandoned working-class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. These would be based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities – which can only pit them head-to-head against the BNP and the political mainstream.
The types of small victories that 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 political self-assertion, the necessary first steps towards achieving further-reaching change. There are already existing groups engaged in this sort of practical activity, such as the London Coalition Against Poverty, Haringey Solidarity and the Oxford and Islington Working Class Associations (see Red Pepper Oct/Nov 2007).
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 an area/workplace with the existence of a 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 – but there is no reason why they cannot play a role within these broader open groups.
2 Focus on policy
We should develop the ‘expose them’ model into one that, instead of revealing ineffective details about individuals, 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 criticised above. This, of course, needs to be linked to the activity of the ‘community union’ type groups mentioned above.
3 Abandon Labour
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 seems unlikely to happen.)
4 End the marches
Stop the marches, labelling, shouting, and so on. Marching into an area that you do not know and have no continuing interest in and 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 and without writing off vast swathes of the population. It has to be.
With thanks to Red Pepper
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