All mouth, no trousers

Why do we make so much fuss about a bunch of no-hope, neo-Nazi criminals called the BNP?

Nick Cohen
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer

The charging of Joseph Owens with assault causing actual bodily harm last week exemplifies the presentational difficulties of the British National Party. Until the case is heard, his alleged victim, a student who needed four stitches to a gash behind his ear after an 'incident' at Salford university, remains an alleged victim. Owens, the Merseyside organiser of the BNP, is innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
But here's the rub for the BNP. If Owens is found guilty, he won't be the black sheep of the party. As Searchlight, the anti-fascist information centre, puts it, people who say today's politicians lack convictions should look at the shed-loads of convictions collected by the BNP. Nick Griffin, the leader, was convicted of inciting racial hatred. Tony Lecomber, one of Griffin's lieutenants, has 12 convictions, including one for the possession of home-made hand-grenades and electronic timing devices and a second for unlawfully wounding a school teacher. Robert Bennett, a leading BNP activist in Oldham in the 2002 elections campaign, could better that. He had 30, including a conviction for gang rape.

I could go on through a sizeable chunk of the BNP's membership and put appropriate convictions for football hooliganism, burglary, theft, possession of drugs, assault, racially aggravated assault and racial abuse beside their names. But that would be a long - very long - way of making two obvious points: like all other neo-Nazi parties, the BNP is a criminal conspiracy; and criminals tend not to do well at the polls.

Yet for several years predictions of a breakthrough by the BNP have been the conventional wisdom of the political media. Vast attention has been paid to the party's odd successes in the Pennine towns. The interest isn't all sensationalism. Much of the reporting has been genuine investigative journalism. In common with other European far-right parties, the BNP presents itself as a party of post-modern nationalism which denies the universal values of human rights while celebrating difference.

Jean-Marie Le Pen sounded like a good student of the philosophies of Derrida or Lyotard when he said: 'I love north Africans but their place is in north Africa.' Griffin, too, has insisted that all he is saying is that different cultures can't live together. A lot of the journalists who have worked on the BNP have revealed that fascism lurks behind the cultural relativism, as it does behind a surprising large number of the ideas of post-modern philosophy.

But when all the journalistic back-slapping is over, hacks have to admit that much of the appeal of the BNP lies in its exoticism. Here are real neo-Nazis... in dear old Blighty! We've got football hooliganism, tattooed brutes whose beer bellies graze the ground and the ever-present possibility of race riots! If that's not a story, what is?

Coverage of the BNP has been in inverse proportion to its political importance, as has the significance assigned to it by politicians. Again, I don't want to be too damming. Labour politicians from the North-West in particular have fought hard and honourably in the neo-fascist hotspots. It's no good telling a Labour MP from Oldham that the BNP doesn't matter nationally, when it matters enormously to the social peace of his constituency.

But when all the caveats have been made, the fact remains that Fleet Street and Downing Street have created an imaginary monster, a stereotype to put alongside Essex Man and Worcester Woman: Angry Young Working-Class Man. At a summit at Chequers in 2002, Philip Gould, New Labour's pollster, presented Tony Blair with a terrifying vision of the future. According to the Sunday Times, he produced 'recent private-polling and focus-group evidence that showed how there was a real possibility of a surge in support among the working class for popular nationalism based on fears about crime and immigration'. 'Angry Young Working-Class Man' was turning to neo-Nazism.

Typically Gould didn't propose defusing working-class anger by, say, extending trade-union rights or promoting job security, but by cracking down on immigration and crime, policies his government and the previous bunch of scoundrels have been following for at least a decade.

For all the hysteria, the far-right has not followed-up its successes in Europe with a breakthrough in Britain. During the campaign for this week's elections, YouGov, the most reliable of the polling companies, has found that BNP support is so small it can't be measured. I should add that the combination of a low turnout and proportional representation means that anything is possible on Thursday. In the capital a party needs only 5 per cent of the vote to win a seat in the London Assembly, and Ken Livingstone's newts would have a fair chance if they were standing. All that can be said with certainty this weekend, is that the BNP has failed to appear in the polls and any victories it scrapes will rely on a miserable turnout rather than a wave of enthusiastic support.

Its real success has been to distort the political vision. Until a few weeks ago few in the Westminster village noticed the far more significant right-wing phenomenon of the United Kingdom Independence Party. But whatever you think of its policies, UKIP is respectable and can appeal to the respectable working and middle classes. None of its leading members has served a prison term - not even Robert Kilroy Silk.

In a pamphlet by the Fabian Society last week, Catherine Fieschi lacerated the media for magnifying the threat of neo-fascism to sell newspapers - 'it's so much sexier than council tax bands'. She made the cheering point the far-right is in decline; not only in Britain, where fascist and communist parties have always failed, but in Europe. For instance, Jean-Marie Le Pen's and Jorg Haider's parties lost two-thirds of their seats in France's regional and Austria's national elections last year. While Fieschi doesn't predict that either will be wiped-out in this week's Euro elections, she reckons internal strife and the far-right's failure to deliver whenever it wins support 'offer strong inoculation for democracy against the threat'.

But it is possible for reactionary ideas to succeed when far-right parties fail. As we've been over the shift to the right on immigration and crime by the mainstream parties, it may be worth taking a look at the extraordinary and unprecedented developments on the left, where many are prepared to make excuses for the Islamists and remnants of Saddam's fascistic forces as they fight the Americans, and to reach a pact with religious bigotry.

About one million gormless if well-intentioned marchers allowed themselves to be organised by the Stop the War coalition last year. The coalition has mutated into the Respect the Unity party, led by George Galloway, which is basing its appeal to the electorate on crude communalist politics.

In London, Respect is circulating a leaflet boosting Galloway as a 'fighter for Muslims', and claiming 'Tony Blair wants to see George Galloway silenced. We, as Muslims, want to see him continue to speak out for us.' (In truth, Galloway isn't too keen on Muslims speaking out. He saluted the 'courage' of Saddam Hussein, who forced silence on the mainly Muslim population of Iraq, and supported the military coup in Pakistan, saying that 'in poor Third World countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians'.)

In Birmingham, Respect has a pact with the People's Justice Party (PJP), a Kashmiri community group. It backs Respect for the Euro elections, Respect backs its candidates in the local council elections. A leaflet sent out by the PJP and then withdrawn told its supporters not to think of voting for the Liberal Democrats because they are 'in favour of equal rights for gays and lesbians'.

As the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a small group of honest Marxists points out, nothing like this has been seen in the history of the left. The left has always emphasised the need to break down the barriers of race and religion to achieve working-class solidarity. In recent years it has added the causes of freeing women and gays from religious and political prohibitions to its shopping list. But all of that is old hat, apparently.

There is a glimmer of good news amid the murk. According to the pollsters, Respect is making as much headway as the BNP. I know I risk sounding like Robert Kilroy-Silk, but if Thursday's elections confirm their predictions, I for one will be proud to be British.

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For those of you who didn't get his original pro-war spiel in the Torygraph you can read it here:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$3LHH213TZMLZHQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2003/01/14/do1401.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/01/14/ixnewstop.html

To summarise:

Anyone who is campaigning against the BNP are wasting their time as they won't win any seats (yeah but if they don't win any seats maybe it is BECAUSE people campaigned against them Nick??!!)

All those fine people who marched against the war in February last year are "gormless" (!!) but mislead by the Anti-War Coalition (actually Nick it was 2 million!! get your facts right!! and ...erm ...well I think we were all kind of prooved right weren't we??)

Oh, and of course that old chessnut about Galloway funding dictators (I feel another law suit coming up here??)

At least he has something nice to say about "Workers Liberty". Congratulations you guys! I bet you are all honoured to receive his award for being the most "honest Marxists" eh?? I doubt if he'll be voting for Workers Liberty in the elections though eh?? (My bet is he's going for the UKIP??)

Maybe we should put him up for the "Darwin Awards"??