How Not to Fight the BNP.

Today sees a Hope not Hate Day of Action against the BNP. This is just one initiative amongst many. Unite Against Fascism organises opposition to the BNP and the English Defence League (EDL). There are regular skirmishes. Last week’s demonstration against an EDL rally in Bolton was met with brutal police action. Emotions are rising.

What are the ideas and strategies behind these campaigns?

That all democrats should act to “expose” the BNP and the EDL. To show that they are far-right racists, out to attack non-British ethnic groups. That they hold a neo-Nazi agenda.

The UAF writes, “We aim to unite the broadest possible spectrum of society to counter this threat.” This alliance includes the labour movement, the left, liberals, religious and ethnic groups.

Those involved are motivated with genuine anger at the BNP’s public declarations, and, limited,  election presence.

Why are some people voting BNP? Why was the party able to get MEPs elected? What are its roots? How has the EDL  got the means to bring football supporters and casuals out on the streets to shout about Islam?

Is the best way to answer them to “expose” their real aims by door-to-door and media campaigns? To bring out anti-fascists when the far-right is in the street  to say “No Passaran!”

Eddie Ford argues in the Weekly Worker (here) that,

The EDL is but a symptom of the alienation engendered by the decaying system of capital, defended and promoted by the whole bourgeois establishment and its state. And to take on the latter we need to begin by uniting the existing organised left around a partyist perspective and hence take a decisive step towards what the working class really needs – a mass Communist Party of hundreds of thousands and millions.

The profound problem being, of course, that this is almost the exact opposite of the approach adopted by the SWP/UAF and others. Deliberately, and with a certain degree of cynicism, such groups constantly present the threats and dangers posed by the EDL and BNP in such an exaggerated way as to justify the construction of the widest possible popular front – which turns out to be the SWP and assorted liberal personalities, vicars and trade union officials.

Eddie is on the right track. Neither a popular front nor streeting-fighting will get anywhere.

• The fury at the BNP and the EDL is displaced resentment. The left is unable to offer a cedible alternative to Gordon Brown. Encouraged by members of the Labour Party and Trade Union officials it united  against what seems a far easier target. The left can feel warm, self-righteous and active without having to confront its own weaknesses. The Labour Party equally avoids  its own responsibilities.  
• Far-right parties have grown across Europe. Why? What is the alienation Eddie Ford talks about? Political scientist Eric Maurin explains the French Front National support as a response to a “fear of the future” (here). Despite its claim, this is not just high in France. A ‘factured’ society where there’s a loss of faith in tommorow, is emerging across the continent. What is it based on? It is a division inside both the working and middle class between those who are still ‘safe‘ in their work and careers, and those exposed to the ‘flexible‘ labour market. The fear of being turned out from a job and having to face competition for employment means that people blame the last arrivals on the market . In Britain, migrant workers take the brunt of these anxieties. Whether deliberately or not, employers take advantage. 
• In these conditions, the far-right can get people to blame ‘foreigners’ for everyone else’s difficulties,  even when they are not even in the running for the same work. Anyone anxious about keeping their job and salary (mortgages, debt and high private utility prices make most of us on the edgy about our income) can vent her or his frustration on this convenient object.
• In-fighting extends to  state provision (housing, education and health). Those protected ‘in’ the system are worried about being cast into less protected. The government’s programme of privatisations and outsourcing increases the difference between private welfare and public. It makes a whole swathe of people nervous about their position. Unemployment looms. Anyone forced onto the Flexible New Deal and other dole schemes (hundreds of thousands) is made to feel that they do not have benefits as a right. They have duties to the state. It, and its private contractors) have rights over them. Many people loathe this condition. This is another source of frustration.
• The government’s multiculturalism has encouraged this process. This is not by its welcome promotion of mutual understanding. It is by its political strategy of supporting ”community leaders’  of ethnic and religious groups the recipients of local power and money. It contributes a further level of frustration and competition over resources. Multiculturalism, in this  sense ,  is a factor in fostering racism.
• The far-right can concentrate all the resentments and insecurities of people together into an  ‘anti-system’ programme. This can slip from anti-foreigners, British nationalist, to virulent anti-black or Moslem propaganda. But its hinge is a reaction to the market-state. That is Labour’s commitment to keeping its consistency ‘safe’, promoting their interests. With its idea that the state should equip us to compete in a global market, people are left vulnerable  to the gales of insecurity when economic crises arrive. Their own policies inflame the atmosphere in which the far-right thrives.

UAF and Hope Against Hate have not tackled these problems. They tend to reduce the source of BNP backing to ‘anti-Islam’ inflamatory speech. They have tried to create the view that nobody should criticise religious belief.  But opposition to religions, such as Islam, and Islamist politics, should not be confused with dislike of Moslems. By putting these together they are unable to pursue an  anti-racist agenda. In Tower Hamlets, for example, Ken Livingstone, Galloway, the SWP and other’anti-BNPers’ , are allied with the supporters of the far-right Jamaat-I-Islami  a well-funded  Islamist group responsible for massacres in the Bangladesh War of National Liberation and the slaughter of leftists, Hindus and other minorities ever since. By failing to answer those who criticise this link they expose a weakness that undermines their own credibility as anti-fascists.

Nevertheless, one should not exaggerate either this factor, or the importance of the BNP. Much more serious, is, as Eddie claims, the inability of the left to develop a “partyist” perspective. Only a densely networked left, present in the community, can begin to fight the BNP and the EDL. This would have to be one that confronts the legacy of Blair and Brown – the market state to start with – that is the real cause of what popularity the far-right  has got.

This does not mean ignoring the BNP, or the need for a street presence against the EDL. But it’s an issue of different priorities.