Though Cowards Flinch

A comment on the blog tonight, in praise of the BNP, and in disgust at ‘people like me’, begins thus: 

We are retired ex-RAF and have supported The British National Party for some years, and as you are entitled to find their views offensive, there are many many ordinary people who find your views offensive and insulting.

Now, there is pretty well nothing I dislike more in the world than people justifying their affiliation to the BNP by the fact that they have served in the British forces. 

How dare they!

And yes it is personal.

I simply reprint below a piece I wrote last year, on a blog few people read, in advance of the European elections in the North West, where sadly Griffin took a seat. 

It sets out why I find the comment above – and I’ve heard others on the doorstep like it – so loathsome.

CHURCHILL AND MY DAD

This is part 2 of this post on why I’ll march against the BNP.  Part 1 is here.

BNP members and sympathisers go on a lot about the need to defend to ‘our way of life’.  Here are three examples, googled, and more or less at random (all typos as original):

1) A commenter to the Lancashire Evening Post, round my way:

Many Whites suffer a great deal of race hate. We want to protect and defend OUR way of life, culture, language, religion, customs, livelyhoods, etc.

 2) A commenter on a Daily Telegraph Article

BNP appeal to more and more people with each passing year. People like me, a lifelong Labour voter till recently, who are sick to death of immigrants, the changes they bring to our way of life, their incessant demands for more and more accomodation for their religion and beliefs, increasing crime, yobs and thugs unpunished and the general lack of attention to our fears.

 3) A commenter to the local paper online forum on the Swanley St Mary’s (Sevenoaks) BNP bye-election victory:

‘Well done BNP. Perhaps this shows everyone the country as a whole is fed up with our laws and life style being shaped to fit in with a multi cultural society,our way of life is at risk. Immigrants housed first,given everything for free, given a vote(to keep labour in).Anyone that is saying you should be ashamed to vote for the BNP needs their head testing. You should be ashamed if you dont,if you are happy with this coutry of ours being spineless and seen as a soft touch by the rest of the world for any immagrant to come and stay for free and drain us dry. All of you that say bully boys and so on is so out of date.’

My dad, who was killed in 1979, also ’defended our way of life’.  But he defended a very different ‘our way of life’.  He defended, loyally, the ‘way of life’ that Churchill spoke of in one of in one of his most famous speeches:

 ‘Let no man underrate the abiding power of the British Empire and Common-wealth.

Because you see the 46 millions in our island harassed about their food supply, of which they only grow one half, even in war-time, or because we have difficulty in restarting our industries and export trade after six years of passionate war effort, do not suppose that we shall not come through these dark years of privation as we have come through the glorious years of agony, or that half a century from now, you will not see 70 or 80 millions of Britons spread about the world and united in defense of our traditions, our way of life, and of the world causes which you and we espouse’ (Sinews of Peace Address).’

My dad was a peaceful man, a toughened steelworker who, as soon as he was able, and as often as he was able, took to the Northern hills on his bike and on foot.  He didn’t drink, he walked and rode, and the hills were always where he was happiest.

He never talked about the war, when he did his duty in defence of ‘our way of life’; he flew in Lancaster bombers, as bomber and reserve rear gunner, in the event that the rear gunner was injured or killed. 

I only learnt that detail from my mother after he died, because the only thing he’d say, in answer to a child’s naive questions, was that it had all been really frightening, and that he was glad when it was over.

He was scared, but he did his duty in defence of what he also knew as ’our way of life’. 

In the face of a Nazi regime that was intent on exterminating more than one race of people, and intent on creating murderous carnage across Europe, ‘our way of life’ then seemed like an apt enough way of describing what needed to be defended, by scared, peace-loving people like my dad.

So the BNP has quite a cheek, to say the least, trying to appropriate the whole notion of ‘our way of life’ for their own nasty, narrow, racist ends.

This BNP ‘way of life’ wasn’t my dad’s way of life.  His way of life centered on a quiet ‘cultural Christianity’ (he never bothered much with church), where the important things were tolerance, helping people out whoever they were, just being decent to people in a quiet Methodist sort of way.

And the BNP way is not my ‘way of life’ either.   I might not do as much in the way of cultural Christianity, but I know what Kant said, and I agree:

‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end’  (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Moral) (1785), 4:429).

That, for me, is the most important statement, advice, guidance, of the lot.  It signals an end to pre-Enlightenment savagery and superstition; it signals an end to slavery (though it took another 80 years); it signals, in its own way, that every person counts. 

It signals who we are today; it’s ‘our way of life’.

And that’s my ‘way of life’ – the way of life of a 200 year old period of Enlightenment, darkened 70 years ago by the emergence in Germany of a force bent on its destruction, but upheld by people like my dad, who lived for the rest of his (all too short) a life with the then apparent necessity of killing (jury out on the tactics, certainly) thousands of Germans, in order to defend it.  The greater good, they used to call it, and my dad risked his life and sullied his conscience for it.

It’s a ‘way if life’ that the BNP now threaten. 

Their threat is here, it’s here now, and it’s much bigger and more suddenly dangerous than I thought it was going to be.  These people are right about that.

And just as Churchill would have advised, this is not a time to ‘accommodate their concerns’, as the likes of Dan McGurry would have us believe.  Now is not the time, Dan, to stay silent on the doorstep, because they are too dangerous for that, because they are winning.

Instead, the ‘fault line’ where the Left/Labour (the Tories are not going to help out here) must challenge the BNP,   is precisely around this notion of ‘our way of life’.

We (Labour and the Left) must develop an articulation of our own about what it means to be British – that being British is about being tolerant, about loving your neighbour, about decency, about the Enlightenment we defended 70 years ago, when the real Nazis came to threaten us.

In that way, we will defeat these plastic Nazis.  But if we don’t, we’re fucked, because the BNP WILL rise.  They have shown that they can.

And that’s why I’ll march against the BNP, despite how scared I’ll be, whenever they do decide to march, whenever they do decide that they might get a few Everton supporters on side (it’s only a tactical withdrawal). 

It’s why I’ll write leaflets and knock on doors more intensely than I’ve ever done before in the Euro 2010 elections, when a holocaust denier called Griffin will be up against a decent person, Theresa Griffin.

It’s why any placard I’ll design will have the words ‘Defend our way of life: stop the BNP’.  Because we must take those words back of them. 

For Churchill’s sake, even.

In Chester, four years ago before the last Euro election they came too close to winning, the BNP leafleted people coming out of the cinema from Lord of the Rings, saying that the film was about good vs. evil, and that the BNP were the good. 

Their tactics were clever. They very often are.  But they are the evil, and we - whether I call you colleague or comrade – are the light.