Though Cowards Flinch

I put off writing this because I had already got the subject out of my system, but it has returned and it’s very difficult to ignore: it is the question of multiculturalism, and more specifically what this means to anti-fascists.

Richard Seymour recently produced a blog entry about philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s attempts to critically analyse violence and provocation carried out against the Strojan family – an extended family of 31 Gypsies, 14 of them children.

Seymour’s beef is with two things: firstly the outcome of the events, which culminated in the police succumbing to pressure by violent mobs and forcing the family to leave, who, as he notes, had they not “driven the gypsies out, the racist mob would have done so with fire and blades.”

The second thing Seymour has beef about is Zizek’s poor research on the matter. Zizek has used this example to underline his own controversial view of multiculturalism (more of which in a moment) but what he has failed to do is properly understand what happened to the family. As Seymour says in a reply to critics of the aforementioned entry:

I find no evidence that the Strojan family are car thieves, and they didn’t murder anyone. It is true that locals blamed the Strojan family for a number of thefts, but it’s also true that they acknowledge when pressed that the Strojans have been scapegoated on this issue.

I’m with Seymour here; had Zizek done his homework, he would’ve seen that this is a case of scapegoating, or at best a heavy-handed response to petite-theft among some individuals of a family, perhaps spurred on because of the family’s racial background. Zizek here is not being racist, he has just erroneously placed this disgraceful event in the wrong context; by implication I feel that Zizek’s “apologia for anti-Roma racism” is due to a misjudgement by the Slovenian.

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As it happens I find Zizek’s critique of multiculturalism very useful (which is why one can agree with Seymour on this issue, and still be in defence of Slavoj Zizek, so to speak). I will attempt to place it in its correct context.

Multiculturalism, according to Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy, has come to be defined as a policy promoting diversity among a society of people with fixed identities, partly as a reaction to inharmonious feeling at a time of increased immigration into the UK. For Malik this has simultaneously become the problem and solution to intolerance. While it rather nobly aims to celebrate difference, it also rather crudely pigeon-holes people, on account of their racial or national heritage.

In trying to effect “respect for pluralism [and] avowal of identity politics” – which have come to be “hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook” – segregation has simply become institutionalised.

As a consequence to the respect agenda, all cultures have become of equal value, which may mean that in purely multicultural terms everything is permissible if it can be justified on the grounds of cultural heritage – which leads to the question who can authoritatively account for what a cultural trait is (for Malik, such policies in the eighties served only to strengthen conservative Muslim leaders in Birmingham, on the daft assumption that they alone could authoritatively account for what Islam is).

For Zizek, there is a bourgeois liberal variant of multiculturalism that is repulsed by (far) right wing populism of the Other (the immigrant for example) to the extent that it starts to fetishise the Other. Not content with opposing all racism directed at this Other, it starts to think the Other can do no wrong. Take as an example the song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” often sung by Julius Malema, President of the African National Congress Youth League; the real anti-racist would oppose this song in spite of its historical context, for whatever the white farmers’ crimes during the apartheid, this is a song that is derogatory towards a race. The bourgeois liberal fetishist, of the ilk to which Zizek refers, may justify singing the song on the grounds that such retaliation is historically justified (you could perhaps ascribe to this the notion of “white guilt”).

For Zizek, the bourgeois liberal justifying Malema singing the song is akin to expressing the belief that Melama knows no better, leading Zizek to assert that certain modes of politically correct tolerance of the Other is grounded upon the belief that certain groups can be judged differently (which is why the BNP for example are wrong for being racist populists, but Malema is clear on the grounds that he has experienced racism himself). This ends up being monoculturalism based upon a rather stereotypical ideal of how the Other should act – the point being that the bourgeois liberal, for Zizek, is deluding himself by thinking he is a mutliculturalist, since it is almost a colonial understanding of the foreign Other who he is identifying.

In short, this notion of multiculturalism masks a racist idea of the Other who needs to be “tolerated” (for more on this see Naadir Jeewa’s excellent analysis).

The confusion here lies in who we identify as this bourgeois liberal, naïve apologist? For many people who subscribe to multiculturalism this simply doesn’t resonate. For me, Zizek’s analysis is less a critique of multiculturalism, and more a critique of naïve, neo-colonial monoculturalism (which I assume he is well aware of, though if not, we ought to understand that the bourgeois liberal variant of multiculturalism is not necessarily inherent to multiculturalism proper). But maybe the word multiculturalism lends itself too easily to the idea that cultural relativism is appropriate– since we’re immediately in a struggle to identify what we can call culture (authority on which, as Malik explains, can often fall into the wrong hands).

When most people support multiculturalism, what they mean is that a country ought not to have a dominant national character immigrants are obliged to adopt as a guarantee of their debt to their new homeland. Instead a country should allow all to practice what they wish, as they wish, provided that it doesn’t harm anyone. Perhaps I’ll adopt the term socialist universalism?

Recently Paul (Mr Cotterill to you), in the comments thread to a post of mine on conservatism and epistemic closure, said that I’d probably at some stage detail some of my thoughts on the tea party movement. That’s what I am going to do now, albeit exploring another narrative simultaneously; that of black conservatism.

Unsurprisingly, some of the sentiments and placards that stand out from the tea party movement concern Obama’s race, nationality, religious background and myths about socialistic politics – all very low politics.

Some of the intellectual backbone of the movement is provided by such media personalities as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – who the charge “epistemic closure” had originally been levelled at by Julian Sanchez. It remains almost impossible to separate the politics of conservative epistemic closure from the tea party movement therefore.

Another thing that springs to mind is Pastor Jones and the Koran burning, and the protests over Ground Zero Mosque, which drew support from that most disturbing blogger and tea partier Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs.

There are 61 posts on the above blog which are categorised as Obama’s Birth Certificate Forgery – which should tell you something about the content which appears there. Indeed, the tea party has become inseparable from ad hominem attack of Obama’s nationality, evoking criticisms that at the heart of the movement is racism. Further still, reports have emerged that the English Defence League are forging links with the tea party movement, which will add much fuel to the fire of such criticisms.

But it is of little surprise to me that certain black commentators have come out to deny the movement as ultimately a racist one. The Telegraph had an article on Saturday profiling Tom Scott – who will be the first black Republican congressman from the deep south in more than a century. In it, they quote him as saying, of the tea party movement, “this whole race issue is a diversion away from the real basic platform of the Tea Party”.

The Guardian has started to host a blog by a man called Lloyd Marcus, who is referred to on his homepage as a “Tea Party singer/songwriter, entertainer and speaker” as well as being a “black conservative”.

In a blog entry published last Friday entitled “Why I am a black tea party patriot opposed to Barack Obama” – a really terrible piece – he ends by saying:

…when I hear politicians, such as Barack Obama, pandering to the so-called poor of America, it turns my stomach. I’ve witnessed the deterioration of the human spirit, wasted lives and suffering that happens when government becomes “daddy”.

What is common to both commentators, and common to what Tom Scott called “the real basic platform of the Tea Party” is a dissatisfaction of high taxes and big state. Some of the patent crap about Obamacare having a death panel, uttered in lieu of research by Sarah Palin, was piss in the wind, but the movements’ opposition to universal healthcare was predicated on the idea that universal care is somehow un-American and at odds with the principle of low spending and less government.

In fact listening to some of the members of the movement who are dubious even of the Republican’s spending, views of whom Ed Pilkinton of the Guardian recently had the privilege of interacting with (see video here), one gets the sense that at heart of the movement is a kind of socially conservative, economically fiscal conservative/libertarianism exploiting a low politics platform to reach the hearts and minds of Obama-sceptics.

Therefore I should just clarify, that simply because the movement has black members, this in itself does not prove critics wrong about race – I’m not that stupid – but that there is a little more to the tea party than that – and in fact it hasn’t phased me at all that the movement appeals to black people.

In fact, it rather reminds me of an analysis of black conservatism by the US philosopher and academic Cornel West – whose voice rose once again in light of Obama’s presidency, after saying he wanted him to be a “progressive Lincoln” so that West can be the “Frederick Douglass to put pressure on him.”

It was the opinion of West, in his 1994 book Race Matters, that black conservatism gained much traction, among other things, as a response to a crisis in black liberalism. Black conservatives, for West, seemed inclined to support freedom movements abroad – Europe, Latin America, East Asia – but were disinclined to support the freedom movement in America.

Black conservatives according to West were rather scornful of affirmative action measures, but it is his contention that the well-heeled, middle class black American conservatives were actually biting the hand which fed them. 40 years ago, he stated, 50% of black teenagers in the US had agricultural jobs, 70% of those lived in the South, many jobs disappeared due to measures curbing industrialisation, and in 1980 15% of all black men reported no yearly earnings at all to the Census Bureau while the US army at the time was almost a third black.

In the same breath as questioning why black conservatives couldn’t see the obvious racial disparity in equality of opportunity, West also pours scorn on black liberalism limiting itself to in-fighting and petite squabbling, taking its eye off of the real crisis.

West contends that many viewed black liberalism as inadequate and black conservativism unacceptable, that is until black conservatism began to appeal to a classical liberalism in what West defines as a “post-liberal society and post-modern culture”.

Such a move is not alien to us in the UK; indeed listen to any Tory cabinet minister admit at the moment how the Conservatives are more radically liberal and supportive of the poor than Labour were.

The parallels in what West is saying and the sentiments of contemporary black conservatives and members of the tea party are that not only does Obama purposefully play down his white heritage, but that he is setting back the plight of blacks in society because of it; he represents a failure in black liberal leadership (or, in the words of Timothy Johnson, co-founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group that helps promote black Republican candidates, “His mother was white, his father was a person of colour but every time there’s a racial issue he plays the race card just the same as everyone else.”)

I don’t share this sentiment, but all it takes is the perception that Obama is setting black politics back, and thus arises the crisis of black leadership similar to one diagnosed by Cornel West.

In conclusion to this blog entry, which admittedly took many deviations, I will say that the tea party is marred by a pretty low level of epistemically closed politics, but that stripped down it is a PR-savvy version of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. In the process of its becoming in US politics, it will be a haven for many black people who feel, as Timothy Johnson does, that Obama is doing a disservice to black politics; this may well see a resurgence of black conservatism similar to that assessed by Cornel West – and through the same conditions too. It is incumbent upon Obama to take heed of this possibility, and counter the tactics of the tea party, not because it is racist, but precisely because it is opening itself to Obamasceptics of all stripes.

I am happy to inform readers of TCF that this blog has a new fan, and I must say it did come as a surprise. His name is Bob Bailey, he is a fairly high-ranking member of the British National Party.

In fact he took a shine to me in particular – though I suspect he is confusing me with Dave, as he does refer to the blog as though it has only one author. He says of my “25 things…” meme that “It makes interesting reading and importantly for Nationalists it gives an insight into the mindset of some of our more thoughtful opposition.”

Oh it made me proud to learn I was an example of the BNP’s thoughtful opposition – after I had demonstrated my early political life as an anti-fascist activist in London and the South East, I have of course crossed Mr Bailey’s path.

You can take a look yourself here: [http://www.londonpatriot.org/2010/09/21/though-cowards-flinch-analysis-of-a-marxisttrotlabour-member/] – remember no hyperlinks, a link would make me feel all dirty.

For anyone who follows the movements of the BNP in London and the South East will almost certainly have heard his name.

Some of the stories that have made the news are well worth repeating here.

The famous one was Bailey’s involvement in a fight with some youths, while canvassing in romford. This made national news, the video of which is below.

Bailey is married to a German diplomat Martina Borgfeldt (who is pictured here, and is listed as Mrs Martina Borgfeldt Assistant Attaché here). It is reported that he receives immunity “as the family member of an envoy, though this is limited by the fact that he remains a British citizen” and that though he “gives his main home as an address in Barking and Dagenham, [he] lives in embassy-funded accommodation in west London with his wife and two children.

Him and his party are reported to have used Margaret Hodge’s maiden name, Oppenheimer, on the doorstep during the election campaign in May this year, though Bailey denied this to a journalist. But, perhaps worse, Bailey on the same website as the one he talks about me on, he referred to Hodge as “Margaret (the Egyptian) Hodge”.

[http://www.londonpatriot.org/2010/03/03/independent-group-formed-to-contest-elections-in-barking-dagenham/]

This at worst is anti-Semitic, since it is well known that Hodge’s parents were refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria. At best – and it is a loose use of the word best – it is making Hodge out to be a no good foreigner, trying to take BNP memebers’ jobs in East London. Indeed, Bailey calls Hodge a foreigner in the article pictured above.

It does seem rather hypocritical to play on the maiden name of Hodge, and use this to try and prove that “Labour is a party of foreigners, bought and paid for by foreigners, to rule over the British people” as Bailey does. Particularly when his wife’s name is Martina Borgfeldt. If they really had a good case, why appeal to such cheap politics.

Another story you might remember is Bob blaming a conspiracy against “the indigenous people of this country” after he was banned from driving for 18 months.

He is quoted as saying: “Well, I spent 14 years in the Marines and spent a good part of this working with the security forces and I know how the system operates.” Obviously not well enough to know one has to keep schtum with such information, otherwise all us other donuts find out don’t we.

Perhaps you remember Bailey’s tirade against non-white Christians? This is London reported:

Bob Bailey, 44, took an “antagonistic and offensive” tone when a black pastor applied for planning permission to convert Barking offices into a church.

A meeting in Barking town hall was in uproar when Mr Bailey said: “We don’t want any more Nigerian churches in the borough.” The public gallery was packed with members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

He said he had visited the premises and told the planning committee meeting last July: “These people eat off the ground.” He added: “We don’t want the amount of black children.” A rival councillor called him a “racist pig”.

Or maybe you heard about Bailey confusing the BNP with B&B?

the BNP’s top man in London, [called] the BBC London newsdesk on Monday about a story he insisted the programme was running about alleged homophobia. It concerned, he said, two gay people apparently thrown out of the party. “We know you’re running it, and we want a right to reply,” he told a bemused researcher. He would not be denied. And so she checked with her colleagues, each of them more puzzled than the next, until the answer became apparent. BBC London was indeed doing a story about alleged homophobia, she explained to him, but in a B&B, not the BNP. “Oh! We made a mistake. We’re not paranoid or anything,” said Bailey. Which, in its own way, says it all.

If not, you may have heard that Bailey once said ‘white British people will be extinguished like the American Indians’ within four decades. Interesting that he focuses on the American Indians. Now that he is no longer London’s regional organiser for his party, he has time to run that campaign against the American Friends of the BNP, who are all white, and surely anti-ethno-nationalists, right?

Remember that ironically titled article by Yasmin Alibhai Brown called God bless the foreigners willing to do our dirty work where she mourned the exploitation, often unregulated and often un-unionised work that people from abroad have to suffer. The one where she castigated the managerial class for embracing the free movement of labour as a way of driving down wages, and enjoyed the lack of laws relating to temp workers so hours can be longer and wages minimal? No?

I guess that is not what she meant when she penned the following:

Two fit white British men loiter outside my local bank. They beg. I asked if they wanted to clear out my back garden for a fair wage. They said I was one crazy lady. Polish Andrew did the job cheerfully and efficiently. God bless bloody foreigners who do our dirty work and are then damned by an ungrateful, obtuse nation.

If this is the voice of someone left wing or progressive (that, among other things; self-described of course) then I’ll get my coat. But left wing this is not.

Brown has made quite a name for herself as being someone who derides the “lazy” – demonstrating, not simply a lack of knowledge in the writing of Paul Lafargue (won’t blame her for that), but as one who forgets the golden rule against using dangerous generalisations and sweeping statements unable to be substantiated upon.  

Eagle-eyed Reuben, over at TTE, noticed this as well. He says:

While Yasmin says she knows a number of lazy immigrants, she observes “most of us immigrants feel insecure and vulnerable and can never take anything for granted. The survival instinct makes us push the work ethic into our kids.”

The point Reuben goes on to elaborate is immigrants should not have to work for nothing, or next to nothing, which can quite often be their option, and points out that if this “ethic” is to substantiated, it is not necessarily the most rewarding in a society predicated so fixedly on exploiter and exploited (similar to the conclusion made by Lafargue in fact).

I want to go further; I’m happy for Brown to say this instinct is present in people who have felt vulnerable, but in context with other comments she has made about  who she might refer to as lazy white British men, what results is excluding the white working class from being either “insecure” or “vulnerable” – which of course is baseless.

Read again, with knowledge of other things she has said about those who do not work; is insecurity and vulnerability necessary elements to a good work ethic, and if so, does that mean people who do not work are not “insecure” or “vulnerable” enough?

I might forward this reasoning to the caricature bourgeois, suburban liberal middle class comments awards taking place at an as-yet-unnamed venue.

Her latest offering, at first glance on the subject of how Taliban values are entering Muslim children in the UK, turns out to do with middle class Muslim attitudes to rogue British children in state schools.

She “interviews” a representative sample:

Samad Hussein, who runs a corner shop near my home, speaks for many when he says: ‘When I first came to England, it was a nice country – polite, respectful.

‘People knew good behaviour. My older children had English friends, no problem.

‘Now these girls, nearly naked in the roads, drinking and swearing, sex everywhere. I can’t let my young daughters be like that.

‘So I send them to Muslim schools. I don’t want to, but it is bad out there.’

What I detect in Brown’s attitude is, not sympathy with the difficulty in juggling progressive values with wanting to ensure ones child(ren) receives a good education, one which they have a right to, but rather a moral superiority very few of us on the left would ever wish to promote positively.

So for the next five posts I am going to discuss the Labour Leadership race, by discussing each candidate in turn. This week I am going to start off with whom I personally believe to be the most controversial candidate of the whole leadership battle.

Prior to the beginning of the Leadership race, I must admit that I had never heard of Diane Abbott. The only candidate that I had heard of was David Miliband, due to the obsessed love for him by an old school friend. I have to admit that I was in support of Miliband, due to my political naivety and the only one I knew about but decided to check out the other candidates and this saga of posts will help me to come to a comprehensive decision before September comes around.

Diane Abbott, the only female and black women to have entered the race, was elected to the House of Commons in 1987 for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington as the first black women to become an MP. Now in 2010, she has been in Parliament for over 23 years and is being called the ‘token’ candidate? As a fellow blogger stated, ‘… tokenism is often the way that otherwise insuperable barriers of discrimination are overcome’, calling Abbott a ‘token’ candidate seems slightly unfair seeing as Diane has been in Parliament and worked her way up the Labour party. Is this not due to her not being a New Labour Minister or does it go deeper to the idea that she is a women and comes from an ethnic background?

Really it comes down to a balance of the two; Abbott has not had as much limelight exposure as say David Miliband; unless you are an avid fan of This Week then of course you will know about Diane and her antics on the sofa with Michael Portillo. She was an avid challenger of the New Labour movement, and was a figure of the left of the party but this has all been undermined by her decision to send her son, James, to City of London School, where the fee is £10,000 a term.  As she has admitted, calling her son’s education ‘intellectually indefensible’, this goes against her socialist and left leaning politics. For someone who targeted members of her own party (Harriet Harman and Tony Blair) for sending their children to selective schools, it seems a bit hypocritical.

What made the issue worse for many right-wingers was her comment trying to defend her actions, that ‘West Indian mothers would go to the wall for their children.’

This has caused a ripple effect within the Labour party and the right, especially those from white communities who are aggrieved at the suggestion that they wouldn’t do whatever was good for their children, whatever the personal cost. Such sentiments miss the point. I don’t think this was what Diane was trying to get at; she was just making a statement about a particular cultural view of motherhood, though it may give an opportunity to attack her.

I wonder how this would have gone down had Andy Burnham said something similar about his kids?

Tensions always arise when someone mentions the race card. I am not a fan of the race card, but I do take a guilty pleasure and use the ‘mixed race bombshell’ every once in awhile when around a racist, but shouldn’t we flip it on its head and think about how everyone else who calls her a token candidate is also using the race card in some way?

Next Week: David Miliband

Ham-fisted as ever, both John Reid and the Daily Mail have eagerly jumped on the dilemma that any government needing votes from the regional parties – SNP, PC, DUP or SDLP – will likely have to give away pork barrel promises on spending or primary legislation. Both sound positively gleeful in anticipation of the Englishman’s offended national pride.

The danger, of course, is that whether or not any of this is accurate, the argument that the Scots, Welsh and Irish are better off under Labour and any coalition partners is one designed to turn anger away from where it should be – all the main parties and their cuts agenda – and towards nationalist sentiments. Which is unhelpful.

Potentially this is a much more explosive form of the anti-European sentiment, encouraged by UKIP, the BNP and others that if Britain was basically left to its own devices – without paying any money to the EU – we’d all be a whole lot better off. Now the argument is, if we didn’t have Labour paying extra money to Scotland, we’d be better off.

In reality, the alternative is a Conservative government. Though it would likely tackle the devolved governments on their budgets, it would also make things rather difficult for the average English person. Yet the narrative of English national pride could be invoked to distract from this situation; a phenomenon we’ve seen before, ably assisted by the media.

Such an approach would make things difficult for the Liberal Democrats to enter into coalition with the Conservatives. Yet Labour cuts are going to produce a backlash all of their own, and without the various national paranoias that the Right can take advantage of, that it’s all a conspiracy all directed against YOU by THEM, the result will be electoral defeat.

People will not simply accept that their job must go, without any sort of safety need to transition them into a new one. They will not simply accept the reneging of the State upon its duties to provide free healthcare and so on. And why should they? They fulfilled their part of the bargain; they turned up to work every day and worked hard.

They turned up to vote, and voted. And even had they voted for a Conservative government (if one assumes that this is the default view of those who represent the market), they would be in the same situation. For the average person, whatever they look, they lose – and there’s no reason they should accept that while decision makers and those who made billions over thirty years of financial markets should get off scot-free.

Anger results. Either it finds expression in a class-based response to the government, or, having failed to stop the government, it finds expression against other people, who are often in exactly the same position. There’ll inevitably be continuing anger at the ‘Westminster’ or ‘liberal’ elites, and this could be supplemented by national chauvinism, directed at other parts of the United Kingdom populace, or directed at more obvious ‘foreigners’.

These are the fires that the Daily Mail and people like John Reid are feeding with their rhetoric.

Rud eile: did anyone notice David Blunkett, man sacked for corruption, talk about the Lib-Dems acting like harlots? That gave me a chuckle.

Have you heard the one about Nick Griffin, former Lib Dem MP Alex Carlile and a conviction for incitement to racial hatred?

If not, you will before the General Election’s out. Over and over again.

The recently launched anti-fascist media organisation Expose the BNP is aiming to lay bare the real intentions of the BNP and halt the normalisation process in the media whereby the BNP are treated as an ordinary political party.

The campaign argues that media workers have a special role to play in challenging the representatives of the far right when they are granted column inches or air time.

In some ways I sympathise with this argument, journalists are often poorly briefed on the BNP and there have been a few instances in recent months where the BNP and the far right in general have had an easy ride.

The two obvious examples that come to mind are the fiasco with Mark Collett being interviewed as the ordinary man in the street on Radio 1 and Channel 4′s ‘Young, Angry and White’ where the youth organiser of the National Front was presented as some misguided, troubled young man.

However, I have serious reservations about the underlying assumptions of this campaign. A failure to understand the way the BNP is gaining support and the impact this has on the process of normalisation and overestimating the ability of the media to influence BNP support will limit it’s effectiveness.

Firstly and most importantly, I think the campaign has got things the wrong way round. Favourable press coverage is a consequence of the growing normalisation of the BNP not a major contributing factor.

For understandable reasons fascist groups in Britain have generally got a pretty bad press since the outbreak of the Second World War. The BNP is no exception to this and hostile press coverage towards them has become a regular feature at election times.

Nevertheless, many fascist groups have used the press to win recruits and spread their ideas, either through the shock value of the ideas they espouse or taking advantage of journalists’ naivety about what they really represented. Combat 18 quickly learnt the value of the former approach in the 1990′s while the nice, moderate patriots of the National Democrats (who weren’t the old NF, honest) tried the latter at roughly the same time.

In this fascinating personal account of life in the National Front and the New National Front (the forerunner of the BNP) a former organiser describes how he combined both methods to generate large amounts of publicty for a march in the West Midlands that, in reality, they didn’t have the numbers to pull off.

Some far right groups still try this approach, with varying levels of success. The best example of it in recent years in the English Defence League’s amazing capacity to publicity when their marches involved a dozen blokes hiding behind police near a mosque in Harrow.

The BNP, however, do not rely on the media to build support and win recruits. For some years, the party has been following the ‘ladder strategy’ of taking power. This is not to say what the media prints plays no part in this but it’s not a very important part.

First outlined by National Front activist Steve Brady in the 1980′s (whatever happened to him?) the strategy envisages taking power step by step, gaining representation on a lower rung of the power ladder before moving up to the one above it.

This is what has been happening over the last decade. The BNP won its first county councillor last year in Burnley, where the party first made a breakthrough in 2002, and representation in the European Parliament after a decade of standing in local elections all across Yorkshire and the North-West.

This is the process of normalisation at work as the BNP become a familiar part of the electoral process for millions of ordinary voters through grassroots political work. They have achieved this in the face of the approach favoured by ‘Expose the BNP’. Formerly hostile press coverage is changing because people unfortunately increasingly regard the BNP as a legitimate part of the political process.

Without wanting to labour the point, it’s not because of overly favourable coverage from The Sentinel or the Barking and Dagenham Recorder that Stoke or parts of East London have become electoral strongholds for the BNP.

I think the best illustation of this argument is this article about the work of BNP councillors in South Oxhey (where the BNP had county councillor elected after first having representatives elected to Three Rivers district council):

TWO councillors from the far right British National Party (BNP) were entertained by a newly-formed community rugby club in South Oxhey yesterday.

The South Oxhey Rugby Club Exiles invited county councillor Deidre Gates, and Three Rivers district councillor Seamus Dunne, to share their post match drinks, and a game pie cooked in their honour at The Dick Whittington pub in Prestwick Road.

Mat Sharpe, who got the club off the ground at the start of the season in September, said: “If it had not been for the help given by these councillors, our club could not exist…

“South Oxhey is an area of high deprivation, and although there are five football clubs there isn’t much else for people to do for physical exercise.”

Anticipating criticism for accepting the BNP’s help – refused by the South Oxhey Community Choir – he said: “I am not interested in politics, but I know this club is a good thing for the community and I need help from wherever I can get it.

I’d be interested in seeing what supporters ‘Expose the BNP’ think would have been an appropriate response to this or what can be done about it. A rapid press release drawing attention to the convictions of a councillor in Burnley for football related violence? A link to the Youtube video of Nick Griffin spouting offensive bile on the Cook Report in 1997?

The second problem with the strategy of Expose the BNP is a shorter and more glaring one: what they are offering is nothing new.

We’ve been here before. The run up to last year’s European elections saw a huge campaign in the press and negative stories about the BNP making a regular appearance, particularly in papers like the Manchester Evening News. As Searchlight’s Nick Lowles notes anti-BNP stories were placed in the national press on a daily basis in the run up to the poll.

Whatever reason people attribute to Griffin and Brons election to the European Parliament, favourable press coverage was not among them.

The BNP have come to anticipate such campaigns and plan to undermine their impact. The BNP’s European election campaign last year which attempted to invoke the Battle of Britain, with the use of Spitfires, posthumously recruiting Churchill and plagiarising his speeches, was designed to wrong-foot opponents pinning the Nazi label on the party. Anti-fascists walked right into it because they didn’t have an alternative strategy beyond exclaiming that this was totally illegitimate because they were Nazis.

The motivations of the people behind ‘Expose the BNP’ are admirable, the results may be disappointing.

Tiger Woods, a golfer of some renown, was unfaithful to his wife and crashed his car into a tree.  You may have read about it in the newspapers.

He took some time away from golfing.  He has now decided to return, but many people consider what he has done to be despicable, and he is afraid that he will be unpopular with the golf-loving and wider public.  He is therefore pursuing a careful media strategy, which involves saying he regrets greatly what he has done in very controlled circumstances.

This is a clever strategy, because when he comes to do a more open press conference, he will , as and when asked about his behaviour off the golf course, be able to say that he has spoken about these matters in previous interviews, and is keen instead to talk about his chip shot at the 13th.

Thus, he hopes to re-integrate himself into golfing society, and that everything will become as normal as possible thereafter.

This is also the basic strategy of the BNP, and in particular their racist leader Nick Griffin.

Nick Griffin has, in the past, been very publicly dismissive of the holocaust, suggesting that it is a convenient fiction invented by, presumably, Marxists.  Or Zionists, or perhaps black people.  The details need not detain us, because what is important is that most people regard this as a wrong, even abhorrent thing, to have said.

So Nick Griffin has adopted a ‘normalisation’ strategy, akin to that of Tiger Woods.

This strategy is being unwittingly aided and abetted by some parts of the media/blogosphere, such as John Harris of the Guardian or Iain Dale of Iain Dale. 

It has also been partially aided and abetted this evening by James MacIntyre, who has written a well-meaning but confused piece on his New Statesman blog in praise of Iain Dale, and his rigorous interviewing technique.

James MacIntyre describes his general position towards the BNP as one of ‘non-engagement’, but then goes on to set out a different position, in which it is acceptable to engage with the BNP as long as it is done well and their lies are exposed.  He praises Iain Dale, therefore, for the rigour of his interview.

This, unfortunately, misses the point. 

It does not matter how well Iain Dale conducted the interview, not least because in a small magazine like Total Politics, very few people will read it. 

What does matter is that Nick Griffin, by allowing himself to be interviewed on the matters on which he is most controversial and from which he now seeks to distance himself as part of his normalisation strategy, will be in a position to say to other interviewers that he has already covered these matters fully, and would prefer to talk about other matters – perhaps about his chip shot at the 13th, but more likely about how the BNP is being victimized by Marxists.

It does not matter that Iain Dale, and indeed John Harris, are ‘fundamentally decent’ people – I do not doubt that they are.  What matters is that they, and now James MacIntyre, have assisted the BNP in their normalisation strategy.

James MacIntyre in particular, as a self-professed ‘non-engager’, needs to think through the logic of his position, and ask himself honestly why he is making these exceptions to his rule. 

Is it really all about the BNP, or is there just a little bit of a media love-in going on, where he is keen to show how open-minded and noble he is, noble enough even to praise one who has apparently crossed him previously.

More importantly, he needs to look at what ‘no platform’ or ‘no engagement’ means in the real world, where one small, awkward platform leads to another bigger, more comfortable one.

The racists at the BNP are clever as well as evil, and we need to be as clever back.

Today at TCF we will mostly be exposing attempts of authorities to justify odious policy choices with the aid of completely ridiculous arguments.

First, there was Dave setting out how the US policy on gay people in service is ‘justified’ by the argument that the end of the cold war meant the Dutch army allowed gays into their ranks, and this meant they became no good at fighting. 

Problem is, as Dave points out, he’s factually wrong as well as stupid.

And now here’s Home Office Minister Meg Hillier justifying her decision to imprison children on the basis that she’s really protecting them:

[W]ith children being detained I’m faced with a number of options.

One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying say if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported and I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route

(Daily Politics, BBC 19 March 2010.)

I can’t improve on the End Child Detention Now blog’s caustic commentary on this nonsense:

Hillier’s comment was clearly intended to create the impression that either:

a) destitute single asylum seekers would place orders for small children to be trafficked half way across the world by criminal gangs with forged identity papers (and no doubt matching the false ‘parents’ DNA and blood group;

or

b) they would somehow borrow or adopt children who had already been trafficked into the country (with neatly forged ID documents etc) for, as Meg said, a ‘high price’, the minute some empty-headed government decided to follow the soft-hearted Swedes, Australians and Canadians in not locking up children in detention centres.

Because of course these governments foolishly gave into the pro-children/pro-human rights lobby, and we all know there are containers full of trafficked children just waiting to be delivered to failed asylum seekers for large sums of money in Toronto, Sydney and Stockholm!

Quite simply, this is a ridiculous statement from Meg Hillier. 

It’s so far from a being a sensible justification that you almost have to admire the gall in coming up with it.  

When I set out in a previous post how wrong the government was to lock up children, I assumed any defence she might make of it might be on the grounds that the care afforded to children outside prison was even worse than in prison.

That would have been wrong-headed enough, but this justification defies belief.

(The above piece was written before I saw this similar piece at Open Democracy by Clare Sambrook of  End Child Detention Now.)

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.