Though Cowards Flinch

Although it is uncouth for a political blogger to say so, I admit the argument over the voting system has failed to get me too excited, though sometimes someone will turn out something that’ll perk my ears up on the subject.

Take Andrew Rawnsley recently for example, when he noted:

The prime minister must also be asking himself how exactly he would justify opposing this reform. He could claim that AV is a little more likely to produce indecisive, weak coalitions. That was his argument during the election campaign. But there’s a bit of problem with that now, isn’t there? The self-same David Cameron is king of a coalition which he hails as strong and resolute. Lovers of political paradox are going to be in heaven.

The most important thing for Cameron before the 2015 election – taking for granted that the coalition government will last this long, which it will – is running an effective campaign for the Tories as a separate party to the Liberal Democrats. By this time the country will probably have an existing AV system, and it will be interesting to see whether Cameron campaigns on the anti-AV ticket as he did before, or as an AV convert – which apparently Tories ought not be worried about anyway, since, according to one law scholar, it will apparently:

be likely to win the second preference votes of most UKIP voters, a large slice of the Liberal Democrat vote and a surprisingly large number of green voters. AV may well be one of the pillars of 21st Century Conservative political success

There is another thing I identify in the debate that drives me to frustration, and that’s the concern the BNP will gain as a consequence of AV.

One Professor Ted Cantle, who is the executive chair of Coventry University’s Institute of Community Cohesion, mentions that “In 2001 the BNP picked up 47,000 votes, in 2005 it had grown to 192,000. This year it was 563,000 … Under a proportional representation system the BNP would have picked up12 seats for the BNP.”

For me, proportionality is nothing without representation, and for all that the former will do for the parliamentary system, we have only known a severe lack in the latter. But the argument presented by some politicians that we should abandon the move towards proportionality on the grounds that it may benefit the far right seems like just another way to deflect responsibility for its rise in the first place.

Tory MP for Totnes Sarah Wollaston, for example:

[w]hile welcoming the chance for voters to have a say on replacing first-past-the-post Westminster elections with the Alternative Vote in a referendum to be held on May 5 next year … argued it would give “a second bite of the cherry” to minority parties such as the BNP.

Nick Clegg, whose reason for being at the moment is the AV referendum, said that if AV “were susceptible to such dangers [as the far right and extremist politics entering the mainstream as a consequence of the AV system, then] I would be as concerned as she is.”

Not a full and rigid answer by any stretch of the imagination, but even Clegg, who, one might speculate, only chose to form a government with the Tories to get this one issue through, has admitted that his concerns about it would be raised if it appeared to favour the BNP.

It is this model, of trying to ignore the BNP, that has engendered where we are with them today. They increase their support where they can convince people they offer the alternative to the mainstream parties, who have perhaps neglected them. And it is a shameful testimony of how much the BNP increased their vote under a Labour government.

But not only should we avoid putting a more proportional system into jeopardy because unpalatable parties might reap some of the benefits, we should attempt to address some of the reasons as to why the BNP are a concern in the first place; rather than trying to identify the legal mechanisms with which to utilise to keep the BNP out, all three main parties should ask themselves why so many people have felt the need to offer the BNP a vote.

From a Labour perspective, I embrace the AV system for the simple reason that Labour since Blair (in particular, though I’m aware people think it goes further back) have taken for granted the working class vote, while it has done more to pander ideologically to the well-heeled and those who benefit the most from a neo-liberal agenda.

In the knowledge that third party/protest party votes will count for more, Labour ought to feel this pinch and reorganise its agenda to return to the grassroots (though I worry about the will to do so).

Some people might argue this frees up the centre ground to a wider range of parties ( – the argument that suggests while Labour court the centre, the Tories are forced right, which in turn suppresses the UKIP vote – it’s out their believe me) but in addition to curbing those opportunistic left wing parties who inevitably will see room to manoeuvre with a more proportional system, carving up the left vote even further, it will force the party to be more appealing to those who feel, or potentially feel, disillusioned by Labour; and have acted upon that – for though we can pretend the BNP is so extreme their vote was never Labour’s vote anyway, to look at Professor Ted Cantle’s results above, it cannot be a coincidence that the increase in BNP vote has massively increased under Labour’s watch.

One indisputable bright spot for left-wingers in the recent elections has been the electoral wipeout of the British National Party.

Not only did the party fail to advance in their electoral ‘strongholds’ of East London and Stoke, where they threatened to take control of local councils, they lost virtually every council seat they were defending.

This includes all 12 in Barking & Dagenham, the ‘jewel in the crown’ according to Nick Griffin.

Despite standing candidates in a record number of parliamentary seats they didn’t come anywhere near to winning a seat anywhere in the country and lost thousands of pounds in deposits.

It’s a fantastic result and people have been celebrating accordingly. According to the Daily Mirror far right politics have been wiped out in Barking & Dagenham, UAF see it as a humiliation prompted by a wave of popular revulsion against the Nazis while this morning’s Guardian raised the question of whether this was the end of the party altogether in an article where academic Matthew Goodwin predicts they will shortly implode.

Add to this yet another bout of spectacular infighting and you could be forgiven for thinking the party’s over.

Memories of what happened to Britain’s last relatively successful fascist party encourage this line of argument. In the 1979 General Election the National Front stood a record number of candidates, overstretched themselves and in 303 seats they only chalked up 191,000 votes. Demoralisation and vicious infighting finished off the party as a functioning political organisation not long afterwards.

Unfortunately, I think the comparison’s a misleading one. For one, it was in 2005 that the BNP polled 192,000 votes. This time they polled 563,743. It’s been a week since the elections and it’s time to stop celebrating and take a sober look at the results (though anyone involved in the campaign in East London has earned the right to feel smug for months to come).

The first obvious point is that anyone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with the British far right will know that the BNP is always having bitter internal squabbles. The recent fracas between former webmaster Simon Bennett who appears to have conveniently lost the plot a few days before the General Election, suspending the website and launching into a rant about the party’s leadership (superb timing Simon), is merely the latest in the ongoing ‘fascists who think Nick Griffin is a slimy con-man’ saga that has been a regular feature of far right politics for some 25 years.

It’s worth remembering that while some of these feuds have hilarious and serious short term consequences, such as the release of their membership list for instance, the impact on support for the BNP has been marginal.

As I remarked recently:

For as long as I’ve been an active anti-fascist (which, in fairness, is not a huge amount of time!) stories about internal troubles in the BNP that could provoke its collapse and the apparently precarious position of Griffin as chairman have been written or circulated by anti-fascists indulging in a bit of wishful thinking every few months….

Griffin will remain BNP leader in the foreseeable future and it’s a safe bet that this will be accompanied by plenty of articles detailing how the party is on the verge of collapse.

Complacent anti-fascists convinced that the BNP are in danger of imploding, and bank on that accordingly, are backing a loser.

The most transparent piece of wishful thinking currently circulating as analysis is this piece from There’s Nothing British About the BNP announcing that the party has split in two so they’re taking a holiday. Job done eh?

There’s no doubt some antifascists deserve a holiday after the election though. In the run up to the election there was a massive mobilisation in Barking & Dagenham by Hope not Hate, UAF activists and the Labour Party. According to Nick Lowles almost 1000 people participated in their campaign delivering an incredible 250,000 leaflets in the borough. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total amount of anti-BNP literature distributed in the area topped half a million.

The Hope not Hate and UAF strategy of mobilising an anti-BNP majority, which generally means the Labour vote, at the polls seems to paid off. The Labour vote increased and BNP representation vanished. What’s there to worry about?

Firstly, this was a mobilisation in response to a specific threat (the BNP taking control of a council) and I’m not convinced this level of activity is sustainable or can be replicated. Would there be  the same amount of resources to mount a simultaneous operation like that in, say, Stoke, Barnsley, Rotherham, Nuneaton and Thurrock in a few years time? I suspect not.

It’s also worth noting that the BNP vote in Barking & Dagenham did not collapse in any meaningful way. If we compare the 2006 results with the 2010 results it’s evident that at best it dropped slightly in numerical terms but mostly remained stable. That’s worrying. Glyn Rhys puts it better than I can to describe why:

What does this now mean in terms of those who, after all the leafleting, after all the door knocking, after all the arguments that the BNP are a fascist party, still voted for the BNP in Barking & Dagenham. Are we to now believe that these voters are all fascists?

There is a very real risk that by not providing any alternative and by continually marginalising those who will not tolerate the likes of Hodge, we actually push those who would vote BNP as a protest into actually identifying with the BNP and starting to think fascism is an answer.

Hopefully, Griffin won’t realise this and will stick to his promise to abandon East London because of demographic changes.

It’s wasn’t only the BNP who posted results in the local elections ranging from disappointing to humiliating. Respect lost almost all their local councillors as did the Socialist Party while the Greens polled votes that, in any other year, would have won them a number of new council seats across the country. Instead, they lost nine seats.

Is this a wave of popular revulsion against minority parties?

In fact, what happened in the council seats the BNP were defending was part of a broader trend in the local elections, a huge swing towards Labour that swamped all the minor parties.

In the General Election, the BNP vote held up better than most other minor parties such as the Greens. In a tight election in which the vote for minor parties was squeezed the BNP stood roughly three times as many candidates 2005 and got roughly three times the vote. Although gratifyingly the BNP has lost a large amount of in deposits in around 200 parliamentary seats the BNP vote was around 4%. A slight increase in the BNP vote brings them into the territory where they can stand in a large number of seats and save their deposit across large swathes of the country.

This election is a setback for the BNP. By wiping out many of the gains they’ve made it’s reset the clock for the party. However, the same factors that have been generating their support will continue to operate and it would take another huge swing to Labour in a few years time to eradicate their progress.

The BNP were defeated by a Labour recovery and the first past the post electoral system. Since the new coalition government has signalled willingness to countenanace some kind of electoral reform I wouldn’t count on either of these remaining a feature of the political landscape in the near future and if we ditch first past the post then the task of mobilising an ‘anti-BNP majority’ becomes near impossible. Working out an alternative to this strategy will soon be crucially important.

Update: The IWCA analysis of the BNP’s General Election performance is spot on.

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.

The yolks on him?

Lancaster Unity reports that the governing body of Cambridge University (presumably, like at Oxford, a congress of all fellows) has voted by 64% to strip Nick Griffin of his 2:2 degree from the university. All that is required is the agreement of the Vice-Chancellor. Should we support this move?

Students seem to support it, with Griffin being voted “worst graduate ever”. It does strike a blow at Griffin’s mainstream credibility, though the immediate response of the press will likely be to go and interview him about his psychic pain. From the perspective of publicity, therefore, this move is probably a boon to Griffin.

Similarly, how many of the C2DE social group that comprises a huge chunk of Griffin’s support really give that much credence to Cambridge University?

I’ve always argued that it’s easy to underestimate the standing that learning has amongst people who have little themselves. There is respect for Oxford and Cambridge; the inverse snobbery of “you and your fancy degree” is less common than you’d think, though I’ve never tried to insert myself into a management position as a result of my degrees.

Yet both are still pillars of the Establishment, and with commonly-held disgust over the actions of British politicians and ‘them in charge’ generally, a move by Cambridge against Griffin is likely just to make him seem willing to defy whatever multicultural elite the conspiracy fantasists of the BNP choose to blame.

It makes him seem persecuted, which is a well-trodden narrative for the far-right. Having glanced over at Stormfront, the usual sociopathic bilge is on display in response: it’s “anti-white racism”, it’s a communist conspiracy and so on.

Tactically, the whole thing is probably a non-event, though it’s good to know where Cambridge academics are at. Academics should be activists, whatever their field. Maybe next time it would be nice to see them do something productive, rather than moan about Griffin to themselves. What about the principle?

Even allowing that the governing body of today is different from what it was in the 1970s, it’s a bit strange that the university votes to remove Griffin’s degree but had no problem with his founding the Young National Front Students. Or representing the University as a Boxing Blue. Is this to be stripped from him as well?

Cambridge students and townsfolk, unlike at the Other Place, have managed to stop Griffin appearing at the Cambridge Union, which is admirable. Yet I didn’t notice much full-throated opposition from the Cambridge governing body. Removing his degree seems like settling for the least academics can possibly do, which isn’t good enough.

There’s also the problem of precedent: having removed a degree from someone for political reasons, it makes the threshold necessarily that bit lower for the next attempt. This politicisation of university degrees is not to be applauded; people rely on their degrees for their livelihoods and even fascists have to work.

Awarding honorary degrees is an intensely political affair, and should probably be got rid of. It’s a procedure that stinks of patronage, and stinks all the more so due to the College system at Cambridge and Oxford, where I was once informed that I should vote for the Conservatives as Cameron was a good Brasenose (my college) lad.

Yet Griffin’s degree is not honorary. Presumably he showed enough merit to earn his 2:2. It’s not a commentary on the feasibility of his politics. It’s awarding should not become such a commentary, nor should it become a commentary on anyone else.

I am a supporter of the No Platform policy. It is my belief that communities can and should act to deny fascists the right to use community resources to spread their propaganda and wingnut lunacy.

Whether that community is an academic one, a geographical one or a media one is irrelevant. Collective solidarity demands that we act with colleagues and neighbours to determine how we want communal pools of money, or communal buildings to be used.

This is not what is at issue with the matter of Nick Griffin’s degree, for all his odious scumbaggery.

Protest march in 2009, taken by Sarah Wrack

Today in Barking, Youth Fight for Jobs organised a march to call on the government to provide jobs, to stop the cuts that would see £500 million slashed from the civil service and its pension fund, and to oppose the BNP’s racist message, which interferes with real solidarity and a fightback.

YFJ is largely supported by the Socialist Party, so a lot of the people on the march were from the SP. However, there was a lively contingent of about thirty from the Day-Mer community group, including families. The NUT branches of Waltham Forest and Lewisham also sent along contingents to the march.

In the event, the march was lively, receiving a warm welcome – including from a Unite Against Fascism stall outside Barking Tube station. The march attracted a lot of interest. While we passed, leaflets were distributed to all bystanders about meetings in Barking in support of a ‘national day of action’ on Thursday 18th of March, protesting cuts inflicted on higher education and other sectors.

Impetus and awareness will have been built by this march, which takes place in a key area. Nick Griffin will be standing in Barking at the next election, and with the unpopularity of the Labour government, Labour MP Margaret Hodge will be in for a four way fight between the Lib-Dems, Tories and the BNP.

None of this is helped by the fact that Hodge herself is not above making incendiary comments about immigrants.

Such an attitude is likely only to generate support for the sentiments the BNP thrive on. It certainly won’t act to build a concerted movement capable of showing workers there are better ways to demand housing and oppose cuts, and explaining, while at it, that the BNP are racist cowards who vote for the same cuts as Labour, Tories and the Lib-Dems.

The third function of the march was to bolster the spirits of the people who attended.

A dose of high spirits was heartening in a week where PCS were on strike, due to cuts announced by the government. The RMT signallers have balloted for strike. We’ve seen BA pilots commit to seven days of industrial action, and British Airways admitting that they want to break the strength of Unite, the union which represents their pilots.

Cars beeping and people giving the thumbs-up sign out of their car windows was encouraging. Even when people were initially hostile, having received leaflets and been informed that the march wasn’t anti-immigrant, stiff debate got across our point about the need to fight for public services and welfare, and to stand together with immigrant communities to do it. People didn’t always agree, but it was obvious we’d got them thinking.

Our attitude was summed up in the speech, after the march, by one of the Day-Mer marchers – that we needed solidarity, that each colour or nationality or race fighting for what it could get would only make it easier for the government to cut spending in the areas that need it most, the areas with least political clout.

In-fighting amongst workers would make it easier for bosses to hire cheaper staff and fight unions. It would make it easier for crime to drive a wedge between people instead of inspiring solidarity in neighbourhoods.

The key work is still to be done in Barking, but I was happy to lend a hand to the local activists, to get people talking about the issues that should decide the next election in Barking, and should thereafter be used to unite the labour movement to fight for key demands around jobs, housing and education.

(Paul Sagar of the Bad Conscience blog submitted this as a guest post in defence of the collective decision of this website to ask for a boycott of the Total Politics top blogs poll, should they go ahead with a Nick Griffin interview. Hyperbolic image choice is, naturally, mine – Ed).

The question of whether to boycott Total Politics magazine’s top blogs poll if it runs an interview with Nick Griffin is proving divisive. Giles is sceptical. More surprisingly, so is Sunder.

I wanted to set out why I think bloggers of the left should support the boycott.

Firstly, let me say that I am not a uniform supporter of No Platform. The world is too messy and complicated to apply one position to every circumstance. Thus, I was not opposed to Griffin appearing on TV per se but (for reasons that turned out to be off-target) to his appearing on Question Time because of that particular show’s format. With hindsight, however, the QT appearance did Griffin more harm than good. His odious personality and his cringing attempts to be loveable showed him up. Badly.

Yet a printed interview aimed at nerdy political anoraks is different. Griffin’s weakest asset is his face and his personality. He’s not TV-genic, and he doesn’t know how to behave under public scrutiny. In a magazine interview, those things don’t matter. No matter how “tough” Iain Dale’s questions, Griffin can lie and squirm around them. The crucial thing that made the QT appearance a glorious disaster was that people could see him squirming, hear his lies automatically challenged. Not so with a published interview.

But what really matters is not whether Griffin flounders on Dale’s questions or not. It’s about the long-run effect of having Griffin feature in a mainstream publication. Long after the specific questions that Dale asks are forgotten, people will remember that Griffin was interviewed by an (allegedly) respectable, mainstream publication. It will help to normalise Griffin and his party. It will encourage him to be seen as a legitimate politician with legitimate views to be considered a reasonable political option by reasonable people.

At present, the BNP is held back in huge measure because it lacks popular legitimacy. Its leader is largely seen as unpleasant and devious, the party as fascist and suspect. The BNP are still stigmatised in the eyes of the vast majority of voters. What the BNP desperately want is to break out of that, and to be seen as a reasonable political choice. That’s the only way they can move beyond the (already considerable) million people who voted for them last June, and into the political mainstream.

Sure, the BNP thrive in deprived areas on their status as underdog outsiders. That’s something we should worry about. But the solution is not to normalise them by ending their status as outsiders, making them a legitimate political choice in the eyes of the electorate! Yet by interviewing Griffin, in the long run Total Politics can only serve to normalise the BNP as a part of Britain’s political mainstream.

Now let me be clear: one thing I am not advocating is state curtailment of Total Politics’ activities. As an independent organisation, they can invite Griffin if they want to. It’s Iain Dale’s professional decision. In a democracy with freedom of press, he can interview Griffin if he wants. By the same token, those of us who oppose the legitimation of the BNP as a political force can withdraw our support for Total Politics, and do so by boycotting their poll with the hope of making it redundant, and thus hurting Total Politics.

Yet there is one final big question to ask: why does Total Politics want to interview Griffin? An obvious answer is that controversy attracts attention and shifts units. That may be all there is to it. But it’s worth noticing that the BNP are not presently a threat to the Tories – they are a threat to Labour. Traditional Labour areas – where the white working class feels abandoned, disempowered and angry – are what the BNP target. One does have to wonder if Dale would be quite so prepared to interview Griffin if the BNP leader was targeting Chelsea rather than Dagenham this spring.

As huffing and puffing seems to be what lefties are best at, in the eyes of the Right-blogosphere at least, we at Though Cowards Flinch thought it might be fun to try some.

It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party.

Before we forget, therefore, we thought we should announce that, in the event of the publication of this interview, TCF will withdraw from the annual voting process to rank the popularity of UK blogs, run by Total Politics magazine, which once we welcomed and which made itself relevant to the internet through the annual UK blogging guide (pictured).

Our withdrawal will of course be laughed off as inconsequential, and ‘exactly what you’d expect from humourless, sanctimonious Lefties’ by the people who run Total Politics, if indeed they notice it at all.

However, we do hope that an early announcement of our decision to withdraw from a process which has provided, at the very least, some light-hearted entertainment over the last couple of years, will provide other bloggers on the Left with some food for thought over whether they should participate.

This will clearly be a personal decision, and we understand that there are a multiplicity of views on the ‘no platform’ question as it relates to the BNP. It behoves us therefore to set out briefly our reasons for proposed withdrawal.

As a group of bloggers, we broadly support a ‘no platform’ stance in respect of the BNP.  This is not a call to ban the BNP, or deny their individual members’ civil liberties. A more effective approach is solidarity between anti-fascists, without recourse to the law, to make a clear statement that the BNP are beyond the pale.

Publication of an interview by Total Politics, which will be distributed to every parliamentarian, peer, political journalist and to councillors across the country, does the opposite. It is a further acquiescence to the BNP message being accepted as a normal part of British political discourse. It is not.

We also do not feel that such an interview is in keeping with the mission statement of TP, which is to be “unremittingly positive about the political process”. Lest we forget, this is a party which abuses that process. Its elected officials are amongst the laziest and most incompetent, giving the lie to their promise to help solve local problems.

Not to mention the outright thuggery of some of them.

Thus we seek solidarity amongst Left bloggers, and any bloggers writing from a different perspective but who share our views on this matter, as a way of seeking to force the hand of Total Politics into the withdrawal from publication of the planned interview.

Total Politics should be made aware that to proceed with publication it will risk, via a boycott, losing whatever legitimacy its voting process has as a measure of blog popularity , with consequent negative impact on its business.

For more information on our stance in respect of the BNP and similar fascist organisations, the following blog entries may be helpful: In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king (by Duncan),  Once more on the no platform policy (by Dave), Churchill and my dad: Why I’ll march against the BNP (by Paul) and SDL world pub tour continues (by Gordon).

Allegations by the Sunday Telegraph that there are “Islamists” at work in the Labour Party won’t come as a galloping shock to anyone who regularly reads Private Eye. That organ has contained plenty of juicy gossip about Lutfur Rahman, leader of Tower Hamlets’ council, and the goings on in that area. The Telegraph simply attempted to put a name and formal structure to the influence peddling and dodgy politics.

That name is, allegedly, the Islamic Forum of Europe. The scoop was in getting Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for the Environment, to denounce them as “entryists” and to say that they are, “completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.” Hereafter everyone will be able to talk about the process like it’s a conscious infiltration rather than part of a broader trend that requires no secret conspiracy.

Islamisn and Labour
Read through the Telegraph articles and comment pieces on the subject. This group, the IFE, have only gained ground as people “moved away from secular, Left politics”. This move shouldn’t surprise anyone; the secular Left has been caught in an impossible position between a Labour government waging war on Muslims and a Labour Party that would prefer its genuinely Left members to shut up and gormlessly pound the pavement, rather than expect to have any say on policy.

By ‘genuinely Left members’, I mean those who still hold to all the old chestnuts: redistribution, universal public services where corporations don’t turn a profit,  liberal values of free speech and civil rights and so on. The splitting of this Left across Greens, Labour, the Socialist and Socialist Workers Parties and a welter of independents, plus the crushing weight of bureaucratic power in Labour that prevents a coagulation of the Left within the Labour Party, leaves the way open for fundamentalist groups to win people to other avenues.

We’ve witnessed it with the BNP, and every time a genuine take-no-shit socialist runs against the BNP, with a sufficient campaign to back them, the BNP get hammered back. This will be much more difficult if the link between the Left and minority communities is broken by religious extremists, and in turn this will create a feedback loop that polarizes the white working class away from uniting with minorities to the good of all.

Andrew Gilligan, in his piece, compared the Islamic Forum of Europe to the Militant Tendency, a revolutionary socialist group that picked up thousands of members due to agitations against the inaction of Labour’s leaders over the Miners Strike and the other Thatcherite attacks on the working class. The irony here is that only groups like the Militant can win people back from religious extremism, because only those groups can be unambiguous and forthright in their class politics and class demands – but Labour’s leadership does its level best to kill those groups.

In the case of the Militant, this was done through expulsions – but for those who survived the Labour Party purges of the 1980s, it has continued in the bureaucratic attitudes and structures of the labour movement that sees union leaders act as New Labour backscratchers, leaves the Party NEC as a puppet for the parliamentary leadership, and leave Labour conference as a figleaf democracy.

Hypocrisy and ignorance in the Telegraph
Beyond the immediate concerns of preserving Labour’s secularism (for which the leadership’s first recourse won’t be a change in policy, to quit alienating Labour votes, it’ll be expulsions or NEC control of local selection procedures), I found the holier-than-thou attitude of the Telegraph Op Ed piece on the subject to be really quite amusing:

“If the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) was open and frank about its aims, voters would be able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to see its members in any form of government in Britain. It is part of any democratic system worthy of the name that those who abide by the rule of law are entitled to campaign in elections, even if we find their beliefs objectionable. But some members of the IFE demonstrate in private that they have an agenda that they are not willing to share with the electorate.”

Hypocrisy! Both the Labour leadership and its Tory counterparts quite happily hold off on announcing policies and plans because they might alienate voters. The Tories are especially guilty of this at the moment, with their loud claims that they can’t really say anything definite until they are in office and can see the book-keeping. Which is precisely why this “Change” guff is so all-pervasive. The Op-Ed continues:

[The IFE] would be more credible if, in public, the IFE was not presented as simply a “social welfare organisation” committed to “community cohesion” and “tolerance” – while in private, it shows itself to be committed to replacing democracy by a theocracy based on Islamic law.

This type of sentiment displays a staggering ignorance. The reason extremist organisations gain influence is precisely because of their roles as ‘social welfare organisations’ – in the absence of a State prepared to step up and fulfil its responsibilities. Has no one noticed the proliferation of extremist Christian churches in the shittiest parts of this country, with their Bible groups and focus on helping the sick, the old, mothers etc? It’s the same principle – and whilst not especially violent, can be just as antithetical to liberal secularism.

All talk of community cohesion and tolerance is to Brit politico-speak what “Freedom”, “Truth”, “Justice” etc are to US political discourse. Who the hell is going to admit to being against them? There’s a fair argument to be made that with their emphasis on nuclear family values, harsher sentencing, less redistribution and the odd slip back into anti-immigration rhetoric, the Tories aren’t exactly contributing to community cohesion and tolerance – but damned if the Telegraph spends pages arguing about that, because they agree with Tories.

Part of the problem
This rise of ethnic extremism is the precise counterpart to the continuing nationalist, xenophobic diatribes of the Waily Mail, Telegraph, Sun etc. If the conditions of the British working class are presented as being the result of mass immigration, and disenfranchisement a result of individual corruption or ‘political correctness gone mad’, then we’re pushing for the rejection of the big minority communities that form a part of the UK, and capitulation before the hysterical “cultural Christianity” of Melanie Phillips et al.

By doing so, we’re inviting others to take advantage of the resentment stoked up in both majority and minorities. And still nothing will be solved; disenfranchisement will continue, declining public services will continue. The ‘British’ far Right are interested in the same harmful privatisation and cut backs as the mainstream – they vote for them in local councils like Kirklees on a regular basis. The ethno-nationalist Right – as demonstrated across the Islamic world – is equally little interested in social welfare and the liberation of the individual.

The socialist answer – one that has an immensely powerful pull when talking to people of all races, cultures and creeds on the ground – is simple: we fight extremism and we fight the indifference of our political class by the same methods. Building the democratic organisations for a fighting working class, to secure the most basic demands; employment, housing, universal healthcare, education and public services and a government form which does not breed an unaccountable political class.

As others have noted, the recent capitulation of the BNP to the EHRC and the decision to allow non-white members changes nothing about the party (apart from giving them the opportunity to claim legal approval as a non-racist party, cheers Trevor Philips).

The fallout from the decision is also helping provide a degree of consistency to stories about the BNP in the mainstream media.

One angle of this story is a new variant on the staple of pieces on the BNP; another round of speculation that the BNP is undergoing internal turmoil, is facing a serious split, will shortly see Griffin removed as leader or expelled from the party, etc.

This time the fantasy is that BNP members are leaving in droves for the more hardline National Front as a result of the sell-out by Griffin and co:

Rise of the NF in Yorkshire

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I’ve no idea what the BBC are playing at here. The idea that the National Front is about the be rejuvenated by an exodus of hardline BNP members is laughably silly. Five minutes research on Google would reveal that the NF is not a functioning political organisation. It’s best seen as a holding pen for racist misfits and people expelled from other fascist parties for being suspected police spies or drunken incompetents.

Is this shower on the brink of winning over BNP branches across the country? No.

The evidence offered in the clip that this could take place is an interview with a former BNP organiser who is now a member of the NF and pointing the 7.4% of the vote the NF received in a by-election in Hull 13 months ago.

The latter is hardly ground-breaking success and the former would be a bit more convincing if the man in question wasn’t Steve Smith. Steve isn’t a recent departure disgusted by the sell-out who quit to join the NF. In fact, he left the BNP around seven years ago and was heavily involved in the English First Party in the intermediate period.

Deja vu

This isn’t a one off lapse in concentration. For as long as I’ve been an active anti-fascist (which, in fairness, is not a huge amount of time!) stories about internal troubles in the BNP that could provoke its collapse and the apparently precarious position of Griffin as chairman have been written or circulated by anti-fascists indulging in a bit of wishful thinking every few months.

Take this offering which appeared 11 years ago in Searchlight magazine:

NICK GRIFFIN intended the recent BNP’s Red White and Blue festival to be a celebration of his first year as leader of the party. In fact, it turned into an embarrassing public display of the crisis gripping the country’s largest fascist party.

With several leading party officers not present, the gathering was held against the background of growing animosity towards Griffin and increasingly strong-arm tactics by the leader…

The Advisory Council meeting will determine whether this schism will erupt into a party split.

If any of that sounds familiar you must be a subscriber!

These stories aren’t works of fiction though. There has been some huge internal disputes inside the BNP in recent years and the main issue in virtually all of them has been people opposed to Griffin’s position and conduct. Steve and Sharon Edward’s took the bulk of one of the party’s early growth regions (the West Midlands) with them when they left in 2001, Sharon Ebank’s tried to do the same several years later after being expelled, Griffin’s right man Tony Lecomber was caught red-handed trying to solicit the murder of establishment figures, Sadie Graham threatened to split the party and the entire organisation’s membership list was leaked online.

A focus on these events and it may seem fair to construct a narrative where the party is always on the verge of collapse, lurching from one crisis to the next. However, the end result of all this ‘turmoil’ is that the BNP is more successful now than it ever has been while Nick Griffin is still leader and facing no serious challenge.

The reasons why these internal rumblings have such little political significance beyond the short-term are simple: There is no figure on the fascist right capable of challenging Griffin’s position as BNP leader or has a credible alternative to his ideas about the necessity of moderating the party’s image and publicly stated policies. He was no serious challengers either inside the BNP or outside it.

Middle management

Most prominent BNP members are veterans of the far right and after the vicious internal struggle that destroyed the old National Front in the 1980′s (in which some of them were on opposing sides) reached the conclusion that the mainteance of unity was of paramount importance.

A long-term weakness of the BNP, and something we should be thankful for, is the failure of this existing leadership to recruit and retain a layer of competent ‘middle-management’ able to effectively organise electoral interventions without the baggage of a well documented openly extremist past or serious criminal convictions.

Either something about the existing leadership rubs these individuals up the wrong way producing destructive friction, for an example of this see the  hilarious departure of Andrew Spence – the most successful far right parliamentary candidate to date, or they are transparent opponents of the party, like Sadie ‘Shady’ Graham and her hapless boyfriend Matt Pringle, who work hard in order to reach a position where they can best destabilise things.

This process is evident at a local level as well. The main figures in Cumbria BNP are long-standing fascists. Clive Jefferson has been a member for years while both Martin Wingfield and Paul Stafford were in the NF. While these individuals remain a constant unwelcome presence the last few months has seen the departure of both Simon Nicholson, a competent new recruit was just 16 votes away from becoming the party’s first county councillor in December 2008, in unclear circumstances and the acrimonious resignation of former Carlisle organiser Alistair Barbour who has cultivated a refreshing hatred of his former colleagues.

The obvious by-product of this is that there are no figures in the party willing or able to challenge Griffin. The only ones with the profile to do it are veteran fascists who (unfortunately) know the results of a bout of infighting.

Only show in town

Another reason we have to be thankful for is that the BNP’s success in the last 10 years hasn’t been replicated by any other far right party.

The myriad of would be competitors from existing fascist or neo-Nazi groups have ably spent the last decade proving that for all the time they spend meeting in grim pubs up and down the country they couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.

This would not be much of a change from their performance in previous decades, given that it’s much the same people running these tiny groups, were it not for the glaring comparison with the BNP. Many have sunk without trace, Combat 18 being the best example, while others do little but update a website, like the fruitloops from the International Third Position.

The losers of the various disputes inside the BNP during this same period should have had better prospects for success, given that some of them like the Edwards’ and Sharon Ebanks were effective local organisers, and many did set up their own political organisations.

The fact that groups such The Freedom Party, New Nationalist Party, the England First Party and Voice of Change  are little more than short entries on Wikipedia now gives a good indication of the success they had.

The elements inside and outside the BNP opposed to him have been stripped of all political significance by the success of Griffin’s strategy. The angry mutterings (and, importantly, nothing more) that emanate from these people over the internet is a testament to the way they have been totally defeated.

The only far right organisation with even a fraction of the BNP’s profile and success is the English Defence League, which is different kettle of fish altogether.

There is little prospect of an exodus from the BNP to the National Front. Even if hardliners in the BNP are privately critical of the capitulation to the EHRC there is literally nowhere else for them to go beyond joining the ranks of disgruntled former members posting on sites like Stormfront about how they are permanently offended by all aspects of modern Britain.

Griffin will remain BNP leader in the foreseeable future and it’s a safe bet that this will be accompanied by plenty of articles detailing how the party is on the verge of collapse.

Complacent anti-fascists convinced that the BNP are in danger of imploding, and bank on that accordingly, are backing a loser.