Though Cowards Flinch

This is a guest (re-)post by Bob From Brockley.

I originally posted a version of this post last Autumn. I have asked TCF to re-post it for me (slightly edited) because I posted it at a very busy time at my blog, so it got very little debate, and I wanted to test it out away from my comfort zone. But I am asking now because I think the situation is becoming more and more critical for anti-fascists. The continued decline of the BNP is a positive but it has opened the space for the re-emergence of more emphatically Nazi sects, while its ideas and narratives have infected the political mainstream as authoritarian xenophobic politics spread beyond the fascist fringe. Meanwhile, the English Defence League has seen a continued violent rise based on a style of politics the BNP long ago abandoned, and could well form the nucleus of a new far right alignment. These changes pose the questions of militant anti-fascism more urgently than ever.

Waterloo Sunset has published a very helpful critique of Searchlight’s announcement of a brave new era for anti-fascism. Searchlight call for a re-thinking of the reality of fascism, and a step away from some of the old orthodoxies of militant anti-fascism. Like WS, I agree that there is some truth in the analysis of the changing situation put forward by Nick Lowles and Paul Meszaros, and like WS I am far from convinced of either the newness or the wisdom of the new course they chart. But I am far from sure what the right course is.

As WS points out, the aspects of the new Searchlight analysis which are correct were actually set out very clearly a decade and a half ago by London Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) in its Filling the Vacuum document, which led eventually to the self-dissolution of AFA and a turn to community politics. In short, the battle against the BNP on the streets had been won by the early 1990s, but the BNP were winning a cultural war in the communities where white working class people felt let down and abandoned by mainstream society, and in particular by the left and the Labour movement.

But, as WS also points out, the way to engage those communities is not to enter the political mainstream, or to do the Labour Party’s business and re-connect the electorate in those communities with the political machine which abandoned them. That only further sacrifices our credibility.

The way to fill the vacuum, instead, is to build the grassroots initiatives that take seriously the real concerns of such communities – especially now, in an age of rising unemployment, financial crisis and unfairly imposed austerity. (These grassroots initiatives look different in every locality. The relationship with the Labour Party, trade unions and so on will be negotiated differently depending on local circumstances. Meszaros and Lowles are right about the need for flexible, local solutions informed by local knowledge.)

Related to this is the issue of who the constituency of this sort of activity should be, something which, as WS notes, is skirted around in the Searchlight text. They talk about “the community”, “real people”, “real communities”, “ordinary people”, “real ordinary people”, “the mainstream”, “the anti-BNP voter”, “Mr and Mrs Smith”, “the public mood”. But this vagueness contrasts to the more specific constituency identified in the analysis of the BNP’s growth: “The BNP was building inside communities and tapping into widespread discontent with the political system. More significantly, and often ignored by many, the BNP was engaging in a cultural war that was successfully drawing upon a loss of identity and meaning among many white working class people. By carefully nurturing an image of itself as victim and speaking up “for the silent majority” the BNP could offer a new white nationalist identity to people who felt let down and abandoned by society.” Those who are experiencing a loss of identity and meaning, who feel let down and abandoned by society, are a very specific constituency, and it is them, and not “Mr and Mrs Smith” that anti-fascists need to engage with.

But where does that leave militant anti-fascism? Is its job over? The key problem with the Searchlight analysis of militant anti-fascism is to reduce it to the philosophy of “No Platform”. In my view, this is simplistic and misleading.

“No Platform” is a policy that relates primarily to student unions and trade unions. For a student union, for example, No Platform means using the power of the union to keep fascists off campus – denying them a platform in the college or university. For council workers, it might mean stopping council premises being used by fascists.

No Platform is sometimes counterposed to “free speech”, but No Platform is not historically a policy of calling upon the state to ban fascists, but rather of using one’s own resources to deny them a platform in one’s own institutions. If I tell someone that in my house, in front of my kids, they should refrain from swearing, I am not infringing their free speech in general, just saying what the rules are in my house. No Platform, historically, was never about bans and police actions; it was about people setting the rules in their own houses.

What happened was that No Platform took on the status of a fetish, an absolute value, and a life of its own, in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with the wider ethos of anti-fascism. We see this reflected in two very different ways. For many anti-authoritarians, anti-fascism became a lifestyle choice; the hoodie and scarf became a uniform; and anyone outside the charmed circle of the antifa milieu was not trusted.

On the authoritarian left, in the white collar unions and student unions dominated by the SWP, we see calls for BNP teachers to be sacked, or agencies like the EHRC taking the BNP to court over its membership rules – meaningless, bureaucratic, legalistic interpretations which rely on the state and disempower citizens, while allowing the BNP to paint itself as the heroic victim of censorship.

Meanwhile, in the real world – in the world of the internet and YouTube and Facebook, where platforms for hate endlessly proliferate; in the a period when the BNP have achieved a wider support base of people who are in no sense fascist; and in an age of increasingly sophisticated policing and surveillance – the ideal of No Platform has become meaningless.

Ironically, coinciding with the concept’s irrelevance, the SWP front Unite Against Fascism (UAF) has re-discovered it with a vengeance, probably noting that they can gain competitive advantage in the anti-fascist market by making “militancy” their USP. Hence childish actions like throwing eggs at Nick Griffin, which might be fun but have zero or negative effect.

Militant anti-fascism, however, never meant just street fighting. AFA, for example, saw it as a two-track strategy: physical and ideological confrontation, the latter less spectacular but taking up at least much of the organisation’s energy. To list just a few examples I can recall, in London and elsewhere, we did a huge amount of work with football fans, organised carnivals and local history workshops, developed a political response to knife attacks in London, did estate-based work in issues like housing transfer and anti-social behaviour. This approach was also that of our predecessors, as you can see if you read the autobiography of Joe Jacobs for instance.

Another challenge for militant anti-fascism is how to deal with forms of fascism that don’t look like the old NF did – forms of fascism that fester among “oppressed” minorities, among people that hate the BNP. When this challenge was recently posed by Carl, it was totally failed by both UAF and Searchlight. But when it was posed in the East End in the summer of 2010, more positive results were seen. Whitechapel United Against Division mobilised working class white and Bangladeshi local people to protest both the Islamists and the EDL. And the statement “Against fascism in all its colours”, condemning both, was signed by a wide range of local organisations, from the Bangladesh Welfare Association to the Brick Lane Mosque to the Whitechapel Anarchist Group.

This points to a neglected part of the militant anti-fascist story. A large part of the history of militant anti-fascism in Britain, from the Jewish East End in the 1930s to Southall and Brick Lane in the 1970s and 1980s, has been communities defending themselves from violent attacks. With the BNP’s turn in the 1990s from the battle for the streets to the battle for the ballot box, that sort of violence was less common. But with the rise of the EDL since 2009, Asian communities are once again under attack. If anti-fascism is to have any credibility with these communities, and especially their youth, an appeal to “Mr and Mrs Smith” is not the right approach. And this opens a space that reactionary jihadi groups are happy to move into. Anti-fascism, then, needs to fill the vacuum in white working class communities, but also drive a wedge between angry Muslims and the far right Islamist political entrepreneurs appealing to them. Doing both at once will be no easy task.

In conclusion, I agree with Meszaros and Lowles that we urgently need to re-think the old dogmas in new times. But I don’t think they offer us the tools to do so.

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.

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).