News - June 2004

'Anti-Fascism' Can't Deliver

Britain's Changing Political Landscape - Game on and Literally Everything to Play for.

19th June '04

For a number of reasons the recent elections were the most interesting canvass of public opinion for a very long time. Not only because of what happened, the actual results and so on, but also because of what they portend for the future.

Without question the political landscape is changing. Both Labour and the Tories have had their worst results for more than a hundred years. Just 10% of the population voted for the governing party. By any democratic standard this is fairly staggering. Of even more significance, though little noticed, is that no less than five out of ten voters disregarded the Tories and Labour as a preference.
Interestingly this is in accordance with the numbers which surveys show will definitely turn out for them in the next general election.
To cap it off, the Liberal Democrats, who might have expected to take advantage of any slippage by the others got their sums woefully wrong in the contest for London Mayor, and were beaten by Ukip into fourth place in European elections.

Needless to say, all of this is a very long way from both the 'apathy' explanation favoured by the media and from Jack Straw's head in the sand comment in 2001 that the low turn out simply reflected the 'politics of contentment'.

What makes it even more intriguing is that neither Labour nor the Tories are in a fit state to recover, while the 'all things to all people' Lib Dems seem at last to have been rumbled by the electorate.
Oh sure, the electoral performance of the Big Two with a little tweaking here and there may recover from this nadir in the short term, but fundamentally they are both holed beneath the water line. The Conservative and Unionist Party, as we have long pointed out are an aging party, with as little as two or three activists in some parliamentary constituencies.
Meanwhile their grassroots support seems to have defected en masse to Ukip. And should they ever return it certainly would not be to serve under the type of middle of the road leadership being offered up at present.

Labour too is showing similar signs of emasculation. Membership is declining, even halving in some areas, but more significantly as Frank Dobson admitted in the Guardian, 'I can't recall a time when we had fewer members to do the local party work which is vital in every constituency before and during a general election.'

He is probably too polite to say so, but what Dobbo really means is that there are less and less working class people prepared to do the scut work for a party that claims they no longer exist.

This means the governing party increasingly resembles a husk, bereft of a heartland. Just a decade ago Roy Hattersley proclaimed that the 'working class would continue to vote Labour no matter what the party does'. How silly and careless a forecast does that look now?

Oddly, the comfort blanket that the New Labour hierarchy draws around itself is the disaster that is Iraq. The thinking is that when the issue of Iraq is resolved in one way or the other normal service will be resumed. Wrong. Repeated surveys show that Iraq comes near bottom of the list of most peoples acknowledged concerns. If to a certain extent this is the past, then what of the future? What of the alternatives?

Ukip hogged the headlines but it is in the main a single-issue protest group relying heavily on the Tory party grass roots for electoral support. Indeed it could be argued that organisationally it is actually the Tory party at a grass root level. And while it did spend an unprecedented £2 million on publicity there is more than a suspicion that the warmth with which sections of the media took it to their bosom had as much to do with the damage it might do to the BNP than any genuine affection.

A YouGov poll on election day for example exaggerated support for the Ukip by considerable extent, claiming it would win 18 Euro seats. In the event they won just twelve. It is also extraordinary how Robert Kilroy Silk, who let's not forget was forced to resign in disgrace for disparaging remarks made against Arabs some months previously, suddenly found himself not only the de-facto leader of a mainstream political party but a most unlikely symbol of anti-fascist resistance as well.

Meanwhile Dick Morris, former Clinton spin-doctor who had been brought over from the US to head up Ukip electoral strategy, drew gasps when he clarified Ukip policy on immigration on Question Time. 'Space not race' was the respectable distinction between his party and its rivals, whom he condemned as 'thugs'. Just about respectable maybe, but hardly a million miles from the 'space and race' argument of the BNP either is it?

But if the stratagem was to stall the BNP advance then it certainly did so, but only to an extent. And 'stall' is the operative word here. Sooner or later, BNP strategists anticipate, probably correctly, that the single issue Ukip will run out of track, either when Europe becomes a non-issue, funds runs out, or they simply implode as a result of fratricidal conflicts.

When that happens they quite reasonably expect a succulent chunk of Ukip support to transfer directly over to them, rather than return to the Conservatives. But even without the capture of the much-coveted Euro seat, the BNP still emerges from the election as a party with genuine national reach. With 808,000 votes across the country it cannot reasonably be regarded as anything less.

Yet despite the eightfold increase on 1999, category one denial remains very much in vogue. Searchlight with weary predictably presented the outcome as 'a victory for anti-fascism'. But many more anti-fascist victories on such a scale and leading BNPers would seriously begin eyeing up places in the shadow cabinet.

The difficulty for Searchlight is that to acknowledge any sense of a diminishing return would be to accept that their 'anti-fascism' does not in any quantifiable way deliver on anti-fascist objectives.

Centrally, in a population looking for solutions, an anti-fascism that enjoys support from right wing Tories, and even has arch bigots from the Orange Order among its sponsors, can define, just about, what it is against, but finds itself utterly incapable of framing in any understandable way what it might actually stand for.

So, no matter how you cut it, and regardless of how much nonsense the likes of Searchlight acolyte Nick Cohen writes in his column in the Observer (in the run up to the election he dim-wittedly reassured his readers that support for the BNP was too small to register in any poll) this lacking cannot be papered over any longer.

In 2002 Cohen congratulated the ANL and Searchlight for 'a near total victory' against the BNP. But in the 24 months since the BNP first captured three council seats in Burnley, Searchlight boasts it has been working flat out to stem the BNP tide. Yet the BNP now has seven times as many councillors as it had two years ago. Is this the same BNP, or is it another one? Obviously if the BNP are not advancing then equally they cannot be 'beaten back'. One way or the other both Cohen and Gable cannot be telling the truth. In fact neither of them is.

Though coming from the same stable as Unite Against Fascism, Respect can hardly be said to deliver on anti-fascist objectives as previously understood either. Quite the contrary. With the Saddam admiring MP George Galloway to the fore there was an unrestrained and unapologetic orientation to, and proclamations issued on behalf of, something most easily understood as Muslim nationalism.
'The suggestion was made over and over again that the Muslim community was uniquely victimised, targeted, oppressed and discriminated against' was how Independent columnist David Aaronovitch put it.

It also needs to be emphasised that the core message was aimed in a cross-class fashion at Muslims collectively not the working class nor any progressive element perceived to be within it. Worse, as the overwhelming majority of Muslims come from one ethnic background, the racial imperative lurking within is hardly deniable either. It follows then that should Respect and the BNP ever confront each other at council ward level, as George Galloway is threatening to do in London's east end within the next five weeks, then the racial polarisation that must inevitably result could prove explosive and would play directly into the hands of the far-right.

Not least because Respect would have manufactured a situation whereby 2% of the population would be pitted against 98%. To try and build political support almost entirely on religious/racial grounds on the back of a tiny minority is wrong-headed, shortsighted and utterly amoral. Respect is quite simply a horrible accident waiting to happen.

Genuinely at the other end of the spectrum, the IWCA sought to expand its profile and test its standing at a macro level through standing a candidate for London Mayor. Prior to the election IWCA strategists privately estimated that developmentally they were between five and seven years behind the BNP. In the absence of complimentary IWCA candidates for the 'Assembly', and with negligible media coverage and no cross-class appeal, a return of 50,000 first and second preference working class votes was more than a credible return.

Sandwiched between the BNP take of 18,000 votes in London in the Euro elections in 1999, and the 60,000 additional votes the far right party secured in the GLA election the following year, it does suggest the IWCA is on, if not a shade ahead of schedule.

Needless to say, all bar militant anti-fascists ignored the 80,000 first and second preferences votes for the BNP in 2000. It took a 26% vote in a council by-election in Bexley later in the year to set the alarms bells ringing for the likes of leading Tory Steve Norris. Not for the last time the 'professional' anti-fascists of the ANL and Searchlight pretended insouciance.

Coincidentally, even before winning three council seats in adjacent wards in working class Oxford on June 10, the average vote for the IWCA also registered at about 26% nationally.
The Mayoral result aside, it is of course at this micro political level that the IWCA strategy is shown to excel.

Understandably the result in Oxford will now serve as a paradigm for work in other parts of the country. A hugely impressive display all round, it was all the more satisfying for having been achieved in the face of a Labour campaign being personally marshalled by Cabinet Minister and Gordon Brown loyalist, Andrew Smith.

And although the conservative and liberal left continue to regard the IWCA with hostility resentment and a certain envy at present, out of need rather than love, some form of anti-fascist dividend must kick in sooner or later.
This is largely because 'working class independence' when the opportunity presents itself, will make a far more convincing 'radical alternative' on the ground, where it counts, in working class communities.

And radical alternative is indeed the name of the game these days. As Europe shows, the extremes can bully the centre. But in Britain other possibilities are also opening up.
Basically what we are witnessing is the emergence of two electorates: the 50% who still vote for the Big Two and the other 50% who have stopped doing so.

Just like the BNP, the IWCA also enjoys the advantage of being able to tap into the pool of the disgruntled, no longer available to the leading brands. When either contests a seat the turnout often doubles. This factor has not gone unnoticed within the BNP who gleefully proclaim, with tongue firmly in cheek no doubt, that 'the BNP is good for democracy'.

One way or the other Britain's political landscape is changing. The two parties that have alternately formed the government since the 1920's are visibly decomposing. The centre cannot hold. Appropriately it is the two parties who in their own small ways are helping change the landscape who are likely to be the beneficiaries of the collapse of the consensual centre. So for the first time in 80 years it is game on - with again literally everything to play for.