Why we should be worried about a ban on whites only political organisations.

Recently, in the aftermath of the BNP’s election victory, Harriet Harman boasted that her new equalities bill would outlaw whites only political organisations.

Whatever my hatred for the BNP, I must say that this whole idea sends a bit of a shiver down my spine. Such a law would represent an enormous shift in the relationship between the state and civil society – and in the terms under which people engage in political action. It would assert – in a quite unprecedented way – an obligation for political organisations to manage themselves in a manner which is acceptable to the state, or to society at large.

My feelings here are pretty clear. If a bunch of citizens get together for the purposes of collective political action, it is absolutely up to them to decide who can join them and who can’t. If a bunch of my neighbours decide to form a local conservative association, they should not have to account to me, or anyone else, for who they let in and who they do not. If they operate a membership policy which jars with the way in which most of society thinks then so be it. This is called freedom of association.

Of course political orgnaisation do sometimes come up against the power of the state. If any group of people were to run through the streets attacking bystanders then of course the police would intervene. The point about Harman’s proposals is that make political organisations – by mere virtue of their existence – answerable to the government.

It would be incredibly naive to imagine that such an advance in state authority could not have any blowback for us on the left. Throughout our history, organisations of the left have used all manner of criteria to quite reasonably dilineate who can and who cannot join. In most cases you will have to understand and agree with the politics. In the case of the Chartists – the most important progressive organisation of the 19th century – members could only come from the working class (middle class associates were given honorary membership status). Given the propensity of well spoken middle class types – myself included – to speak over people, you can kind of see why. More importantly there are, today, a plethora of womens organisations and ethnic minority organisations. I personally think it is important that disempowered and disenfranchised groups have a space in which they can speak and organise. You might disagree. But such groups should not be accountable to either of us. And it is crazy to think that the forces of the right would not seek to use such anti-discrimination legislation against the organisations of the left, and against the organisations of the least powerful sectors of society.

Meanwhile, once the principle has been established that the government should have a say in how political organisations run themselves, who knows where it will lead. Who knows what will be considered ‘deeply unacceptable’ in 5, 10, 20 years. This is a line that we need to hold.

If we hate the BNP – and its membership policy – then we should do all we can to fight it. We should, however, hope to weaken the far right by expanding the power of the state at the expense of political activists.