Mind the Gap
Labour are warning that the far right are becoming more dangerous – perhaps it’s time for them to stop being complacent.
John Denham announced a new government initiative on the weekend to address the concerns of the white working classes who he said had been “exploited” by the far right. The government, it seems, has finally taken its head, ostrich-like, out of the sand of middle class suburbia and realised that in their absence the right wing have filled the void that their disinterest in traditional Labour heartlands has created.
As secretary of state for communities and local government, Mr Denham has actually helped to deepen the class divide that has led to traditional Labour areas becoming a breeding ground for racists. In a speech he gave to the Fabian Society only a few months ago – a speech, aimed at wooing the middle ground of voters – Mr Denham said that the old ideal of egalitarianism that had “dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s” was over. In other words people were now willing to accept disparities in wealth and we should stop kicking against the system. This is sort of the political theory equivalent of “shit happens”. He also said:
“If you think you are in the middle, policies and language aimed at ‘the poor’ leave you out. And if you are in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether ‘the top’ is doing better than you, than you are about ‘the bottom’.”
Well, guess what John? Those people at ‘the bottom’ are now in danger of becoming a major thorn in the side of the Home Counties voters New Labour has been so busy attracting for the last 12 years.
The far right are making gains, they aren’t large gains yet – they are, however, getting a lot of publicity. In the vacuum of any decent opposition to them on the ground, that publicity is starting to win people over to their crude and ignorant ideologies. Every time the media shows someone from the BNP or the English Defence League on TV they are in isolation. If anyone from any of the major political parties deigns to even comment on them, it is usually from the despatch box at Westminster. The logic being: “you are ‘down there’ and we are ‘up here’”. Unfortunately, ‘down there’ is in the grass roots of the constituencies – i.e. where the voters are. A good, if maverick, example of how this optical illusion works can be seen in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (bear with me). When Romeo talks about how attractive his latest crush Rosaline is, his friend Benvolio says to him:
“Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,
Herself poised with herself in either eye”.
In other words, in the absence of any comparison, she looked like a good thing. So it is with the BNP. Those who say that Nick Griffin should not be given the platform of a respected programme such as Question Time to air his racist opinions are missing the point. It is exactly the platform that they need to be seen on. They need to be engaged with in a respectable environment so they can be compared to mainstream politicians – and completely annihilated.
Ignoring the problem has not and never will make it go away – just as ignoring working class voters, your own traditional constituency, will only make them turn against you. Complacency, combined with a recession that has hit the poorest and most marginalised in our society the hardest, is the ideal breeding ground for fascism. Necessity is the mother of all reinvention. Labour may lose the next election, but for the good of the country as a whole they need to remember who they are and win back the working class.
Reader Comments
BNP voters are,in fact,ex tory voters,not disillusioned working class labour voters.If I was able to hyperlink I could demonstrate this to you.However,you are perfectly capable of finding this out if you choose to stop peddling bullshit and do some research.Working class labour voters are more likely to stay at home on polling day than vote BNP.This doesn’t help John Denham,obviously.Denham is a greasy little jobsworth with a strong instinct for self preservation,see his resignation over Iraq and his subsequent failure to be at all critical of those responsible for that glorious adventure,followed by his rejoining the government.
Tom, you’re right insofar as the decision by droves of Labour’s core support to stay at home during the European elections allowed the BNP to break through under proportional representation. I think it would also be fair to say that more Labour voters stayed at home than voted BNP. But that doesn’t mean the BNP’s support is not primarily ex-Labour and you’re wrong to claim that BNP voters are ex Tory voters. Look at the areas in which they’ve gained influence and broken through on the council. Their gains have primarily been at Labour’s expense by drawing support from white working class voters. As one political analysit concluded on election night this year, “UKIP attracts disillusioned Tory voters. The BNP attract disillusioned Labour voters.” It might be a bitter pill to swallow, Tom, but the fact that sections of the working class are choosing crude nationalism over international class solidarity is an uncomfortable reality.
I think it’s important to de-link these two claims. The fact that Labour has abandoned its key constituencies does not mean we should ‘engage’ with the arguments of the BNP. Certainly Labour need to re-engage with the working class, but debating Nick Griffin and the BNP shouldn’t be seen as the best or only way to do this. There’s a danger we cede ground to the idea that the BNP or EDL ‘speak for’ disaffected working class people and by and large they do not.
As for who BNP voters are, well it’s complicated. Looking at where they do well proves little, and a number of polls do suggest many BNP voters are ex-tories. It is at least up for debate who these people are. Sections of the working class have always chosen crude nationalism over international class solidarity, by the way, no-one denies that, but the picture is a complex one.
Incidentally, Tom, if you want to email me what you wanted to link to I can stick them up. Email is danswain85 at gmail dot com.
I don’t think Liz was advocating engaging with the BNP’s ideas, rather destroying them. You’re right though, Dan, I’m not sure a televised debate is the best way to go about this. In The Observer last week, Barbara Ellen argued that Griffin should be allowed to go on Question Time because he would slip up and ruin his party’s image. That’s exactly what Nick Griffin is not going to do. He’s a cautious and extremely image conscious man and he’ll peddle the same old lies again, but he’ll do it well. As Sunny argued on Pickled Politics not long ago, the EHRC has done the BNP a big favour by forcing them to reconsider their membership policy. The last overt example of the old white supremacism will be gone from their public face and Griffin will find it that much easier to play the legitimate politician. I’m sceptical that the majority of BNP support comes from Tories rather than Labour (though I’d be happy to be proven wrong) but I would say this. Nick Griffin’s public image wouldn’t have stuck out too sorely in the Conservative Party of the last century. He wears it well.
As you say, demolish or engage, Newsnight isn’t the place, actually the place is on the doorsteps. The No Platform argument often becomes ludicrously caricatured as sticking our fingers in our ears and going la-la-la-la. Of course its not, we have to expose and challenge the BNP’s lies with the people who they are appealling to. But where Labour, and other groups, have disappeared from the ground it ends up being exactly that.
Of course Labour have another problem. They have been pursuing a strategy of either ignoring or pandering to much of this stuff. So when on the doorsteps John Denham says ‘immigrants aren’t stopping you getting a council house’, he can hardly follow up with, ‘it’s the government’s chronic neglect of council housing’.
Clearly I meant Question Time, but Newsnight too!
So when on the doorsteps John Denham says ‘immigrants aren’t stopping you getting a council house’, he can hardly follow up with, ‘it’s the government’s chronic neglect of council housing’.
Indeed!Dan, I wish I could remember when and where I formed my impression of the background of BNP voters.Also,mea culpa,I think I’ve been guilty of sloppy reading with this article and it’s general slant.However,I don’t agree with the point Liz makes about the value of Griffin getting pwned on Question Time.Question Time is a panel game,and the point Liz makes about the fillip the media are quite tranparently giving the BNP should be explored in depth.The producers of Question Time choose who Griffin goes up against,remember that.Why are the media giving the BNP a boost?
The problem with the liberal argument that the BNP should be allowed onto Question Time, is that it assumes Question Time is a debating programme rather than a bunch of hapless individuals slinging soundbites at each other. In this sense, the BNP would fit in well. Its format means you can pretty much make uncorroborated statements and get away with it. Since this is the case, if we were in a position where the BBC refused to back down over giving the BNP a slot, I wouldn’t oppose someone from the Left going on to fight the BNP’s “arguments”. Otherwise they’d just be getting free airtime.
Fascism is a product of the middle class. Contrary to popular prejudice the working class have never supported it. It is the middle class who at times of recession and with much to loose turn to Fascism to protect what they have.
It is the middle class who vote for anti free speech laws . it’s the middle class who prosper on mass immigration . it’s the middle class who with one foot on the property ladder and with some immigrant to do the dirty work are the first to point to the great unwashed with an acusing finger. The danger does not come from the poorer neighbourhoods and never has…
Ironically , the more educated/ prosperous a man is the more likely he is to turn to the right to protect his position / status /class..The press and media are only too happy to point to the BNP in the hope that people will forget exactly who it was that actually made the gas ovens and prospered on slave labour and then went on to establish the Coal and Steel Community (EU)…..
If people spent quarter the time they spend railing against the BNP reading the immediate post war history of Europe they might realise that the real Fascist threat was not from the working class and (for very good reason ) never will come from the working class.
Louis, I’m sorry, I forgot we were still living in the mid-twentieth century. Really, it is our fault for publishing an article about a modern political issue. We won’t do it again, honest.
The idea that the BNP is somehow worse than the mainstream political parties is an interesting delusion. It’s not the BNP who are introducing anti terrorist laws .It’s not the BNP who introduce laws that would not have been tolerated even in Hitler’s Germany. The BNP have not banned free speech or made strikes practicall illegal….
The BNP are thugs but amature one’s compared to those who every day pass ever more repressive laws..
……in the meantime those folks who made the gass for killing jews are still in business and are doing very well thank you and thanks to the ‘mainstream political parties’.
Well, this is all true louis. But it is the BNP who are intimidating communities. It is the EDL and BNP who are demonstrating outside mosques, and it is racist thugs linked to the BNP who are attacking ethnic minorities. It is the growth and legitimising of the BNP that is giving confidence to the fascists who attacked a gay student in Birkenhead last week.
So excuse us for wanting to do something about them.
There is no immediate danger of the BNP getting into power, so in a sense Louis is right that they are not “the real danger”. But anyone who tells us to go and study history but then cannot tell the difference between Brown’s Britain and Hitler’s Germany has a serious reality problem.
The growth of the far right is dangerous for the reason Dan says, that it translates directly into violent attacks on non-white people, foreigners, Roma, Muslims and so on. And because their rise helps drive the agenda that makes the mainstream parties worse: the British Brothers League drove the agenda that led to the anti-aliens act of 1905, the NF in the 1970s led to Thatcher’s anti-immigrant policies, and the rise of the BNP since the 1990s has been followed by some of our most draconian anti-migrant legislation. (But Louis, as a history expert, presumably already knows that.)
It is true, as Tom notes, that some evidence, e.g. from YouGov http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/who+voted+bnp+and+why/3200557/ that BNP voters are Tory defectors not Labour defectors. But the same data identifies them as working class Tories, not middle class. The data is very limited of course. Looking at places like Barking and Burnley and in particular Stoke and Swanley, it is clear that there is a sizeable ex-Labour working class vote for the BNP. In places like Barking, Burnley, Stoke and Swanley, the BNP thrives by addressing working class issues.
This is why it is important to “engage” with the issues that drive working class voters. Not by playing to anti-immigrant sentiment (as Brown, Woolas et al do). But by showing why there aren’t enough homes and jobs, and fighting for transparent fairness in their allocation.
As a footnote, the BNP’s membership and especially its activist base is more like Louis says. I think the SWP published some analysis of the leaked membership list to show they remained from the sections of society fascism has classically drawn from: ex-military, self-employed, small businessmen, etc.
Yeah, the article Bob refers to is here: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=16518
It’s obviously a small sample, because most of the names on the list had no profession listed at all, but it’s usefully instructive. Some anecdotal experience (of the merseyside branch) is that this fits the breakdown of the active membership (as opposed to the near million passive voters).