FACING REALITY –
A CALL FOR AN ANTI-FASCISM BASED ON BUILDING A LEFT WING POLITICAL ALTERNATIVE
by John Tummon

In June 2008 Searchlight’s Online Edition carried an article by Nick Lowles reflecting on the BNP’s success in last year’s London Assembly Elections. Nick found that “the truth is that as each year goes by our job is getting harder. There is an ever-growing list of wards at risk to the BNP, it’s becoming more difficult to turn out our voters and even when we do prevent the BNP from winning we do so by increasing turnout rather than necessarily reducing the BNP’s support. In today’s political climate we can sometimes feel a sense of relief just by keeping the BNP down to 30% support in key wards”.

The article analysed this dilemma more generally - “We are currently witnessing a tangible change in British politics. The old traditional voting patterns are fragmenting as voters increasingly shop around for a party that best articulates their concerns and even prejudices. The emergence of the BNP is just one consequence of the change under way, and it is a change far more fundamental than many political commentators and politicians appear to register. It is also primarily an issue affecting the Labour Party”.

“Many of the people now turning their back on the Labour Party have not shared the economic prosperity of recent years. Many in areas such as Stoke-on-Trent and Dagenham now find themselves in a worse economic position than a few years ago. Great swathes of these traditional Labour voters not only feel ignored but are increasingly seeing in the BNP a party that articulates their interests. This degree of alienation with the mainstream parties was clearly demonstrated in the BBC polling that accompanied its White Season.
A number of studies, such as those conducted by Vision 21 and more recently by Democratic Audit, show clearly that a reoccurring theme among BNP voters is the sense that no one listens to them any more. Labour is increasingly seen as a middle-class party that prioritises minority groups and the interests of more affluent voters over themselves”.

Nick’s conclusions seemed to be

1 “A simple “Don’t vote nazi” is an irrelevant slogan that needs to be discarded immediately”

2 “Anti-fascism has to continue to focus around elections. After all, this is how BNP support is measured and nothing helps the BNP grow more than substantial electoral victories”.

3 “If the BNP support is driven by racial prejudice, often whipped up by the national media, economic deprivation and a loss of identity, then these are the three issues we need to contest”.

4 “It is locally that anti-fascists must focus their energies. Searchlight has long argued for a localised strategy to defeat the BNP and the need for this is even greater now. Each area is different and requires a slightly different solution”.

To some extent, Unite Against Fascism agrees – “As these constituencies are so large, it will be impossible to mobilise voters solely by door to door leafleting and canvassing”, but its answer to this problem – carnivals – in fact rarely reaches beyond the BNP’s existing opponents and usually goes no deeper than ‘Don’t Vote Nazi’”. Worse – it does not provided any way of engaging with the BNP’s target voters who are yet to vote for them.

I think the situation is worse than both Hope Not Hate and the UAF are admitting – In fact, I am decreasingly convinced that the BNP can be stopped in the long term by anything other than a new political party of the left, but reality dictates that, in the meantime, an electoral alliance of the same forces will have to do.

The Hope Not Hate and Unite Against Fascism strategy of exposing the BNP leadership’s Nazi past and criminal convictions can still work at one-off by-elections where resources can be focused, but the distribution of the BNP’s 1 million vote in the European elections was remarkably even – for instance 300 in an estate near where I live in which they seem to have never done any work – and so we have to face the fact that their appeal has become more general than targeted work can deal with. After Question Time October 2009, they are likely to build on that; by how much we do not know. National developments in the political situation undid us in the 2009 Euro elections up here in the North and they could easily do so again, but to a far greater extent, next May. The nature and extent of the BNP threat has been changing for some time and we need to adapt. Neither re-inventing the Anti Nazi League of the 1970s nor saying the same things about the BNP that we said about the National Front are as effective as they once were.
THE BNP THREAT AT THE 2010 GENERAL ELECTION AND BEYOND

The run-up to the 2010 General Election could feature rejuvenated BNP branches with fresh blood & legs now that they are a recognised brand among the 8 million who watched Question Time and the extra millions who listened live on BBC Radio Five Live. In places like Blackley, North Manchester they are already out there leafleting, even though there is no election in sight, so they’ve learned from how we kept them out in Oldham and elsewhere by working within target communities throughout the year and not just at election time.

If General Election turnout dips another 10% from 2005 to 50%, then around 19 million people will vote in England; just another 500,000 votes for the BNP on top of their Euro 2009 result could take them to the next level – 13% of the popular vote in England, which is half what New Labour will get and only 6% behind the Liberal Democrats, according to the latest poll.

Actual polls of BNP support since the October 2009 edition of Question Time which featured Griffin show that it is still at 3% or less, but a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph claimed that 22 percent of voters were “prepared to consider voting for the BNP.” This survey found four percent who said they would “definitely” consider voting for the party, three percent who would “probably” consider it, and 15 percent who said they were “possible” BNP voters.

This reveals a very real potential for medium-term growth, which, in the midst of a deep recession with no sign of ending before the General Election, needs to prompt a fundamental review of our counter-strategy, which many of us, Searchlight included, have been questioning for some time. Anyone who thinks it is alarmist to do so is advocating a high-risk strategy of ‘business as usual’.

So long as the BNP stayed within its previous share of the vote, we could just about contain them on a purely anti-Fascist basis, but there comes a time when they can only be taken on by a rival politics which provides answers across the whole range of political debate, and I believe we are now passing into an era where this is the case.

The political situation in which the 2010 General Election will be held is yet another one characterised by a massive and unprecedented void in the political spectrum – Labourism - where the old Labour Party stood and which the BNP have only partially won over so far. The BNP have some policies and people in their ranks capable of taking this to the next level among the white working class and they currently have no competitors for the hearts and minds of people on white-majority housing estates, within which the level of disillusionment with conventional politics seems to just grow and grow.

As things stand, the BNP’s main opponent on white-majority estates is probably apathy – research shows that they are growing most among people who normally do not vote. The recession is bringing genuine hardship to the same people and their sense of white victimhood can only increase, because there is no way back to the free market boom years; a boom which many of us never shared anyway.

Just as crucial is the crisis of political representation and legitimacy; the three main parties are now increasingly seen as essentially the same on key issues, so a strategy of alliances with them and asking people to vote for anyone of their choice apart from the BNP runs the risk of counterposing the BNP to all 3 of them as THE alternative.

Allying with these parties is making less sense to people after the money given to the bankers and the unending tales of MPs with noses in the trough. None of the three main parties has the politics, the aspiration or the foot soldiers to win the allegiance of the unorganised white working class in parts of this country where hardship is biting deep.

Instead, they are committed to fighting each other for ‘middle England’ swing voters. This puts the BNP out on their own with a head start. The UKIP vote retained its position as a “halfway house” between the mainstream right and the BNP at the June 2009 European Elections, but UKIP remains a single issue party which could well lose more of its vote to the BNP now that the Lisbon Treaty is done and dusted.

The current potential for seismic shifts in politics has not gone unnoticed among key sections of possibly the best-informed and most successful political elite in modern history - Buckingham Palace, a group of ex-Generals and an ex-Archbishop of Canterbury have each recently expressed concern about the rise in support for the BNP, and when these people and organisations decide that it is time to speak out in public, we should take serious note that the parameters of the British political situation are changing.
The question for us is whether they are changing, without over-dramatising anything, in a way that is eerily similar to the situation in the Weimar Republic, where the same factors – loss of political legitimacy by elite politicians and recession – applied.

EXPOSING NAZIS IS NO LONGER ENOUGH

Despite Nick Lowles’ warning in June 2008, we have not discarded this strategy yet, mostly because the post-war anti-Fascist strategy of ‘No Platform’ + ‘Exposure’ worked very well for five decades. On reflection, though, it did so only so long as the various fascist groupings had plenty of people with demonstrable track records for supporting Hitler and Moseley, and so long as there was not a deep recession and a level of alienation from mainstream politics which make some of their policies attractive, despite their well-publicised links to Nazi views.

We were able to recruit many people through this position in the ultimately successful campaigns against the National Front in the 1970s. Crucially, though, we have continued to use it for over a decade against the BNP at the same time as they have done as much as they could to distance themselves from their Nazi past and become electable. Our strategy has seemed to work on the whole, despite other major changes in the political and economic context, although why we ever believed that we could treat anti-fascism as something quite separate without having to address a whole range of related political issues in the course of it seems very odd in retrospect.

Those days are now definitively gone – Hitwise, the online competitive intelligence service, reported last month that more than seven times as many visitors click on to the BNP's site as for the Labour Party and almost three times as many as for the Conservatives. Although anti-fascists ourselves are among regular visitors to the site, the Hitwise study of over eight million internet accounts found that people who struggle to hold down a rewarding or well paying job, and rely on state benefits and the council for their accommodation were most likely to visit it, so there can be no complacency.

We need to seriously consider if we are over-playing the ‘Nazi’ card and whether it is losing its effectiveness. Like all political parties, the BNP has changed and continues to change. No one nowadays pretends that the New Labour Party is socialist in any sense whatsoever, although there are still socialists within its membership. What is so different about Fascist parties, that brings us to pretend that they cannot change into something else over time? There is no way in which we can successfully demonstrate that such a law exists, even if we believe it, in the face of Griffin setting out examples of how he has changed it.

Unlike in the 1970s, we no longer face a fascist party which seeks to march regularly and provocatively through towns with large non-white populations and which puts across a package of policies squarely in the tradition of Hitler and Mussolini. The BNP, nowadays, while it still includes a significant number of individuals who come from this background, including in its leadership, does not attempt anything like the deliberate intimidatory political activity of the National Front and seems to want to become a racist nationalist party, which is a different kettle of fish, but every bit as important to oppose.

Although the future development of the BNP is by no means predictable, any new electoral support will tend to push it towards populism, as would an upsurge in membership, to the potential detriment of the power held within it by the Nazi hardcore. This would make it even more dangerous.

By continuing to confront the BNP with a desperate, denunciatory moralism rooted in a set of quotes and criminal records about key BNP individuals (and which is not putting people off looking at its website), we should ask ourselves what we are doing which is different from the BNP’s own uncontextualised quotes from the Koran which seek to show that Islam specifically endorses terrorism? Why exactly should people believe us rather than them and why should we still expect them to?

IS DEFENDING DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSIVENESS OUR JOB?

The run-up to and aftermath of Question Time 2009 also highlighted the limitations of the ‘No Platform’ + ‘Exposure’ approach when our allies in the three main parties take it up. In their hands and in the hands of the BBC, it became a desperate rearguard action against the normalisation of the BNP and the criteria they used to define the norm excludes everyone to their left as well as to their right, which happens to include most anti-fascist activists.

How perverse is this situation in which anti-Fascists who are mostly also anti-capitalist are nowadays the main people canvassing the British public to vote for the three pro-capitalist parties in areas that are difficult, if not impossible for these same parties?

The UAF take the same line, like SWP turkeys voting for Christmas, that the BNP “must be vigorously confronted and excluded from our democratic culture”. Whose democratic culture, exactly? Since the main parties did not succeed on Question Time in distracting people from their own failings and, given that New Labour politicians spend most of their time rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, what exactly do we gain any more by defending their ‘normal democratic culture’ and keeping it BNP-free? Why would the people being courted by the BNP see anything other in this than the very alliance between ‘ultra-leftists’ and the establishment that Griffin tells them is going on?

Now that the Queen, a group of ex-Generals and an ex-Archbishop of Canterbury have all spoken out, in an attempt to keep the BNP beyond the pale, we have to ask ourselves whether the involvement of the elite of the elite is just something which strengthens anti-fascism or does it also look like the entire establishment ganging up on the BNP, and doing so at a time when fondness for the political establishment is at an all-time low?

And, because the Question Time format was so clearly tampered with, in order to maximise the opportunities to show up Griffin as beyond this democratic and moral pale, it played directly to the BNP’s strengths – all those people who feel that they are victims of the way British society has turned out saw the BNP itself being given negative special treatment by the establishment: as one commentator put it, “the overall effect of the programme was of an unpleasant person being swamped by a sea of self-righteousness”.

‘British Fair Play’ seems to have rebounded; the outcome is that some people may no longer be reachable by Hope Not Hate & UAF literature which seeks to persuade them to look no further than our revelations about who these people really are and what they really believe, when our allies telling them this include the same discredited politicians we oppose and who are doing so in the name of a parliamentary democracy which is itself increasingly seen by people to be entirely different from what it says on the tin.

Maintaining our anti-Fascist work within this broad church may well increasingly mean having to stomach the establishment’s probable major policy conclusions from contemplating the rise of the BNP – that immigration and asylum seeker controls must be severely tightened and that all political ‘extremists’ will have their civil and political rights curtailed!

There is plenty of momentum in this latter direction already - in the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ programme which central government have been pushing on the British Muslim community for the past two years - and there is no reason to believe that it would not be extended, in the name of anti-fascism, to include the political Left if it appeared convenient or expedient to do so, perhaps in order to seem to show even-handedness.

This alliance has caused an important principle to be breached: where anti-Fascists draw the clearest possible line is at appearing on the same platform as BNP members and am I the only one intrigued that New Labour, with undignified haste, ditched this position, which it held for a long time, in the run-up to the BNP’s appearance on Question Time? Where is the anger about this among anti-Fascists? Where is the sense of betrayal among members of the Labour Left? Ditto anti-fascist Liberal Democrats?

This decision to sit on the same panel as the BNP reflects the enormous role of the media in New Labour’s DNA, born as it was in response to the entry of the advertising industry and media professionals into electoral politics and the consequent triumph of presentation over content. New Labour has come to dread missing out on Question Time as much as having to go into the white-majority estates it progressively abandoned after abandoning Clause 4 and win them back from apathy and the BNP. New Labour lazily relies instead within the same constituencies on the assured block votes of Asians in 'white flight' areas.

Now that hustings, local control over parliamentary candidates and party conferences featuring exchanges of opinion have been buried, along with the political literacy that they nurtured, participatory democracy has gone and the democracy we have in its place is a degraded version. This explains why getting on Question Time has become almost like an oxygen tent for all parts of the political spectrum, apart from those of us to the left of even the old Labour Party, who know that the nearest we will be allowed to get to the programme is to be represented by an ex-Labour MP last seen idiotically licking milk out of the bowl of self-publicity on ‘Big Brother’.

The Question Time dam has been breached and there will be at least one more BNP appearance on Question Time between now and the General Election and next time there will probably not be an exclusive focus on Griffin’s personal track record; the normalisation of the BNP will develop a stage further, giving them an opportunity to showcase quite different and potentially appealing policies on a variety of issues. Being able to argue politically against them from the point of view of the interests of the working class will become ever more vital. It is increasingly difficult to see how the existing anti-fascist alliance with parts of the establishment in defence of the degraded British democracy can deliver this, particularly if they are found increasingly arguing anti-working class policies against the BNP’s Strasserite anti-capitalism.

A further aspect of this alliance that almost certainly weakens us in these changing times is how it entangles us with British nationalist ideology; because of the way our establishment allies argue the anti-fascist case. This was vividly illustrated on the Question Time programme by the spat between Griffin and the rest of the panel over who could inherit the iconic legend that is Winston Churchill.

What possible interest do we have in this type of dispute over British nationalist and imperialist icons? In his own words, Churchill saw fascism as the ultimate defence against communism. His antipathy to Hitler was based not on principled politics or fine motives, but on a rivalry of power; he also advocated a policy of appeasement to Franco and went out of his way to applaud Mussolini’s struggle against ‘the bestial appetite and passions of Leninism’.

Churchill believed that ‘the international Jew’ had brought down imperial Russia and believed in the analysis, if not the fact, of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. He looked to Zionism to “provide the antidote to this sinister conspiracy and bestow stability instead of chaos on the western world”. It was precisely his attribution of conspiratorial power to the Jews that meant Churchill saw it as essential for Britain to side with the Zionists. In short, his thinking was anti-semitic even if his practice was anti-Arab.

Churchill’s imperialism was racist in tooth and claw and he was a class warrior with few parallels. For Churchill, civil liberties were instantly dispensable when it came to a threat from the Left. If he had been on history’s losing side, he would probably have been judged a war criminal.

The BNP has consolidated into a primarily electoral party, which, just like all the others, takes its symbols seriously. To even attempt to deny that Churchill may well have joined them is to ignore his core beliefs on race, empire, the nation, immigration, trade unions and socialism and to involve us in political arguments that imply a common nationalist view of the world. It is also to let down lots of actual and potential anti-fascists whose traditions and oppression place us in opposition to almost everything Churchill represented.

We cannot base successful anti-Fascist work on defying the historical record and making dodgy alliances with British national sentiment and we certainly cannot do so in a recession coupled with a crisis in political representation. The BNP are determined to persevere with their use of the Second World War and Churchill as symbols of the Britain they want to restore and so the establishment will be drawn into arguing this with them from time to time, but is this the job of anti-fascists?

The alliance with an establishment that wants to fight the BNP on an ultimately dishonest and unwinnable basis is not a way forward in the long term.

Our ability to persuade people not to bother looking at the BNP’s policies has been taken from us - by changes within the BNP, by the recession, by the crisis in the political legitimacy of parliamentary party politics and, arguably, by our alliance with these parties. We need to take stock of where this leaves us.

THE UNAVOIDABLE NEED TO TAKE ON THE BNP’S ACTUAL POLICIES

The cocktail of recession and a crisis in political representation, against the backdrop of a vacuum on the Left of British politics, means that anti-fascism has to present a political alternative to this degraded democracy or start to risk failure in its mission to guard against a fascist party breaking through into contention for power. Otherwise, the BNP will stand increasingly alone in providing an alternative, which presents us with long-term political dangers that the National Front never posed. The maintenance of our existing alliances has to be a secondary consideration in this new strategic situation that we face.

Pretending that the BNP’s actual policies are of no real relevance because they are not who they pretend to be is not sensible politics. It is not working any more and the current alliance with the political establishment and its parties has more costs than benefits. Those who still focus their activity on what Griffin, not without reason, calls ‘demonisation’ of the BNP need to undertake a crash course on what the BNP is saying to its core constituencies, because if we are not countering these, we are not countering the BNP.

But, how?

Until 3 months ago, I was the Director of the Oldham Race Equality Partnership (OREP) and had been for 6 years, during which time we worked with community activists on white-majority estates to successfully undermine the support for the BNP. We convinced these communities through our consistent work with them that we had more to offer than the BNP did. In fact, as a result, we ended up with more white community activists than ethnic minority representatives on the organisation’s board.

Over the years, we quartered the BNP vote in their main target wards and, to date, they have never come near getting a Councillor elected in Oldham, despite seeing it as one of their best chances after the riots in 2001. The BNP was also recently defeated in the St Helens ward in Barnsley by working with and through deeply-rooted local community activists, but what about all those neighbourhoods that don’t have such, politicised community activists? Nick Lowles’ emphasis in his June 2008 article was on the importance of building local groups but, when coupled with his emphasis on Election campaigns, this inevitably means that these local groups are temporary alliances of local Labour Party and Liberal Democrat activists, together with people from organisations further to the left and unaffiliated people. Short-term expediency is exactly that.

My experience from Oldham is that long-term engagement with communities through local newsletters and genuine community organisations is far more dependable than these temporary alliances and that such alliances are only likely to come together when there is long-term community engagement going on anyway.

Crucially, we learned in Oldham that it is absolutely vital to engage with the local BNP’s actual arguments and give alternative answers to the social tensions and conflicts of which they are the symptom. Equally crucially, however, we were quite helpless in the European Elections, as national political factors increased the proportional support for the BNP in wards which neither the BNP nor us had ever focused on. This was despite the most extensive and intense multimedia anti-Fascist campaign ever launched in Britain, which did reach such wards and neighbourhoods with its scattergun approach.

When it comes down to it, even a community engagement anti-Fascist strategy can only go so far on its own without putting an alternative social vision and political programme to people who get nothing from the vision of society featuring economic growth and a globalised, free-market capitalism and are now going to look at the BNP alternative irrespective of us advising them not to take it at face value.

Clearly, Question Time illustrated that the three main parties are too compromised on immigration to combat the BNP on that subject and the same inadequacy would have been shown up even further if Griffin had been able to declare his support for the Postal Workers and for hammering the bankers, which we know he was itching to. He would have been the only one on the panel with any credibility and, in the General Election campaign, the BNP is likely to be the only party putting forward any kind of anti-capitalist perspective unless the British Left can begin to compete effectively on what should be our natural terrain.

The truth is that many BNP policies, such as re-building a manufacturing base protected from foreign competition, “withdrawing from the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” and replacing bureaucrats & managers by health workers, would not have looked that much out of place in the old Labour Party’s manifestos. This is Strasserism, 21st century British style.

This is a real problem for New Labour, which has deliberately distanced itself from these politics, yet still takes for granted the votes and financial support of millions of trade unionists for whom those politics still resonate. New Labour has taken £5,313,000 in political levy payments from the UCW since 2000, only for its Ministers to put the boot in to the union’s current strike; there may come a time when the BNP and its alternative policies, such as restoring utilities to public ownership may be welcomed on picket lines by workers treated with such contempt.

In this context, ‘business as usual’ for anti-fascists translates as asking people to vote for the three parties who are arguing against these policies, some of which would quite comfortably attack the BNP and their policies as ‘socialist’. As the economic and political crisis unwinds, this approach could inadvertently become a campaign for the policies that produced the unsustainable global bubble which has since burst, for the War on Terror, for the demonisation of asylum seekers and for bailing out the bankers – for a society which is more unequal than at any point since the second world war.

For left-wing anti-fascists, who are probably the majority of people who carry out anti-fascist work, the General Election campaign may well see us helping out the Greens or some other small Left campaign putting forward a left-wing programme on Tuesdays and Thursdays, whilst spending Mondays and Fridays supporting an anti-Fascist campaign which calls for people to vote for more of the same.

THE NEED TO FIGHT THE BNP ON RACISM

Something else has changed since the campaigns against the National Front and this complicates the situation, perhaps regionally. These struggles against the NF were waged with little involvement from Black and Asian people, even though Black and Asian political militants were arguably more evident within anti-racist struggles a quarter century ago than now. Back then, anti-Fascism was quite separate from anti-racist struggle, in aims, politics and involvement.

This is, to some extent, no longer the case in those parts of the UK where multiracial communities have become the norm, especially in inner London and in parts of the Midlands and some of the big northern cities; Respect had some success in these places in consolidating a Muslim-White anti-war alliance on the back of the Iraq and Afghan wars, which it later squandered. Even so, there are real questions as to the ability of this alliance to achieve a shared understanding and analysis of what lies behind the War on Terror.

The Question Time audience in October 2009 seemed at times to be that alliance in microcosm, in contrast to the panellists (and Chairman), who all seemed to have been briefed by Hope Not Hate or UAF. Of the two, there can be no doubt that the audience delivered more damaging blows to Griffin, partly because there were some working class voices among them, as opposed to on the panel, but also because they were defending something very tangible to them and quite different from what the panel was trying to defend – the multiracial communities of West London from which they came and the place of Black, Asian and Jewish people within those communities.

The curious thing about anti-Fascist campaigning is that it fails, today as in the past, to provide space for anti-racist campaigning. The reason for this is presumably so as not to dilute the ‘Nazi’ argument, but it is not doing anyone any favours.

The BNP is, in essence, a vehicle for racist sentiment rather than for fascist sentiment, for racist policies rather than for fascist policies, and we need to fight it on each and every one of these, line by line. This cannot be done so long as we are telling people not to look at the BNP’s policies because they are just a mask and it cannot be done over areas of policy such as immigration in which the BNP and the major parties differ over degree rather than on principle, so long as we are in an anti-Fascist alliance with these parties.

The BNP will be defeated ideologically when we defeat the racist arguments it puts forwards and to do this we need to put forward a comprehensive alternative. Without this, experience teaches us that anti-racism tends to slip down the agenda and a large part of the reason why is that anti-racism is an area on which the Left and the establishment parties differ fundamentally. I do not see how we can have both an anti-fascism that includes anti-racism and one which continues to court establishment allies as a major part of its strategy – there are strategic choices to be made.

WHAT OTHER TERRAIN DOES ANTI-FASCISM NEED TO FIGHT ON?

These damaging blows from the Question Time audience were probably damaging only in the eyes of people for whom multiracialism has worked and who identify with it and may not have been damaging at all on white majority estates in suburban East London, the Midlands and the ex-mill towns of Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. The working class has changed (been changed) in composition since the 1970s and become smaller and more divided. This is a major problem for any serious review of anti-Fascist strategy.

It seems that combating the BNP in this changed situation should involve a four-pronged strategy which reflects the changes in class composition which have occurred over the past few decades: -

(i) Encouraging alienated, segregated and unorganised white working class people among whom the BNP already enjoys some support to organise themselves – for themselves, for their communities, for the public services they need and to get back the collective self-respect and leadership from within which has largely been lost. This should include work with the trade unions so that they take explicit responsibility for organising unemployed workers. The Claimants Unions of the 1970s and the Right to Work campaign of the 1980s both had a degree of success and many older people on the Left have the skills and experience from these to put to use again.

(ii) Working among trade unionists and unorganised private sector workers to gain support for a fighting political response to the recession which renders the BNP’s ‘defend British jobs’ (also supported by the Prime Minister) line irrelevant. This should include work with the trade unions so that they take explicit responsibility for organising migrant workers

(iii) Organising and deploying the strength of all those who want to defend their multiracial communities against the BNP’s divisive racism and its determination to “reach an accord with the Muslim world whereby they will agree to take back their excess population which is currently colonising this country” and to deport ‘non-indigenous’ criminals.

(iv) Taking on the BNP at a national and very public level in each of these three parts of the working class over the full breadth of its policies, from its weakest policies, such as the environment, to its strongest, such as immigration, and demonstrating how their policies are all distorted by their overriding obsession with achieving a retrospective racial purity.

Climate Change is the elephant in the room of British politics, especially the way it conflicts with the mantra of economic growth, and this includes the BNP - their policy on the environment is the 200 year-old Malthusian population theory with a few odds and sods tacked on; it is driven by their immigration / repatriation policy and, as the threat of disasters caused by Climate Change becomes more real for people, Climate Change will itself drive more and more migration from south to north. The refusal of the BNP to have policies outside the remit of the nation state can be made to look perversely old-fashioned and ostrich-like as peoples’ sense of environmental crisis gathers momentum.

Environmental issues are the BNP’s Achilles Heel and we should exploit this to the full, but it is difficult to see how either the anti-fascist movement or the Green Party are going to make the most of this as single-issue movements with national and electoral profiles that barely relate to each other. The Green Party seems to be coming under increasing pressure from the media to ‘acknowledge’ that capitalism and its political parties, through carbon-trading, technological fixes and nuclear power, is delivering on the green agenda. Only the green left has the eco-socialist perspective that can resist this and show that capitalism, its core activity of production for profit and its mantra of economic growth are the drivers of environmental crisis.

BNP policies on Immigration are what the establishment parties all keep coming back to whenever they feel the BNP is gaining ground, yet they are stymied by their deal with the devil of globalisation, which means that immigration has to be regulated by the capitalist market and will therefore rise whenever British economic growth outstrips that of competitors. And because modern capitalism is so volatile, the labour supply has to be responsive to changes in relative growth rates, so ready-trained immigrant labour is always preferable to the expense and time it takes to train the under-employed and unemployed parts of the resident population.

The modern reserve army of labour actually resident in the west is on long-term leave of absence. For all these reasons, the sound bites of the mainstream parties on immigration are just so much posturing and this is not going to change – they cannot and will not mount a serious challenge to the BNP on immigration control.

The only viable anti-Fascist position on immigration control is to point out relentlessly that for the BNP this is about racial purity because it is linked to repatriation, in order to re-configure the British population profile of 1945, and to relentlessly confront people with the inevitability that this would cause a brutal civil war in which poor people would be in the front line.

In each of these four strands, there need to be plenty of activists working, each with a clear and comprehensive understanding of the BNP’s actual policies and able to put across a more relevant, inclusive and participatory political programme which stands on the side of working class people, not the ruling elite of this country. This means building and putting forward an alternative rooted in the best of the British left-wing tradition, including its internationalist tradition, and persuading people to vote for it.

WHO CAN DELIVER THIS STRATEGY?

This Proposed 4-strand strategy is unashamedly class-based, because nothing else can compete politically with what the BNP has to offer. Although the BNP does attract from other social classes, it can only be defeated by a social force which is organised and this means winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the working class. Such is the broader political and economic crisis that an anti-fascist alliance with the establishment and its parties, which rules out a class-based approach by definition, has costs as well as benefits and the balance between these seems nowadays to be at or beyond tipping point.

This implies the need for a united left, which can stand up and face the present dangers in front of it, win the support of organised workers and is anti-racist, anti-capitalist and eco-socialist at its core, whatever its precise composition and politics. It needs to have a minimum programme for defending the working class in the recession and to be defined by its activism within the working class outside of election campaigning, just as the BNP is.

It is unlikely that such a party or alliance will emerge to contest the next General Election in what may otherwise become BNP heartlands and confront the BNP’s Strasserite anti-capitalism with a Left alternative. Without this, and without a clearly unified electoral alliance of the Left, though, we could well see the BNP getting a vote much closer to that of the 3 main parties.

Much is being made of the comparisons between the BNP and the development of Le Pen’s FN in France on the eve of its surge in the mid-1980s. These comparisons are badly misplaced.

The situation confronting us here is far worse now than it was in France in the 1980s.

In France, whatever the Maurras – then Croix de Fer – then Pétainist right-wing extremist tradition, it was heavily outweighed politically by the French tradition of military resistance to fascism (the FTP and the Maquis), which still lives on. Also, though the PCF (French Communist Party) is a pale shadow of its former self, its anti-fascist tradition is not dead. Similarly, there is a far-left that dwarfs its counterparts in the UK in size and significance and which is tactically more astute and sensible.

These factors have made a major contribution to building an ongoing, possibly even insurmountable, barrier to the further advance of the FN. They were strongly to the fore during the colossal demonstrations across France after Le Pen got through to the second round of the Presidential election in 2002. Not for nothing was the “Chant des Partisans” rediscovered and not for nothing did it achieve renewed and widespread popularity amongst young people at the time, even making it into the French music charts. The mobilisations of 2002 and the determination of the electorate to defeat Le Pen saw off the FN, which has still not recovered from the electoral hammering it, got.

Such traditions of heavy-duty resistance and the democratic republican ideology that underpins them do not exist here. We have Cable Street, we have the International Brigade (so do the French), we have the 43 Group, the 62 Group and the ANL vintage 1977-1980 but none of these has remotely the weight – historically, politically or culturally – of anti-fascism in France, where the mass of people experienced fascism at the hands of the Nazi occupiers and their willing French helpers. We cannot polarize things in the same way.

Likewise, if we compare the situation here, especially the groundswell that now runs behind the BNP, with the situation in Germany in say, 1927 or 1928, we are not in the healthiest position. Again we have no CP or Social Democratic Party with their panoply of organisations that left no corner of the working class untouched and which were there for the working class, even though they were ultimately undone by their failure to unite.

In Germany today, the biggest obstacle to fascism remains the near-universal awareness of what fascism brought down on the German people. This means that when alarm bells ring, the State and the political parties, including the very strong Left Party, present a solid front. Again, the capacity for resistance, for saying “Thus far…and no further” is greater and far more rooted than here. And, we never – fortunately – experienced fascism. If we ever do, it will take over in brutality from where Hitler left off, with the mass repatriation of people or some other ‘solution’ that can be carried out on UK territory.

With almost everything working for it, including the latest official statistics on UK population, the BNP is now presented with an enormous opportunity to become a real social force with little to undermine it or face it down. It has for some time been trespassing on working class territory, penetrating communities with no one or no structures of resistance to repulse it. Periodically, a New Labour spokesperson acknowledges this but then nothing happens.

The days when people on working class estates looked up to key individuals living there – whether they belonged to the CP, the Labour Party, the Trotskyists or were militant trade unionists – have also now almost completely gone. There are few people to lead those communities from within and that is what is vital. Only a clear Left wing alternative can re-awaken a tradition of community activism and leaders; other politics have no basis on which to engage those communities and they cannot speak for them and middle England at the same time.

New Labour and its networks have been a big part of the Hope Not Hate alliance and strategy and no fewer than 57 MPs and 8 MEPs support Unite Against Fascism; New Labour is now a big part of the problem facing us in dealing with the BNP over the next few years and arguably the key part of the problem. Alliance with New Labour and the other mainstream parties causes us a major political headache and undermines our anti-Fascist message.

In my view we need a new national strategy based on fighting the BNP across the whole range of politics and this cannot be done by separating off anti-Fascism from every other political issue. Ultimately, we are in this position because of the retreat of the Labour Party from social and political reform and that has now come home to roost – someone else has to fight the BNP for the hearts and minds of the people who relied in the past on Labourism to represent and struggle for their interests.

To me, this means a united left, or at the very least a truly comprehensive Alliance, has to fight the next General Election and I say this fully aware of just how far away we are from that. The far-left doesn't engage much with the white working class, remains demoralized and is more often fixated on an outdated "demos & rallies" strategy; an outdated form of protest politics which doesn't arise organically out of communities. The long history of bickering, splits and disunity which has made the British Left a joke among itself, as well as internationally, has to be brought to an end – abruptly, and in the knowledge that no-one else has the understanding or the ideas which can compete with Strasserite anti-Capitalism. The new British Left Party I am talking about would be defined from the outset by its anti-Fascist work, its anti-racism and its eco-socialism.

The opportunity and the threat have come at the same time. The question as to why the British left has not revived in the midst of a simultaneous recession and crisis in both political representation and in the belief in the capitalist market has a potential answer. Perhaps it needs a rude awakening to the threat of fascism to bring together all of its groups, parties and the far greater number of individuals who long since left those organisations.

If this proposal is to go forward it should really take the form of the anti-fascist movement deciding firstly whether it wants to put this to the left or not, but such is the state of the left that the anti-fascist movement is extremely unlikely to put the question as things stand, because it has no basis for believing that the left can rise to this challenge and is more likely to remain defiantly divided.

In reality, if anything is going to come of this it needs to be discussed widely both among Anti-Fascist activists and Left groupings, on Left blogs and websites, and at some point before the New Year, someone needs to test if a consensus emerges from this. Please help to get this discussed by passing it on to your networks.

My final question to the Left is this – if the threat of fascist resurgence, of racist resurgence and the threat of Climate Change are not sufficient in combination to force unity on the Left, can we still think that our political beliefs have an historical role at all?

John Tummon
9 November 2009