Popularity (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just how popular is populism? Taking the media, social and broadcast, at face value it appears to be the surging political trend nationally and internationally. In Britain, Reform UK are feted as the almost certain next government in waiting. Every small rubber dinghy that braves the Channel crossing to disgorge its cargo of migrants on the Anglo-Saxon shore counts as a clutch of increased votes for the party. Their accommodation frequently features, on the evening news, as the epicentre of patriotic outrage.

For a while that stalwart British icon, the Turkish Saint George, had his banner raised to flutter from many a lamppost. Or it was draped around the shoulders of angry demonstrators traipsing through the streets of the capital to gather and be harangued by demagogues. Certainly those marchers, like most people, have a great deal to be angry about. Lives blighted by inadequate incomes, rising prices, serious failings in health and social services and a growing housing crisis.

Governments come and go, and nothing substantially alters, except often for the worse. Even a desperate grab for a major change, with its promise of significant transformation such as Brexit, quickly proves an illusion, its glister merely fool’s gold.

Despite being leading purveyors of this political vacuity in its previous incarnation as UKIP, Reform UK is presently gaining popularity as the prospective saviour of the nation. They have, of course, the advantage of novelty, not yet marked by failure of governance. Reform UK’s impressive showing in May’s council elections has been tarnished somewhat through a number of resignations by, expulsions and suspensions of, some of their new councillors. There is evidence from a previous seeming breakthrough in local government of similar serious failings.

The British National Party in 2003 made what appeared to be a breakthrough in council elections. This was seen at the time as a harbinger of further success come elections for metropolitan districts, the European parliament and the mayor of London. This expectation was largely frustrated in 2004. Although the BNP did gain 3 council seats in Epping Forest, scene of recent unpleasantness at the Bell Hotel, it lost 7 of its 8 seats in Burnley, but gained one in Bradford. This proved the peak of its success.

Reform UK have certainly exceeded this precedent and might represent the triumph of populism come the next general election. This then invites the question of how popular populism has to be to succeed.

In the 2024 general election Labour took 33.7 percent of the UK vote (34.6 per cent in GB) to acquire an overall majority of 172. In other words the democratic process as it now is elected a government with a large majority even though around 66 percent of those who actually voted didn’t vote for it.

The last electoral showing by a party boasting a popular surge was in 2019. The Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn had witnessed a large influx of new members to become by far the largest party, at a time when party memberships were declining and had been for a number of years. Despite this Labour accrued just 32.2 percent of the UK vote, noticeably down from Corbyn’s previous effort in 2017. Labour was popular enough to attract those new members, but not to become elected, falling 11 percent short of the Conservative vote on 43.6 percent.

Becoming a government does not require a party to be popular enough to win an outright majority of the vote. Indeed, in the multi-party system we now seem to have, somewhere around a third of votes might actually be enough as Labour showed last time. This then is presumably Reform UK’s target. Should it achieve that target it is a moot point as to how long that populism lasts when it is confronted with administering all the problems and contradictions capitalism continually generates. No party to date deliberately sets out to generally make people’s lives worse. Yet they inevitably are forced into enacting policies that are detrimental to workers when the economic imperatives of capitalism demand it. As Britain’s shortest serving Prime Minister, Liz Truss, quickly found out, economic mismanagement does not even require democratic process to be removed from office.

Populism is commonly associated with right-wing politicians and parties, but the left also make attempts at popular appeal. Following on from boosting Labour Party membership, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus around which Your Party is being promoted. A loose conglomeration of disaffected Labourites and left-wing reformists, Your Party intends to become to the Labour Party what Reform UK is to the Tories. However, there are signs it is already failing before it has had the chance to present itself to the electorate.

Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, has parted company with Your Party citing a toxic culture of infighting, jostling for position and factional competition. Also, there have been questions raised concerning access to, and deployment of, £800,000 raised in donations. Those who have had any experience of left-wing politics will recognise these as common features figuring in previous incarnations of popular front alliances of left Labour and Trotskyist ‘Socialist’ groups. Even if, however unlikely it presently seems, Your Party was to succeed in replacing Labour as the left alternative elected to govern the country, it would still face the fundamental constraints capitalism imposes on administrations.

A simple example: the Brexit referendum had two possible results, but only one outcome. A vote to stay in the EU meant capitalism, while a vote to leave meant capitalism. So it is with parliamentary elections; whichever party is popularly voted for – left, right or centre – capitalism remains the determining feature of society.

In a sense, all contending political parties are populist. They vie with each other for the popular vote, that 35 to 40 percent that unlocks the door to 10 Downing Street. All parties that is, bar one, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. There is no aspiration, not even a far-fetched one, to be invited by the monarch to form a government. This is not lack of ambition. Indeed the Socialist Party’s ambition goes way beyond the severely circumscribed aspirations of all the others.

Only the working people of the world acting in concert to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism can see the realisation of the aims of the Socialist Party. The common democratic ownership of the means of wealth creation to establish a moneyless society dedicated to meeting everyone’s needs without the imperative to make profits. The election of a popular parliament dedicated to serving the emergence of such a society would be an important element in that process. But it wouldn’t be the Socialist Party sitting on the front benches as there would be no front benches.

The socialist cause certainly needs much, much greater popularity than it presently has. That may involve socialist candidates standing in elections, with a view to raising awareness, provoking voters to think beyond the present political offerings.

Socialists do court popularity, yet not for themselves or even their party, but for socialism itself. No matter how unpopular that idea presently is it still remains, and will remain, the only alternative for people who want to take control and refashion society to meet their needs.

D. A.

Letter: Fascist? (2009)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fascist?

Dear Editors,

 

 I am writing in response to Adam Buick’s article about the BNP. Whilst I would whole-heartedly agree that the best way to deal with the BNP is to confront their ideology head-on, and debate with them if necessary in order to expose the paucity of their ideas, I do feel that it is naive to state that “the BNP is not a fascist party.” Their constitution may not be overtly fascist, and they may no longer espouse fascism in their public utterances, but it would hardly be a vote-winner if they did! Is it really believable that, if the BNP came to power, they would still guarantee free speech to their opponents, or meekly allow themselves to be voted out again a few years later? Er… Remember that Nick Griffin is on record as stating that “well-aimed boots and fists” will win out over “rational argument”!

 Regarding their claims not to be racist, I can only recall an incident from when I lived in east London 15-20 years ago. In those days, the BNP was more of a localised nuisance than a national threat. They used to expound their “policies” by means of small credit-card sized stickers stuck to lamp-posts or other available surfaces. “Hang Black Muggers” is one particular gem that springs to mind. In any case, I recall seeing two of these stickers side-by-side; one read, “Protect British Jobs – Ban Imports.” Alongside this (this still being the Apartheid era), was another which read, “Boycott the Boycott – Buy South African!”

 Ridiculous they may be, but these people are gradually obtaining positions of influence. It is important to expose them for what they are, but please do not underestimate them.

Shane Roberts, 

Bristol

Reply:

Irrespective of whether or not the BNP meets the historical criteria for being labelled fascist, their racism and extreme nationalism is bad enough – Editors.

Letter: Reply to the BNP (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reply to the BNP

Dear Editors,

Regarding your article “No Asylum from the Wages System” (Socialist Standard, June), the BNP now has 16 elected councillors. Yes, we consider that wherever native people of the world live, their genetic ancestry in that region, often going back many 100s, if not 1000s of generations in those regions, make them pre-eminent in those regions. Just as individuals work to buy their own homes and leave them to subsequent generations (and not to strangers), we acknowledge that our forebears created the UK, its infrastructure, roads, towns, villages, ancient buildings and institutions, many fighting, some giving their lives, in wars to protect our native land. i.e. we own the UK. We welcome strangers and people from alien lands but only on the condition that our proprietorship is paramount, an idea branded as “racist” by the enemies of Britain. No doubt the anti-racists and lefties in the UK would complain if whites went out and colonised parts of the Third World (Rhodesia is a prime example where white rule was beneficial and now the native blacks are reverting to type and the country goes to the dogs South Africa the same).

You say: “For example, the report Migration: an Economic and Social Analysis from the Research, Development and Statistic Directorate of the Home Office, demolishes a great many of the myths around immigration observing that migrants tend to have higher incomes than natives (on the whole, although they occupy a great range of income brackets), and that there is ‘little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration’”.

This is a distortion – the report does not refer to “migrants” but immigrants who have been here for more than one generation, and it goes on to say that of the immigrants who have higher incomes than natives and better qualifications, 48 percent of them are from “white” countries (USA, Australia, EU etc). The remaining have lower economic activity and worse qualifications. (Alan Travis in the Guardian made the same mistake). I think you are confusing the report with the Home Office report “The fiscal effect of migration” (January 2002) where it shows that migrants pay £1.5bn more in taxes than they receive in benefits, again if you look at the detail you will find that 1 percent of tax payers pay the highest 20 percent of taxes – i.e. once migrants such as US and Japanese financiers etc are taken out of the equation, the remaining migrants (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers etc) are a net loss. Still, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The idea of abolishing national borders is crackers.

Dr Phil Edwards, 

BNP National Press Officer

P.S. do you support the anti democratic activities of the ANL?

 

Reply:

1. The link you try to draw between a particular part of the globe and the “genetic ancestry” of the people living there is just nonsense. You talk about this often going back “100s if not 1000s of generations”. But, taking a generation as being 30 years, just going back a hundred generations (not hundreds) is going back 3000 years, i.e. to 1000 BC. You’re not seriously contending are you that the island of Britain should belong only to the descendants of those Iron Agers who were there then, whoever they were (and their ancestors will have come from various parts of the continent of Europe)? In which case, most people living in Britain today, being descendants of later settlers (such as the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons – yes, the English language will have to go, too –,Vikings, Normans, Flemings, Irish) fall into your category of “stranger” and “alien” to be offered grants to go and resettle “where they came from”.

And, if we go back a thousand generations, i.e. 30,000 years, there’s probably weren’t any humans living in Britain. Go back another thousand generations and all humans are still living in Africa, where the common ancestors of all of us humans evolved. So, the logic of the argument from genetics points rather to the view that the whole Earth should belong to the whole human race.

In any event, from what you say about Africa and from the BNP’s street-level propaganda, the only genetic difference you are concerned about is skin pigmentation. Which is as stupid as wanting to distinguish between people on the basis of the colour of their hair. Neither skin colour nor hair colour gives the slightest indication of what a person is capable of or thinks or is likely to behave, or anything else, except, that is, how they are going to react to exposure to the Sun’s rays.

2. You are quite right that the infrastructure of the big island off the North West coast of the Eurasian landmass was built up by the labour of generations of serfs and wage-workers, many of them the ancestors of a large proportion of the current population, but this does not mean that their descendants therefore “own” Britain. Far from it. You yourself quote figures which show the unequal distribution of income in Britain (at least 20 percent going to the top one percent). This reflects the uneven distribution of profit-yielding assets, where the top 10 percent own as much as the remaining 90 percent. The ownership of land in Britain is even more concentrated, with aristocratic families such as the Queen and the Duke of Westminster owning vast tracts of it. No, Britain is not owned by its “native” population, but by a tiny minority of rich property owners. It’s their country not ours. We only work here.

3. The Home Office study was about “migrants”. We only paraphrased what it said, which was: “Migrants have higher average incomes than natives, but this average masks the polarisation of experiences, with migrants over-represented at the top of the income distribution but also highly concentrated at the lower end of the income distribution, and experience lower activity rates” and “There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration” (p. viii). But, whatever the study says, we still say that migration – out of as well as in to Britain – has not harmed people born in Britain. In fact, it hasn’t made any difference, either way. The problems we face are not caused by workers from other parts of the world migrating to this part, but by the capitalist system of class ownership and production for profit instead of the common ownership and production geared to satisfying people’s needs which will be the case in socialism.

4. We are not advocating the abolition of frontiers here and now under capitalism, if only because we know it’s not going to happen: the capitalist states, into which the world is currently divided, will always prefer to be in a position to control the labour force within their frontiers. What we envisage is that when the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all the human race then the world would no longer be divided into separate states, and people would be free to travel anyway in the world without needing a passport or visa and whether to live or to work or simply for pleasure.

5. We do not support the Anti-Nazi League and its undemocratic policy of seeking to restrict freedom of speech. We are in favour of free speech for everyone, not excluding fascists. And we practice what we preach, having debated in the past with Mosley’s BUF and the National Front. Not because we have any sympathy for their views, but because we think that the best way to deal with these views is to expose them for the dangerous nonsense they are. We’d be prepared to continue this debate with you at a public meeting, but we know that the “anti-fascists” would employ bully-boy tactics to stop it taking place. Pity. Since we would have welcomed the chance to publicly expose the BNP, before an audience of interested workers, as the peddlers of divisive and irrational nonsense that you are.

Editors.

No asylum from the wages system (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the May local elections in England and Wales, much has been made, by leftists and liberals, of the fact that the BNP – opportunistically shmoozing around in multiculturalist clothes – ended up with three more local councillors, bringing their total to eight. The pundits railed in helpless, speechless apoplexy against the fascist threat – their speechlessness, however, reveals how they have no good arguments with which to counter the nationalists; and that it is precisely the failure of their ideas that turn the workers towards hopeless fantasies.

The very idea they all try to spread, alike – that a given country is owned by some inclusive “we”, based on common descent or culture which “we” all have an interest in defending; that “we” owe loyalty toward, and toward our “fellow-countrymen” over folks from other lands – is the very premise that the nationalists latch onto and tout as their glorious cause. All the leftists and Liberals can do is whine that they have taken “legitimate patriotism” too far, that they are extremists.

Asylum seekers

The hold that such ideas have on the workers can be seen from the media treatment of the issue of “asylum seekers” – migrants looking for protection in safer lands. Whereas socialists have attended many demonstrations – to leaflet and counterpoise the socialist position to that of the usual raggle-taggle band of reformist organisers – comprising many thousands, of which barely a whisper is mentioned by the national media, all it takes is a handful of local residents protesting against an asylum seeker detention centre for it to make the national news. The editors and news-managers project their own expectation that many of their consumers are concerned by the “flood” of asylum seekers, by pushing the issue up the news agenda.

The professional politicians do their craven best to pander to this supposed collective identity. Government ministers seek to project the line that they are “firm but fair” in dealing with the asylum “crisis”. Desperate to deflect Tory charges that Britain is a “soft touch” for immigrants, they tout every reform taken to speed up the process of ejecting “undesirables” from the country. They talk about legitimate asylum seekers, as opposed to economic migrants – as if poverty itself were not one of the cruellest breeds of oppression.

All this, despite the fact that the government’s own published reports and advice clearly show that the ideas that dominate the “asylum debate” are largely spurious. For example, the report Migration: an Economic and Social Analysis from the Research, Development and Statistic Directorate of the Home Office, demolishes a great many of the myths around immigration, observing that migrants tend to have higher incomes than natives (on the whole, although they occupy a great range of income brackets), and that there is “little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration”.

One of the central fallacies, peddled by the gutter press in particular, is that the asylum seekers are trying to get access to a “soft touch” welfare system. Yet, the report states, migrants tend to use welfare provision in roughly the same proportions as indigenous workers – although that includes higher usage of unemployment and housing benefits, whilst they receive less incapacity and pension benefits. Indeed, the figures for unemployment among migrants apparently show that around 6 percent of them are unemployed as compared with a general unemployment rate in the economy of just under 5 percent – and this is given the filtering employment barriers of language, legal status, lack of references or recognised qualifications or sheer outright racism, that may stand in their way of finding employment.

Indeed, another report Understanding the Decision Making of Asylum Seekers actively refutes welfare as a basic motive for travelling around the world to come to another country. The majority of respondents had little or no knowledge of the UK welfare system, at most they had a vague idea that they would be “looked after”. Indeed, after finding that welfare receipt was not a primary motivating factor to move, the report notes that “most [of the immigrants interviewed] wanted to find a job and did not want to live on state benefits.”

The report lists other factors likely to be of importance – the perception that Britain is a fair and open society is high on the list, as was the desire to be with family and friends already in the UK. Such primary reasons stem largely from the historic foreign policy of the UK government, in presenting itself as a bastion of the free world whilst simultaneously exerting direct political control and links over far-flung lands. Capitalism is a global phenomena, and the interests of capital in Britain materially reach into all corners of the globe.

This is also amply demonstrated by the lists of countries where asylum seekers are coming from – Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey making up the top six countries. The chaos of global politics and repression drives the need to migrate, a global chaos born of the struggle between rival capitalist bands to access and monopolise the wealth of the world.

Demand for labour

While it is true, as one of the writers in the report observed, that the decision to economically migrate is not taken solely on labour market factors, and the nature of the political regime and country may well have a strong determining role, nevertheless the demand for labour to be attracted to concentrated areas is a structural feature of capitalism. Since its inception, capitalism has drawn workers into highly concentrated areas of development in order to satisfy its labour needs. All those people seeking migration, whether legal or illegal, are simply obeying the imperative that they must try to find a place to work; and no amount of government restrictions will change that fact.

In fact the report Migration Population in the UK: Fiscal Effects states that migration is a net contributor to the British capitalist economy. Many migrants bring new skills, new industries (including the industry around migration). Each new worker is able to expand the capacity of industry to produce. Of course, what the report neglects to mention is that this happens only within the remit of the profitability of capital, which can and will discard workers – irrespective of their origins – whenever its inevitable crises interrupt growth.

It should, therefore, be in the interest of governments to facilitate (at least) the smooth running of the labour market. Indeed, they should promote the widest movement of labour possible. Yet, despite this interest, and the clear advice at their disposal, they fail to do this.

A primary reason for this failure is the perception among workers (who have votes) that there is some threat to themselves from competitors from overseas. It’s a matter of record that those who are in possession of little are easily frightened by the threat of some other coming to take it away – hence all the medieval tales of færies and witches trying to steal children from impoverished peasants. The appearance of jobs going to these “foreigners” whilst their “own” go without reinforces the illusion that migration causes unemployment. However, a government so minded could choose to argue against these illusions, and pour resources into propaganda to that end.

That they choose not to indicates another reason – that governments rely upon apparent homogeneity of culture and population to secure support for their actions and policies. How else, otherwise, to spread the message that “we are all in this together” if the “we” cannot communicate in the same language, with the same set of meanings and values? The growth of capitalism has occurred alongside the growth of the culturally homogenous state – usually through forced population migrations – wherein the owners and rulers of a land could pretend to some sort of common identity with the ruled.

Hence the problem, in the eyes of many capitalists, that despite the fact that since the second world slaughter more people – year on year – left the UK than entered it, of a change of “culture” without the consent of the population. That is, that the cultural changes are breaking up the historical cultural bloc upon which traditional power and authority is based. The economic needs of capital come into conflict, again, with its social basis and the political needs of the master class.

So far as socialists are concerned, this attempt to try and make a common appearance of an interest with our exploiters is like a burglar playing on their support for the same football team as their victim. It does not change the relationship one iota. We see the harm that is done by national boundaries, that prevent workers from moving to be with whom they want to be with; prevent them from sharing their skills and their knowledge as they see fit; prevent them from seeing their common cause.

So far as socialists are concerned, it is not a case of chanting “Asylum Seekers are welcome here”, which implies we as workers have some right to say who is and isn’t welcome in the first place; nor even of saying that the asylum laws should be relaxed. We understand that the thing which makes workers leave behind their communities, and go to a place where their language is not spoken, is the wages system itself, which swats humans around the globe like a kitten playing with its toys. This underlies the need for us to recognise our identical position with regards to the wages system, and work together, as workers across the world, across boundaries, to create a commonly owned planet where all can live in security.

Pik Smeet

Racism rears its ugly head (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leninist ideologues of the SWP believe a ban on the BNP will go some way to eradicate racism. To this end they re-formed the Anti Nazi League in January 1992 to confront racist boneheads head on and to awaken public consciousness as to a "new Fascist threat". Similarly, the Anti Racist Alliance — another of the anti-racist groups that have sprung up in recent years, vying to be the standard bearers of the cause — believe making racial harassment a criminal offence and tightening restrictions on the sale of extreme-right literature will make racism go away.

Both seem not to realize that the prevalence of racist ideas is largely due to the official racism that has been perpetrated by British governments, local councils, courts, police, etc throughout the twentieth century.

Successive Liberal, Tory and Labour Governments have been at the forefront in promoting xenophobia through Act of Parliament for almost 90 years: 1905 Aliens Act; 1914 Aliens Restriction Act; 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act; 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act; 1971 Immigration Act; 1981 British Nationality Act; 1991 Asylum Bill. These Acts resulted in the lowering of successful applications for UK citizenship by 28 percent last year the lowest for 10 years.

Racist candidate

In 1964, a Tory candidate won the Smethwick Parliamentary seat from Labour with the slogan "if you want a nigger lor a neighbour, vote Labour". In the May 1979 election, a month after Blair Peach lost his life at an anti-Nazi rally, the NF vote fell from 19.2 percent to 6.1 percent in its strongest seat. This had less to do with public disapproval of racism and more to do with the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. As one Guardian writer pointed out:

The demise of the NF as a political force was mainly due to Margaret Thatcher rather than any anti-racist campaign. When she said in 1978 that the British people feared they were ’being swamped by an alien culture’, NF supporters switched to Conservative" (14 May).

November 1991 saw Kenneth Clarke, the then Education Secretary, stepping in to prevent a housing association moving five black families from inner-city Nottingham into his neighbouring suburban constituency of Rushcliffe. Clarke feared the families would be "problem families", and that their homes would become half way houses for criminals. Challenged on the matter he replied "I am not concerned about the colour of people’s skin, but you don’t put square pegs in round holes” (Guardian, 22 November 1992).

The current panic about the rising tide of fascism has been sparked by a BNP candidate, Derek Beackon, securing a council seat in the East End ward of Millwall. One BNP councillor, however no more constitutes the dawn of the Fourth Reich than did the victory of the two NF councillors in Blackburn in the mid 1970s.

Neither is racism in Tower Hamlets anything new. When the Liberals took the Tower Hamlets council from Labour seven years ago they embarked upon a discriminatory housing policy, which was attacked for its racist nature in giving priority to the sons and daughters of Tower Hamlets residents. In 1991 the Commission for Racial Equality look the Lib-Dcm council to the High Court for failing to ensure that their housing policies did not discriminate against ethnic minorities. The High Court ruled against the Lib-Dem council housing policy. However, the extent of official racism was this year to become even more evident when the Court of Appeal went on to rule against the decision, permitting the council to investigate the immigration status of applicants.

If anything, the BNP victory was the result of local disenchantment at the efforts of the three mainstream political parties in the area, and frustration caused by local levels of poverty, unemployment and deprivation. Tower Hamlets has pockets of high unemployment and last year out of a total housing stock of 67,581, 45,475 houses were found to be unfit to live in or in desperate need of repair.

Racist housing policy, though, is not confined to the East End of London. In October of this year it was announced that the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council were to be taken to the High Court by the Commission for Racial Equality, for its failure to comply with its order to end discriminative housing policy.

Official racism is all around us, and not confined to the activities of a few East End boneheads. The whirlwind of patriotism and jingoism, for instance, whipped by the Gulf War with the help of the right wing press (Sun, Daily Mail, etc) provoked widespread violence and racial abuse in Britain, including the firebombing of 20 mosques.

In June this year, European Community Ministers agreed to strengthen the walls of "Fortress Europe" in the wake of an influx of Bosnian refugees fleeing the civil war in former Yugoslavia. At the same time the British government were detaining 200 immigrants without trial.

Hitler impressed

Those who think that the BNP are unique in their wish to make Britain "racially pure" would do well to remember that the sentiments expressed by Winston Churchill almost 90 years ago. Churchill, impressed by the theories of Social Darwinism, theories that also impressed Hitler, wanted to sterilize 100,000 "mentally degenerate" Britons who he felt were threatening to sully the British character.

These sentiments have echoed down the years, changing form as the situation demands and nowadays finding outlet, amongst other things, in official opposition to the ERM and Maastricht, "Buy British" campaigns and belligerent tabloid headlines that condone the efforts of "our boys" overseas. Anything, in fact, that might impinge upon the 'British way of life" is viewed as a threat by reactionaries from the Labour Party to the extreme right.

The calls to "Ban the BNP" and "Bash the Fash" by the ARA and the ANL must be opposed by Socialists. As Socialists we should uphold the right to platform. Once we beg the state to regulate organizations and movements we set precedents that pave the way for regulations for other organizations Gay Rights. Pro-Abortionists, single parent groups, perhaps a ban on the SWP. the RCP and the Socialist Party? Andrew Puddephatt of Liberty expresses similar thoughts: in banning the BNP. he said "there is a danger that the government will begin to ban groups which are opposed to their policies" (Guardian, 28 September).

Calling for a ban on the BNP is tantamount to admitting that the working class lacks the ability, the confidence, the ideology, the arguments to tackle racist views head on and to discredit them. At the same time, appeals to the state to ban far right groups distracts attention from the real cause of racism — the capitalist system. Those who openly promote racism can hardly be counted on to abolish it

Home Secretary Michael Howard was right when he commented on the BNP: "Paradoxically, repressive legislation might actually be welcome to such organisations".

To ban the BNP would be to force it underground, to make it a paramilitary organization and thus more attractive to its supporters who relish violence and thrive on the oxygen of publicity. In Northern Ireland a host of organizations are banned (IRA, INLA, IPLO, UVF, UDF, UFF) — this does not stop them killing hundreds of people a year and causing widespread destruction from Belfast to London.

During the ANL march on the BNP headquarters at Welling, a black police constable. Leslie Turner, was apparently singled out for a beating by ANL activists. Speaking from his hospital bed. PC Turner reflected that the BNP had a "legitimate right to freedom of speech" (Times, 18 October).

Is there not an irony in this for the SWP? That in a march they organized to confront racism a black police constable was beaten up who believed racist thugs — who also would have liked to have given him a beating — should have the right to express their views.

Perhaps the BNP could also draw a lesson from this. Of the 20,000 who took to the streets that day. the one that took a beating in protecting them was one they would "repatriate". Both parties, the BNP and the SWP, should stop their infantile bickering and single-issue policies and realize that the real cause of poverty, housing shortages, unemployment is the capitalist system, a system where profits always come first. What we need is class unity. If we must ban anything, ban capitalism!

John Bissett

Does the SWP have an answer to racism? (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Is violent confrontation the answer?

The week after the Unity march was held in October to protest against racism and the BNP, the SWP organised a meeting at the LSE entitled "Why the police protect the Nazis". The speaker was the leading SWP member, Tony Cliff. Anyone attending this meeting to hear anything about why the police protect the Nazis, assuming as the title did that this was the case, would, though, have been very disappointed. The speaker, stupidly or dishonestly, thought that it was enough of an argument to shout to the audience (1) that most police are Nazis and (2) that the police had the constitutional job of supervising the Unity march, so therefore (3) the reason why the police prevented SWP members from burning down the BNP Head Office was that the police were Nazis.

This is what logicians describe as assuming what you are trying to prove. Cliff’s argument was about as strong in its structure as the argument that God is all powerful because created the Universe. Had he been putting this argument about the police being Nazis to an audience on Any Questions or Question Time or on an outdoor platform at Speakers’ Corner, he would have been quite rightly refuted and ridiculed by any cross section of workers.

As it was, Cliff’s audience, many of whom had attended the march, seemed content to wholeheartedly agree with Cliffs rousing oratory. One irony here is that after the contentious report (commissioned by the government from the tobacco magnate Patrick Sheehy) to run the police like a business, many police officers have been wooed by the stringent law and order promises of Tony Blair. Labour’s hopeful Shadow Home Secretary; the result is that come the next general election many coppers will be voting for the same party as the members of the SWP: the Labour Party. It is a point of historical record that at general elections, after lambasting the Labour Party and all its necessary shortcomings, the SWP asks its members to vote for Labour candidates as the election of another Labour government will give workers “an inch more space to manoeuvre" than under the Conservatives.

The Unity march had been organised in the wake of growing racism in Britain and across Europe. The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Workers become desperate and often, ignorantly. look for easily identifiable scapegoats. Racism is thus adopted by them and exploited by those brighter, ruthless politicians who see votes and power in it. The real problem in Tower Hamlets in East London, where Derek Beackon was recently elected as a BNP councillor, is a housing problem.

Respectable racism

It is very important to look at how racism moves from being the nasty neurosis of a few frustrated fanatics and thugs to an idea which thousands of people begin to vote for. The problem in Tower Hamlets is not so much the few skinheads who sell the BNP literature on a Saturday morning — although the threat they pose to local ethnic minorities causes a lot of fear and misery — it is the thousand people with "respectable" appearances who voted BNP in the election and the tens of thousands in Britain who could soon be doing the same thing.

What did the SWP say about this problem at the meeting? What educational and argumentative ammunition did it provide for the eager young radicals who attended to learn about how to persuade fellow workers against racism? The SWP speaker said nothing about such arguments. Absolutely nothing. Instead the 30-minute talk was devoted entirely to repealing the mantra about the police all being Nazis, and to looking at half a dozen ways of using physical force against fascists. His tirade included all the vocabulary of "barricade storming" and the need to use guns against fascist thugs who have knives. Cliff’s argument was befitting of any angry young child who had not yet understood the rôle of ideas in politics.

Fascism personified

He saw fascism as an almost physical entity, a concrete part of society, personified in the small number of identifiable members or officers of the BNP. These people had to be "taken out" (physically deterred from being fascists, by being beaten up or, presumably, killed) and then the problem would be solved. You have to surgically remove the "bad apples". In one of many moments of flamboyant rhetoric he said:

"I'll tell you this. If you have a barrel of good apples but there is in the middle of the good apples one bad apple, the good apples will not make the bad apple good."

What followed from this simplistic and strikingly inappropriate metaphor, is that if the "bad apple" of fascism currently sitting in the middle of society could somehow be surgically removed, then all the good apples would be preserved Although Cliff’s language was riddled with references to force being used against the Nazis, he nowhere articulated with any precision how far his young acolytes should go in the furtherance of their aim to "remove the bad apple". Are the fascists to be simply threatened with baseball bats to relinquish their bigotries; are they to be rounded up and locked away to rot in some secret SWP political prison camps for workers with "the wrong attitude"; or was Cliff recommending that, ultimately, these political incorrigibles should he assassinated?

This meeting, like other SWP meetings I have attended, was rigged. It could not be described as an open, honest meeting designed as a genuine forum for workers to discuss the ideas put by the speaker. The rigging works in this way. The speaker addresses the meeting for half an hour. The chairperson then invites people from the floor for any questions to the speaker or points they wish to raise. Some of these questions, as you might imagine, raise points which are very awkward for the SWP. pointing to inconsistencies in its propaganda, undemocratic features of its organisation or clearly anti-working-class conduct it urges upon its followers. Rather than require the speaker to answer each point from the floor once it has been made (and thus allowing the questioner to come back if they are not satisfied with the speaker's response), the chairperson simply takes all the questions from the floor in sequence without any response from the speaker. When the chairperson thinks enough questions and points have been raised, he or she then invites the speaker to respond to the points collectively. This sinister technique thus permits the speaker to pass over any really troublesome points, damning them with feint response. Such meetings, in the best traditions of authoritarian, deceptive showpieces, give the appearance of being open because questions from the floor are allowed but in reality the questions that the SWP would prefer not to be asked of them in public are deftly avoided by their speakers.

That was exactly what Tony Cliff did at this meeting. One of the first questioners was a young man who identified himself as having been a long-time resident of London’s East End. He said that he could not really see any substantial difference between what Cliff had urged anti fascists to do (i.e., beat up fascists) and what the fascists were doing (beating up anti-fascists and people from ethnic minorities). If what the SWP objected to in fascism was it reliance on force to further its ideas, its bullying, threatening tactics, then surely it was wrong to employ exactly those tactics in opposing the rise of fascism? A few SWP members coughed and shuffled about at this point but Cliff was saved from having to enter into any serious debate with this man because the chairperson moved immediately to the next questioner. When the time did come for Cliff to respond to the six or seven points put to him. he dealt contemptuously with the point from the East Ender. The answer, in a few seconds before hopping on to a more friendly question with a much practised agility, was simply that the force of the anti-fascists was historically justified because (a) the other side started it and (b) the force the the fascists had used before (in the Second World War) and were planning to use again was of such a high order that it would be foolish to try and respond in the realm of ideas.

We were back to the principles of gangsterism. The talk of Robert de Niro playing Al Capone in The Untouchables. "If someone comes for me with fists, I answer with a knife. If he comes with a knife I answer with a gun . . ." Many people in areas like Tower Hamlets are living in desperate poverty. There is a housing crisis. Some people from ethnic minorities do have housing and so ignorant workers are left prey to the idea that if these "immigrants" were ail shipped away then there would be plenty of houses and jobs for "British" workers. What is the best way to argue against this sort of politics? Don’t ask Tony Cliff, he doesn’t seem to know or care. At least if he has any thoughts on these matters he was not disposed to share them with anyone at the SWP meeting. Cliff had other things on his mind and sounded more like Lennox Lewis’s coach than a political thinker.

Burn it down

One of the questions was from a young man from Northern Ireland. He spoke as a member of the SWP and was very keen that the meeting should focus closely on exactly why the SWP activists on the march had been prevented from turning down Upper Wickham Lane in Welling, towards the BNP headquarters "to burn it down". There was momentary unease from some at the meeting whereupon the questioner decided to be more up front: "I mean we might as well be clear about what we w'ere trying to do". He went on to fulminate against the police and how despicably pro-Nazi their conduct was in not permitting reasonable activists like himself to go about their proper civic business with cans of petrol and flame throwers. Clearly, the state was in cahoots with the BNP. Quite who the SWP would turn to for assistance if the BNP threatened to bum down its premises is open to question.

The interesting thing about the contribution of the young frustrated arsonist was that no one sought to dissent from the aim of the march that he avowed. Tony Cliff did not say, for example, in summing up. that the SWP had not formulated any such plan. The chairperson did not publicly proclaim that the questioner was, in fact, speaking for himself alone when ranting on about the need to burn things down. The young firebrand turned out to be the kid who yelled that the Emperor had no clothes on: the naive exposer of truth.

Workers from different cultures and ethnic groups have more in common that that which distinguishes them. They are all living in relative poverty and insecurity while they are systematically robbed by the owners of the means of producing wealth (owners who come from all sorts of racial groups). Racism has not tended to develop in times of economic boom; it flourishes when the going gets particularly tough for workers. With nationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians, racist ideas being toyed with by Labour and Liberal local councillors, and a land where, for instance, the Minister for Education advocates that the Union Jack be unfurled from every school roof in the land, vicious racism is only one goose-step away.

The arguments against racism must be put on radio phone-in programmes, in local and national newspaper letters columns, in public debates, pubs and and during doorstep canvassing. But the only effective arguments against this ugly and recurrent feature of capitalism are those which are truly socialist. Not those quasi socialist SWP banalities which end with an embarrassed instruction "vote Labour with no illusions" at the next general election. It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation. Racism is born from the poverty and nationalistic tensions of capitalism; there is no such thing as a successful campaign against racism within capitalism. That this is so is testified to by the reemergence of racism with all its terrors after it had risen and then fallen in the 1970s. The Anti-Nazi League rather unbelievably claim that racism failed in the 1970s because it was stymied by the might of university students with yellow badges chanting to Clash songs in parks. The truth is that most National Front supporters or potential voters were absorbed into the Conservative Party, specially after Mrs Thatcher assured them all in a speech in 1979 that (a) she would not tolerate our culture being "swamped" by foreigners and (b) that unlike the relatively small and shabby NF, she had the power and real prospect of putting her prejudices into action.

The growth of racism will not be broken with brute force, only bones and hope will become fractured in such a fight. In open public debate, the ignorance and bigotry behind the arguments of racism can be easily exposed, at which point support disperses more quickly than the queue at the door of the surgeon who is exposed as an unqualified impostor with a penchant for learn-as-you-go quackery.

Gary Jay

Blogger's Note:

". . . It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation."

I looked for a correction in a later issue of the Socialist Standard, but I couldn't see one. The Labour Party wasn't in government in 1962. The legislation referred to from 1962 was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act which was a piece of legislation which ". . . entailed stringent restrictions on the entry of Commonwealth citizens into the United Kingdom."  The Labour Party in opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, opposed the 1962 Act.

What legislation Gary Jay was perhaps thinking of was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which was a piece of legislation passed under Wilson's Labour Government. This was denounced in the pages of the Socialist Standard at the time as piece of racist legislation:

• April 1968: Labour's New Race Law by Adam Buick
• April 1968: 'Prejudice and Pride' by Ivan

Letter: “Emotional Man" (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Emotional Man"

Dear Editors.

The October editorial headed "Cure for the fascist cancer" while expounding some fundamental truth, also contained the persistent and basic flaw that is always present in the advocation of your arguments. Your editorial stated: "Do those who seek to ban them (BNP) believe that workers are so stupid as to fall for fascist nonsense when it is countered in public by clear and logical opposition?"

The answer unfortunately is yes they can. There is sufficient evidence to show that millions of people are incapable of rational thinking.

The cause is not because people are “stupid" but because they are subject to early emotional experiences that can thwart mature development of their objective capabilities to fully overcome repressed and infantile fears in later adult life.

If this were not the case, the countless numbers who have, over many years, heard the Socialist Party, with its "clear and logical" position, would have not only rejected their own previous views but, at least most, would have joined the SPGB.

On the contrary, the observations are that millions not only flock to and vigorously support reactionary political philosophies, but in addition millions more become obsessively addicted to religious rantings of the most primitive and irrational kind.

While I am in agreement with the Socialist Party in its desire for a truly democratic world community, based on common ownership, I find that its lack of a deeper and more positive understanding of “Emotional Man", as opposed to its fixation on purely "Economic Man", is its weakest essential link.

Human beings — this should be self-evident — are not robots and mechanical, but living organisms of much complexity in their inner emotional life.

Political reactionaries (including fascists) and religious advocates always make their appeal to the irrational in "Emotional Man" that repeatedly and successfully recruits millions in each generation to their ranks. Despite the fact that those millions, as a result, act contrary to their own rational interests.

This constant seeking after substitute strong symbolic parental images, in the form of Gods, leaders and powerful nation states of "Motherland" and "Fatherland", should give a conclusive indication of the infantile and "lack of confidence" evident in the human psyche.

The source is not in his "nature" but in the "nurtured" early emotional experience. "Fascism" is not merely a political attitude but the outward expression of inner conflicts that we are all capable of living under certain anxiety conditions.

The increasing demand for Sado-Masochistic style movies and violent horror "comics" by vast numbers of young people worldwide, as some attempt at release from inner conflict, should be of great concern.

Trends are also observed in the presentation style, over the last twenty years, in the music of the young, behaviour at football events, drug-taking and drinking habits. All are symptomatic of outward and inward drives of destructive aggressive behaviour.

The development of new religious cults shows an increase in the infestation of mysticism, particularly in the young.

The danger is that these tensions can be projected onto reality with "fascist" values. As a guide to the difficulties Socialists face, if we are ever to secure a genuine and lasting democratic society, may I recommend two two works: The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud. Until Socialists fully understand and tackle these deep matters, little progress, if any, can be made for a sane society. Failure to recognise this could have the most serious consequences, in this technological age, for the future of our planet.

Lionel M Rich,

London NW6

Reply:

Who says we are fixated on "economic man"? Socialism is about improving all aspects of human life. We even have members who like the ideas of Freud and Reich (though others reject them as unsubstantiated speculations, not to say unscientific nonsense). The point is we all agree that the task of Socialists today is to make more Socialists, by reasoned argument and democratic persuasion. What are you suggesting we do in addition? Organise a campaign of mass psychoanalysis? 

Editors.

Rochdale election results (1995)

Party News from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the May local elections the Socialist Party ran a candidate in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale Borough Council. Our candidate, Roger Chadwick, polled 144 votes or 4.6% of the vote. The Conservatives didn't bother to put up a candidate but, where they did, in one ward they only got 90 votes. The socialist vote was also higher than that of the racist and fascist BNP. The full results are given below.

Central and Falinge

Thomas (Lab) 1745, Ali (Lib Dem) 1201, Chadwick (Soc) 144

Newbold

Entwhistle (Lab) 1304, Collinson (Lib Dem) 1294, Henderson (BNP) 104

Smallbridge and Wardleworth

Sanderson (Lab) 1990, Greenwood (Lib Dem) 1555, Taylor (Con) 90, Abrahams (Ind) 51

BNP: product of reformism’s failure (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just what is it about the BNP that the vast majority of British workers find so nauseating?  In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from the Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and unions like the CWU who informed members that their “conscience clause” gave postal workers the choice not to deliver BNP material if they found it objectionable. The anti-nazi organisation Searchlight even produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million of them in areas where the BNP were most active.

Many were clearly panicked at the thought of widespread BNP victories and this afforded the BNP media coverage which was out of all proportion to the size of their organisation. An eve of poll message from Nick Griffin, the party’s fuehrer, on the BNP website of 9 June, stated  that they “were on course for a political earthquake”, that the BNP  would be “breaking through with three or four Euro MPs”.  Yorkshire, the BNP claimed, was to be their “jewel in the crown.”  Two days earlier the same website had this to say: “Today in London a Monk came up to us.  He said he had voted for the Conservatives all his life but this year he was voting for the BNP.  He informed us that most of the Monks in his monastery were also voting BNP.”  One wonders whether the fascists of the BNP had been taking tips in humour from their favourite comedian Bernard Manning.

And so it came to pass that the BNP managed to gain four new councillors in Bradford in four wards. This ‘jewel’ was out of a record 101 candidates they fielded across Yorkshire.

Elsewhere, the BNP made a breakthrough in the south of England, taking three seats in Epping Forest in the local elections. And in Burnley, the BNP gained one seat but managed to lose the other seven in which its candidates were standing. In the North East, where the party stood a full slate of 25 candidates in Sunderland, they failed to make any promised gains.

Leader Nick Griffin, who in April had invited over Le Pen, the Nazi leader of the French National Front,  to plan how they could work as a team (or rather comedy duo) when Griffin became MEP for the north west of England, failed to take the seat he hankered after.  No BNP candidate succeeded in getting elected to the European parliament and in the London mayoral elections the BNP ended up in sixth place and failed to secure the votes required to get representation on the London Assembly.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, booting out the boneheaded troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project. This was much evident from their election manifestoes, especially that used for their London Assembly campaign and entitled London Needs the BNP.

The manifesto began with a subject the BNP are famous for – the strange obsession with the colour of human skin. It opened: “Within another generation, without political change, London will not even be recognisable as a European city”. Considering the diversity of cultures existing peacefully side by side in most European cities London, in a generation, would very much be like any normal European city. It asserted that the  “remaining British people in London are faced with progressive marginalisation” because there are too many non-whites, neglecting to mention the way capitalism itself marginalises, atomises and alienates not just individuals but entire communities.

There then followed the usual rant against asylum seekers, “both legal and illegal” and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party were said to be responsible for “this new influx that is about to engulf us.” Here again, no mention of the fact that within the EU alone, the UK was recently ranked 10th in number of asylum applications compared to the country’s population or that the government has recently brought in measures that make it far more difficult for people from a variety of countries to claim asylum in the UK – together with a reduction of appeal rights for a host of countries. Neither does the BNP acknowledge that the Home Office itself has recognised that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants have made a huge contribution to the economic and cultural life of the UK, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge.

Law and order, another BNP favourite was then tackled. Having informed us that recorded crime has risen by 1000 percent (how they love nice round figures) since the 1950s they go on to cite the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers as claiming that mass immigration had “brought new levels of organised crime, drug dealing, gun crime, prostitution, fraud and kidnapping,” before advocating the reintroduction of the birch and the death penalty and a policy of zero tolerance. Again, no mention that one BNP London Assembly candidate was a reputable soccer thug, that the BNP National Development Officer, Tony Lecomber, has twice been imprisoned or that BNP leader Nick Griffin was given a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred. A visit to the Searchlight website will reveal that the BNP has a membership full of unsavoury characters. Moreover, in the year following the first BNP council victory in Milwall in 1993, racial assaults increased by 300 percent. It seems crime will only be tolerated when it is the BNP and their supporters who are carrying it out.

Next was the issue of “security” with the BNP promising to “make London safe from the threat of terrorism”, by deporting “Moslem fundamentalists”. Their TV election broadcast, which was edited, though downloadable later from the BNP website, was similarly Islamophobic, blatantly hinting at a hyped threat of Islamic terrorism. Significantly, the last terrorist bombs to go off in London which killed and injured members of the white working class were set off back in 1999 by one-time BNP activist David Copeland, who, when apprehended , said his aim had been to start a race war which would lead to a BNP government being elected. And the BNP National Organiser has a conviction for setting off a home-made nail bomb and possessing hand-grenades and electronic detonators. Moreover, Griffin’s political mentor is the Italian Nazi terrorist Roberto Fiore; the very same Griffin who once went to Libya to gain support from Colonel Gadaffi  and who was all too ready to share a platform at a Cambridge seminar in July 2002  with Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the despicable Muslim fundamentalist, currently awaiting extradition to the USA for alleged terrorist crimes.

And so the manifesto continues, each statement showing the BNP to be the intolerant, narrow-minded, racist bigots they have always successfully presented themselves as, before closing on a subject covered in the May issue of the Socialist Standard (‘The Beauty Trap’), namely the forthcoming erection of the statue of Alison Lapper: “Just as Ken Livingstone dislikes anything English he equally disapproves of anything British, which is why we are now to have a sad limbless body on the vacant fourth plinth rather than a British statesman or woman. A BNP Mayor would have this dreadful thing removed.”   In this regard the BNP are in keeping with their beliefs on the white master race. Indeed, their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be “sub-human” and those with disabilities to be “genetically inferior”. As true heroes of the white working class they claim to be the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider “inferior”.

The 800,000 workers who fell for this sort of rubbish across Britain and gave the BNP their votes in the European and Local elections on 10 June are the misinformed products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that one main issue – a total halt on asylum – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than is the hole in the ozone layer. At the end of the day the BNP promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty and tens of thousands wanted it.

Of course, the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism—a tool they can use to great effect when it suits—in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. And neither is their raw brand of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all to ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Furthermore, we can only wonder at the mainstream parties fears of a surge in support for the BNP. Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech springs to mind) and the former’s part in upsetting the Islamic world so much recently, their objections to the BNP do seem a  little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists of the BNP but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which they champion and which gives rise to the politics of racism.

If anything the BNP are the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

John Bissett

In the News: Oldham (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers of Oldham were battling in the streets, against each other and against the police, for three days from the 25 to 28 May this year. The poisonous despair, powerless and poverty of the area, caused in large part by the decline of the town’s traditional textile manufacturing industry, lead to workers turning upon one another. Differences in skin colour and culture became the focus for the pent-up energies and frustrations engendered by these social conditions.

The spark was, apparently, the provocative actions of followers of the British National Party and their ilk, who damaged property and harassed and attacked brown skinned workers, seemingly without reprisal from the police or authorities. Their targets eventually responded to the provocation, coming out onto the streets to fight them. As a part of the conflict, the unfortunately named Live and Let Live pub was attacked, and windows in the area were bricked. The police turned out in force, and a series of running battles ensued, leaving some 25 workers (including police officers) injured.

The centre of the trouble was the Glodwick area, with groups of up to 500 workers throwing petrol bombs and firecrackers at the police lines. Over the three nights of clashes a post-office was looted and the offices of the local newspaper became the target for firebomb attacks.

It has been suggested that the trouble was stirred up by the British National Party, as a part of their election campaign in the area. The BNP advocates divisive confusionist policies, based upon the scientifically absurd idea of racial differences. Its leader Nick Griffin, their candidate in Oldham West & Royton, advocates communal separation, along the lines of the so-called “Peace Wall” in Londonderry/Derry. This is supposed to be the only way of ending the allegedly irreconcilable differences between people of different “races”.

Their campaign turned out to be highly successful, with workers continually let down by the promises of reformism and the lack of any prospect for change from any other parties, being attracted to the radical posturings of Griffin’s band of would-be leaders. Their promises, geared toward insularism, putting a mysterious group called “The British” first, by protecting their “homeland” and ending their unemployment by prohibiting “foreign” products, attracted a high number of votes for such a small party. In Oldham West and Royton the BNP recorded 6,552 votes (16.4 percent) and in Oldham East and Saddleworth they scored 5,091 votes (11.21 percent). Each total is almost twice the entire number of anti-capitalists who turned up to the London Mayday event.

Naturally, the left is outraged. One commentator in Socialist Worker expressed shock that police refused to prevent the BNP members canvassing for their candidates, stating it was “perfectly legitimate election activity”. Presumably, the SWP must believe that the state should be allowed to vet and permit candidates’ campaigns.

They and other groups blame the failure of leaders, Socialist Worker observed that Oldham workers couldn’t identify with Many-Homes Meacher (their MP), and no-one in power listens to them but instead neglects them; while Militant noted that “the community leaders should be fired” for being out of touch. The problem, apparently, lies with the leaders and not the social system. Michael Meacher himself blamed William Hague and his “foreign land” speech for stoking up xenophobia.

Of course, the leftists see the fascists as rivals for leadership, and are thus happy to join with liberals in relying on emotive tactics and censorship to impede them. Such tactics back-fired badly at the announcement of the vote, because the local council forbade any candidates from speaking. This allowed the fascists to pose before the television cameras, wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Gagged for telling the truth”, and sporting large and visible gags in their mouths. This played into their victim posture, along with their attempts to claim they were trying to defend “whites from racism”. It also effectively prevented anyone from being able to hear how ridiculous their policies really are.

Liberals and leftists alike will not debate fascists, because they have no real answers to their arguments. They both support nationalism and its logic, albeit qualifiedly. Their differences with the fascists are those of degree not of quality. After all, the SWP has unfurled openly reactionary banners by merging with the Scottish Socialist Party whose slogan is “for a Scottish Socialist Republic”, the capitalist politics of national self-determination. What is the differences between “moderate nationalism” and “moderate racism”? Both are absurd creeds used to mystify and divide the workers.

The SWP calls upon workers to “turn anger on the real enemy”, by which they mean not the capitalist system, but the fascists. It means a futile programme of continually trying to suppress the manifestations of fascism, without destroying its root cause: the fallacy that workers share in some national interest. Without that understanding then the privations of capitalism will always lead to workers misidentifying the cause of their problems as not the capitalist system, but other workers.

Dividing the workers against the fascists will not ultimately bring the resolution of these problems, nor will simply appointing a different set of leaders to save us. Only the clear understanding that workers of all types share a common interest against the capitalist system, and that its replacement with socialism will end the social conditions that breed such violence will be of any use to us. That understanding will only come about through trusting the workers to think for themselves, instead of trying to crush the fascists with state power or street politics.

Pik Smeet

Voice From The Back: A Billion Reasons For Socialism (2009)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Billion Reasons For Socialism

 There are many reasons why socialists want a complete change in the basis of society. Why we want a new society based on common ownership and production solely for use. Today we have poverty amidst plenty, international rivalry leading to wars, the destruction of the planet because of the profit motive – the list goes on and on. The following statistics though are probably the most compelling of all. “One billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger, a figure which has increased by 100 million because of the global financial crisis, says the UN. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said the figure was a record high. Persistently high food prices have also contributed to the hunger crisis. The director general of the FAO said the level of hunger, one-sixth of the world’s population, posed a ‘serious risk’ to world peace and security. The UN said almost all of the world’s undernourished live in developing countries, with the most, some 642 million people, living in the Asia-Pacific region.” (BBC News, 20 June) We live in a society that destroys food to keep up prices while people die of starvation Never mind the statistics, a kid is dying today because of the profit motive. Get up off your knees and organise for a world based on production solely for use. We owe it to the world’s children.

This Sporting Life

 Capitalism corrupts everything it touches. In this society the cash nexus is everything. Sport may be defined in dictionaries as “pleasant pastime, amusement, diversion” but in modern society it is just another business. Sport, of course, is all about the glory of winning and (if you are British) the nobility of defeat. Oh no it’s not. It’s all about the money. Which is why, Max Duthie, of Bird & Bird, says: “In almost every major sport today there are tensions between the regulatory bodies on the one side and the players or the teams on the other – and normally the argument is over money.” Patrick Wheeler, of Collyer Bristow, says that “there are four key areas of law that come into play in a sports dispute: intellectual property, contract, competition and regulation.” (Times, 25 June) Not so much an arena for sporting types more a fertile field for lawyers and accountants.

 

A Clueless Pope

 At first glance it might appear that His Holiness is getting bang up to date and having a go at the capitalist system, but on closer examination it is no such thing. “Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the ‘grave deviations and failures’ of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a ‘true world political authority’ to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy. The pontiff’s call for stronger government regulation was made in his third and eagerly awaited encyclical, Charity in Truth, which the Vatican chose to issue on the eve of the G8 summit of rich nations being held in Italy.” (Financial Times, 7 July) What kind of fairy tale society does he live in when he talks about “a return to ethics in the global economy”? Capitalism is a society based on class ownership, exploitation and the profit motive. To talk of ethics in such a society is nonsensical and “government regulation” is powerless to deal with the slump and boom cycle of capitalism. The Holy Father should abandon his foray into political economy and stick to what he does best – scaring the shit out of believers and passing the collection plate.

A BNP Submarine? 

The success of the British National Party at the recent European elections surprised many. Their success was put down by some as due to their new more “moderate” policies. How “moderate” they have become can be gauged by the following.” Boats carrying illegal migrants to Europe should be sunk Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, said yesterday. In a provocative intervention, Griffin, elected to the European parliament last month, called on the EU to introduce “very tough” measures to prevent illegal migrants entering Europe from Africa. “If there’s measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we’d support that,” Griffin told BBC Parliament’s The Record Europe. “But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats.” (Guardian, 9 July) Nick Griffin as a U-Boat commander is the sort of fantasy that must appeal to the crazed nationalism of some of the BNP membership.

Scargillism or socialism? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The June elections to the European Parliament were notable not only in having the lowest turn-out ever in a national election but also for being the first national election in which every elector in Britain had a chance to vote for at least one party using the word “socialist” on the ballot paper. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a chance to vote for real socialism.

Only those in the North East had that chance. Apart from the Socialist Party the other parties calling themselves Socialist stood on anything but a socialist programme. Arthur Scargill’s SLP stood on a patriotic anti-Common Market programme. Tommy Sheridan’s SSP stood for Tommy Sheridan and Scottish separatism (the six words they used on the ballot paper were: “Scottish Socialist Party (Convenor Tommy Sheridan)”. An electoral coalition of Trotskyist groups including Militant and the SWP which contested the West Midlands under the name of “Socialist Alliance”, stood on a programme of minimum reforms such as “No to tuition fees and student loans”, “No to private toll roads”, “£5 an hour minimum wage”, “Oppose the Euro”, with no mention of socialism not even as a long-term goal (and not even as their mistaken definition of it as state-run capitalism).

Scargill’s party stood in all 11 Euroconstituencies in mainland Britain and in all but three of them was the only standard-bearer for the word “socialist”. But what a disgrace to the word his programme was!

The SLP’s main electoral slogan was “VOTE TO GET BRITAIN OUT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION”. Socialists know that it doesn’t make any difference to workers whether or not the British capitalist class are in or out of the European Union. Whether or not they stay in this businessman’s club is their problem, not ours. The problems we face as workers are caused by the class ownership of the means of life and production for profit, not by the trading arrangements of our capitalist masters.

The SLP’s election manifesto, however, did not make such a socialist analysis. Instead, it echoed the analysis made by the UK Independence Party and the BNP that all our problems are due to Britain being in the Common Market—and indeed that those of the capitalists are too, since the SLP manifesto expressed great concern about their trading prospects and about how much of the surplus-value extracted from the workers they have to pay over to Brussels.

According to Scargill’s manifesto:

When Britain joined the European Common Market the people were told that membership would protect British industries and British jobs—but the very opposite is true . . . Membership of the European Union has led to mass unemployment, the closure of steelworks and coal mines, engineering industries and the near-destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base.

Or, as the BNP put it in their manifesto:

Being in the EU makes it illegal for us to protect our own industries, including manufacturing, fishing and farming, from the foreign competition which has destroyed millions of jobs. The BNP says ‘no’ to EU insecurity, and—unlike the pro-free trade UKIP—’yes’ to protecting British jobs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no, it doesn’t, since the implication of the SLP/BNP position is that if British capitalism hadn’t been in the Common Market these closures and job losses could have been avoided. But how? Since they were caused by changes in world market conditions in the form of a world-wide economic slowdown it would have made no difference whether Britain was in or out of the EU. If Britain had not been in they would still have occurred.

The fact is that we are living in a global economy and there is nothing a government of any particular state can do to opt out of the effects of a global economic downturn. No doubt an SLP government—or a BNP government—would have tried to protect “British jobs” by putting up tariff walls to keep out “foreign” imports. But this is to forget that Britain, as part of the global economy, is also necessarily an exporting country; in fact its speciality has been transforming imported materials into manufactured goods for export. Keeping out cheap “foreign” imports would have meant forcing exporters to use more expensive British-made substitutes, so increasing their cost and making them less competitive on already over-supplied world markets. This, quite apart from the retaliatory action other states would be likely to have taken against imports from Britain to their countries. In other words, if such a protectionist policy had been pursued British exports would still have fallen off leading to . . . factory closures and job losses.

A siege economy, whether under Arthur Scargill or John Tyndall, is no way out of the global capitalist crisis. In fact there is no way out for workers other than socialism which, because capitalism is already a global system, has to be world-wide too. This is elementary Socialist thinking, but it’s the last thing you are going to hear from Scargill’s party.

Instead, we are told:

If a country like Norway—not a member of the EU—can have one of the most prosperous economies in the world outside the EU, why not Britain?

But Norway is an openly capitalist country (which didn’t in fact escape from the effects of the world slump), so the SLP evidently believes that the problems workers in Britain face can be solved within the context of capitalism. This mistaken conclusion follows logically from the SLP’s mistaken analysis: if the EU rather than capitalism is the cause of workers’ problems then the solution lies not in getting rid of capitalism but simply in getting out of the EU.

We suspect we know why the SLP chose Norway as its example of a supposed paradise outside the EU. The examples they normally give in their literature—Cuba and North Korea—are rather less attractive vote-pullers.

Although all this is enough to show not only that the SLP is not a socialist party at all but that it is a petty British nationalist party, the various Trotskyist groups were urging workers to vote for them, except in Scotland where they preferred Sheridan’s even pettier Scottish nationalism and in the West Midlands where they stood themselves, but including the North East where a genuine Socialist list was standing. This doesn’t surprise us as they have more in common with Scargill than they have with us and, in any event, we only want those who genuinely understand and want socialism to vote for us. They too are Eurosceptics, though not as extreme as Scargill, the BNP and UKIP in wanting a complete withdrawal. Their slogan of “OPPOSE THE EURO AND MAASTRICHT”, i.e. stay in but keep the pound, puts them rather in the camp of Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt.

The correct socialist position on the euro was put in a letter from one of our members published in the Newcastle Journal on 14 January:

To euro or not to euro, that is the question. Or is it? Does it really make any difference if you pay your bills with euro, dollars or pounds sterling? Would your life change if the money in your pocket no longer had a picture of the richest woman in England? The real truth is the rich will still be rich and the poor still be poor. Joining the euro will benefit the flow of business capital. Why? Because we live in a global economy. The European nations must compete as a trading bloc against their strongest competitors, the American and Far East economies. If this planet with all its vast resources was owned and democratically controlled by the people, money would be obsolete. Socialism means that the farms, factories, railways, etc are run for the benefit of all. Without the insanity of the boom-slump profit system, the Stock Exchanges of the world will become museums and the floor traders can stop running around like headless chickens wearing blazers.

The North East, in fact, was the one region where voters attracted by the mere word “socialist” on the ballot paper did have a choice between the SLP’s position and the genuine Socialist one. Of the 6021 voters in this category, 4511 voted for the SLP and 1510 for us. In other words, 25 percent opted for real socialism rather than Scargill’s British state capitalism. What is interesting is that in those areas where we had been active in putting over the Socialist case, in other elections and in letters to the press, the percentage opting for socialism rather than Scargillism was higher. In Jarrow it was 44 percent and in Easington 35 percent.

This would suggest that where those interested in socialism are given the opportunity to hear the socialist case on a regular basis they can be won over to supporting the real thing and not just the name. Many of the 86,749 people who voted for the SLP will have voted not for, but thankfully despite, its reactionary, non-socialist programme, as a way of showing that they rejected the Labour administration of capitalism and saw “socialism”, however vaguely defined, as the way out.

There is talk of getting all the various parties calling themselves “socialist” together in an electoral pact so as to win seats under proportional representation. We want no part of such an alliance. The SLP, the SSP and the Trotskyist groups may as well know that we will continue to put the case for socialism, against them and the other parties which all support capitalism in one form or another, at election times whenever we can. We shan’t be forming any electoral pacts with them since their objective of reforms now and state capitalism later has nothing in common with ours of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production to satisfy people’s needs not profit.

Adam Buick