A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

[American Dream]

Anti-Racism, Working Class Formation And The Significance Of The Racialized Outsider

by Satnam Virdee

The second of a two part essay on race, racism and the making of the English working class.

First published: 21 December, 2014


Part I of this essay highlighted the powerful structuring force of racism in English society over two centuries, including within the English working class. However, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were also periods of multi-ethnic class solidarity when parts of the English working class collectively suppressed expressions of racism and, on occasion, actively rejected it altogether. Central to these moments were socialist men and women belonging to minority groups – Irish Catholic, Jewish, Indian, Caribbean and African – whom I describe as racialized outsiders. It is these men and women against whom the dominant conception of English/ British nationalism was constructed, and whose attachment to such conceptions therefore tended to be weaker, while their participation in subaltern conflicts gave them a unique capacity to see through the fog of blood, soil and belonging and thereby to universalise the militant, yet often particularistic, fights of the working class. Informed by their unique perspective on society, they thus acted as a leavening agent, nourishing the struggles of all.

Such racialized outsiders played a formative role in bringing together concern about racialized oppression with that of class exploitation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the heroic age of the proletariat. For example, the anti-slavery movement was intellectually and politically nourished by the growing population of freed slaves of African descent. While small numbers of Africans had been resident in England since the sixteenth century, this population had grown to between ten and twenty thousand people by the late eighteenth century.[1] It was a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, who brought firsthand experience of slavery to the attention of the British public. Equiano recounted the story of the slave ship Zong and how in 1781 its captain had thrown 122 sick slaves overboard, with another ten committing suicide in despair. The captain’s motivation was that because the slaves were considered cargo, the ship's owners were entitled to £30 a head compensation for their loss at sea, whereas if the slaves had died on land they would have received no compensation. Equiano’s remarkable autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) – an account of his suffering as a slave, as well as his subsequent life in Britain – rapidly went through several editions, and, was one of the earliest books promoted by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

And it was Robert Wedderburn – born in Jamaica in 1762 to an enslaved African woman and a Scottish doctor and sugar planter – who helped make visible the links between the suffering and struggles of African enslaved peoples abroad and working class struggles at home.[2] By 1813, Wedderburn appears to have joined the Spencean Philanthropists – a left-wing group inspired by Thomas Spence’s writings. Shortly afterwards, he went on to publish six editions of a magazine called The Axe Laid To The Root. Through this remarkable magazine and countless meetings of the Speancean Philanthropists, he linked the plight of the ‘African slave’ to the difficulties faced by the English working poor for, ‘The means to obtain justice is so expensive, that justice cannot be obtained’.[3] This attempt to conjoin the struggles against slavery with social justice for the working poor found political expression in his calls for a Jubilee – a free and egalitarian community. According to Wedderburn, Spence

…knew that the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust; and that any person calling a piece of land his own private property, was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud.[4]

Attempts to forge this kind of multi-ethnic working class solidarity became less evident after the catastrophic defeat of Chartism and the consolidation of racist, nationalist and imperialist discourses and practices within the working class. Between 1848 and 1973, the current of proletarian internationalism largely became the preserve of those socialists who were racialized minorities. Apart from some notable exceptions like William Morris, Belfort Bax, Sylvia Pankhurst and John Mclean – it was minority men and women like Eleanor Marx, James Connolly, Zelda Kahan, Theodore Rothstein, Arthur McManus, Shapurji Saklatvala and Claudia Jones who attempted against great odds to challenge racist divisions within the working class. In the course of the new unionism of the 1880s and 1890s, Eleanor Marx, William Morris and other socialist internationalists were able, albeit briefly, to broaden the development of the emergent English-Irish working class solidarity such that it also came to encompass the newly-arrived Jewish migrants. Similarly, in the 1920s and 1930s, racialized minorities within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) like Shapurji Saklatvala, Arthur McManus and Phil Piratin played important roles in challenging the hold of racist, anti-Semitic and imperialist ideas within the working class, culminating in the solidarity action instigated in support of Arab seafarers in the North-East of England and the defence of the Jewish community in the East End of London.

However, it was in the aftermath of the ‘world revolution of 1968’[5] that significant parts of the English working class finally began to challenge racism. This was a conjuncture shaped on the one hand by decolonisation in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the struggle for civil rights in the US, and black resistance at home and, on the other hand, by the organic crisis of British capitalism, the collapsing welfare settlement and the intensification of the class struggle. In that transitional moment in the 1970s – between a welfare state settlement that was in crisis and a neoliberalism that had not yet been named, and whose victory was not assured – Britain experienced an unprecedented wave of social unrest.

Under these changing circumstances, the organised labour movement shifted from its long-standing indifference towards racism, towards actively challenging it - most notably in support of Asian women workers on strike at Grunwick, a film processing plant in north-west London. When Jayaben Desai – along with 137 of her mainly female Asian colleagues – struck against terrible working conditions and managerial racism, solidarity action flowed not only from national trade union leaders but large numbers of rank and file workers. Donations came in from local workers at the ‘Milliner Park Ward, Rolls Royce Works Committee, Express Dairies, Associated Automation (GEC), TGWU, and the UPW Cricklewood Office Branch’.[6] Significantly, on 1 November 1976, the post office workers in the UPW stopped delivering Grunwick’s mail. Ten months on from the start of the dispute, mass picketing began in the week of 13 June 1977 with between 1,000 and 2,000 pickets present. By the end of that week, those numbers had swelled to 3,000, including miners from the coalfields of South Wales and Yorkshire – the latter led by Arthur Scargill.[7] The largest picket occurred on 11 July 1977 when an estimated 18,000 people – among them workers, feminists and anti-racists – joined Desai and the strikers in an unprecedented show of solidarity.[8] Particularly significant was the solidarity action from the London dockers who in 1968 had marched to the Houses of Parliament in support of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech shouting ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’ demanding an end to black immigration. Less than a decade later at Grunwick, amid a rising tide of industrial and political radicalisation, some of those same dockers carried the Royal Docks Shop Stewards’ banner at the head of a mass picket in support of the predominately Asian workforce at Grunwick.

Alongside such anti-racist action in the workplace, parts of organised labour and youth helped fashion anti-racist and anti-fascist social movements of a scale unprecedented in Britain. From Rock Against Racism (RAR) to the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a new popular politics against racism and fascism was emergent with the socialist left (both within the Labour Party and without) at its centre. The ANL attempted to counterpose its own embryonic vision of the alternative society – one based on love not hate and multi-ethnic solidarity not racial division. This was most clearly visible at the major carnivals it organised alongside RAR throughout 1978 and 1979. The first, held at Victoria Park on 30 April 1978, was a genuinely national gathering with among others more than 40 coaches arriving from Glasgow, a whole train from Manchester, and a further 15 coaches from Sheffield.[9] The march to the carnival site at Victoria Park in East London was led by giant papier maché models of Adolf Hitler and others, built by Peter Fluck and Roger Law – the makers of Spitting Image. At the carnival itself, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, Tom Robinson and Steel Pulse played to 80,000 people. Peter Hain, Vishnu Sharma – of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) – Miriam Karlin and Ray Buckton made speeches against racism and fascism. Raphael Samuel – a key member of the CPGB historians group – described the march to the carnival as one of ‘the most working-class demonstrations I have been on, and one of the very few of my adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public opinion’.[10]

Significantly, the part played by socialist activists, particularly those of racialized minority descent, was decisive. They proved to be the conduit through which anti-racist ideas, consciousness and political practice – until then, narrowly confined to the minority communities – came to be transmitted to the left-wing of the organised labour movement and beyond. In that moment when class struggles were brought into alignment with those against racism, an uneven but nevertheless significant organic fusion of social forces took place in which to paraphrase Sivanandan,[11] racialized minority workers ‘through a consciousness of their colour…arrive[d] at a consciousness of class’ and in which parts of the white working class ‘in recovering its class instinct…arrive[d] at a consciousness of racial oppression.’

The experiment in municipal anti-racism in radical Labour-run local authorities further extended such anti-racist sentiment within society opening up areas of non-manual local state employment to racialized minorities for the first time. And through black self-organisation and the alliance with the socialist left in trade unions such changes were consolidated throughout much of the public sector and trade union movement. While racism remained a powerful structuring force throughout the 1980s, the outcome of such collective action was the consolidation of a more durable current of anti-racism in British society, one that had been incrementally constructed over the course of the black struggles against racism in the 1960s, the anti-racist and anti-fascist social movements in the 1970s, and which by the 1980s, had become institutionalised in key sectors of the organised labour movement, the public sector and everyday life within the main urban conurbations. Such anti-racism was the legacy bequeathed to English society by the racialized outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish, African and Asian descent.

Continues at: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... racialized

[American Dream]

A guide to the far right in Sheffield


UK Aktion have produced a handy guide to the UK’s far right. Some of the groups are too exotic to spot in Sheffield, and some (ahem, Casuals, ahem) barely exist outside their own overactive imaginations, but there are some that local anti-fascists should be aware of…

http://sheffieldafn.wordpress.com/2014/ ... sheffield/

[American Dream]

A guide to the far right in Sheffield


UK Aktion have produced a handy guide to the UK’s far right. Some of the groups are too exotic to spot in Sheffield, and some (ahem, Casuals, ahem) barely exist outside their own overactive imaginations, but there are some that local anti-fascists should be aware of…

http://sheffieldafn.wordpress.com/2014/ ... sheffield/

[American Dream]

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... n_bogeymen

Racialized Insiders And Hidden Bogeymen

by Emma Jackson

Those at the forefront of current fights over public housing are as much part of the working class as the 'white van man'. But how does the ‘white van man’ come to stand in for the working class in debates over class, race and nation?

First published: 23 December, 2014

Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider traces formations of race and class in England from the early industrial period to the 1980s. These themes take on a particular poignancy in a context where UKIP’s success has rattled the major political parties and in the run up to a general election where imaginings of England and debates about immigration are likely to take centre stage. The current media and political furore involves the conjuring of particular racialized and classed figures such as the ‘white van man’ and the ‘hidden migrant’. Virdee’s book is useful in unpicking some of these typologies - of both racialized outsiders and insiders - and provides tools for deconstructing the ‘whitewashing’ of the English working class in the popular imagination and for starting to untangle how race, class, immigration and ideas of the nation are co-constituted and inextricably linked. The book does this both by problematizing the idea of ‘thewhiteworkingclass’ as a homogenous mass, while also not shying away from uncomfortable histories, such as that of racism in the labour movement.

New Left Project readers will be familiar with the episode in the Rochester and Strood by-election where Labour MP Emily Thornberry tweeted ‘Image from #Rochester’ with a photo of a house with St George’s flag in the window and a white van parked outside. The tweet, interpreted by the Labour leadership and the Sun newspaper (‘Only Here for the Sneers- Snob MP’s Twitter Dig at White Van Man’s English Flags’[1]) among others, as making fun of white working-class people, resulted in Thornberry losing her cabinet position. This was then followed by a response from Thornberry’s brother, who is a builder and drives a (red) van, asserting that his sister wasn’t a snob. I am less interested in the rights and wrongs of this particular case than thinking about how race, nation and class play out through such debates. How does this image, and the act of sharing it, become so loaded, and what is going on with entanglements of race and class here?

Thornberry’s tweet could only create outrage because of a national context in which MPs are widely regarded as an out-of-touch elite and therefore try to present themselves as in touch with the common people by patronising and clunky stunts, such as donning high-visibility vests at any given opportunity. The tweet also taps into a wider discourse of ‘abject whites’[ii] which reassures white middle-class people that racism lies firmly in the camp of another social group ‘thewhiteworkingclass’, which is cast as homogenous and racist, leaving manifestations of racism among the white middle classes untouched. It does so in a context where UKIP have gained support and two MPs, while the other political parties fall over themselves to chase potential UKIP voters, who are imagined as the occupants of houses like this one. (A later interview revealed that the occupant of the Rochester house did in fact hold strident anti-immigration views.)

But how does the ‘white van man’ come to stand in for the working class? And what of the surge of Labour MPs proclaiming their affinity with the St George’s flag after the incident? For example, Tom Watson tweeted a picture of the flag with ‘Labour’ printed over the top. How does aligning oneself with this contested symbol of Englishness become the way to show solidarity with the working class in a time of austerity and deepening inequality?

One of the political and historically important contributions of Virdee’s book is to point out that the English working class has long been a mixed bunch of people, and furthermore that Black, Asian and Irish people have played key roles in the fight for rights for working class people in England. This is a complex story, and alongside hopeful moments of solidarity including the formation of the Anti-Nazi League and the Grunwick strike, Virdee also unsettles rosy left-wing histories, such as those surrounding the ‘Red Clydeside’ period in Glasgow[iii] where, he argues, ‘racism was deployed by socialist activists to create a cohesive opposition to government and employer attacks.’[iv]. What is often characterised as a golden socialist age in the city also involved racist riots that targeted black seamen in Glasgow. At the same time, Virdee draws attention to the role of white working-class Glaswegian women, who were married to the black seamen, in opposing racism. This retelling of a well known historical period starts to pick apart the white working class as a homogenous mass of either left-wing heroes or racist hoodlums and demonstrates how a racially coded version of national belonging can be used and propagated for political ends.

Another way in which the book troubles the category ‘thewhiteworkingclass’ is through considering changes in the boundaries of whiteness and belonging. Tracing the incorporation of the Irish into a white identity is particularly useful in demonstrating the social construction of race and the shifting boundaries of whiteness (see the quote from Carlyle in Virdee’s essay in this symposium ‘Crowds of Irish darken our towns’[v]). However, while some racialized outsiders may become incorporated over time, there are always new arrivals to be feared and it is through these figures that belonging to the nation is reinscribed. So, while the period of New Unionism of the late nineteenth century saw solidarity between Irish-descended workers and their English counterparts, Virdee argues that the limits to claims for economic and democratic rights were personified by the outsider figure of ‘the Jew’ (‘each time the boundary of the nation was extended to more members of the working class, this was accompanied and legitimised by a racialized nationalism that excluded more recent arrivals.’ Virdee, this symposium).

This process of incorporation and the creation of new ‘others’ resonates with research I have been involved in recently, exploring the impacts of anti-immigration government campaigns. In focus groups conducted across the UK we have heard recent migrants being cast as outsiders by a range of people, including not only BNP and UKIP voters but also more long-standing migrants who are keen to distinguish between their generation, as hardworking and respectable, and new arrivals, as dependent on the state. And this is where one of the book’s central provocations comes in: Virdee argues that left-wing politics have fundamentally failed to challenge racism by refusing internationalism and instead working inside forms of nationalism. If the boundaries of belonging are the boundaries of nation, then citizens will always need an outsider to set the limits of belonging.

It is important to add that even when previous generations of migrants to the UK may seem to be accepted into the national story, this belonging to the nation can be questioned at moments of heightened tension – such as the present. We can see how fears of the ‘insider within’ echo through English history, through Enoch Powell’s scaremongering about ‘immigrant-descended populations’ described in Virdee’s book, to the recent Daily Express headline about ‘Hidden Migrant Millions’[vi]. This recent tabloid portrayal of the dangerous migrant takes a King Herod-like turn, fixating on babies born to people from outside the UK. While roundly mocked, this headline perfectly demonstrates Paul Gilroy’s argument that, ‘Different people are still hated and feared, but the timely antipathy against them is nothing compared to the greater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar.’[vii] In this rendering, the imposter babies’ menace lies in their legitimate claims to national belonging, and, terrifyingly for the Daily Express, their partial familiarity - they may not even look different to other babies. While those criticising the Express have pointed out that their criteria for ‘hidden migrants’ applies to Nigel Farage’s children, this also illuminates a racialized and classed subtext to such categorisations. The tabloid figure of the ‘hidden migrant’ is unlikely to be associated with the white middle classes. Virdee’s book is helpful in providing both a historical context and a sociological perspective on the creation of these tabloid folk devils.

However, one inherent limitation in focussing on the formation of the working class and racism is that it leaves middle-class racism and the relationship between whiteness and middle-class identity to one side. Perhaps a sequel is in order?

How then might these lessons from the past inform anti-racist organising and opposition to neoliberalism today? Firstly, the book illuminates the limits inherent in mobilising around national identity. Secondly, examples from the past show how opposition can come from unlikely places[viii], including broad-based coalitions (think of the Grunwick strike) and often involving those considered unrespectable. An important example from Virdee's book is the matchgirl strikers of 1888, in which teenagers at the bottom of the class structure took successful industrial action which inspired other groups of unorganised workers in London. Looking to the present day, we might think of those at the forefront of current fights over public housing like the Focus E15 mums, a multi-ethnic powerhouse of working class women. Or to the Glasgow Girls, another ethnically mixed group of young women who fought child detention and the dawn raids on asylum seekers in Glasgow. These young women are as much part of the working class as the white van man. Virdee’s book goes some way to help us understand why these kinds of struggles (and victories) get left out of classed and raced stories of Britain and imaginings of the working class.



Emma Jackson is a Research Fellow in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow and is joining Goldsmiths as a Lecturer in Sociology in January 2015.

[American Dream]

This will help provide more context for some of the previously described happenings around and beyond the Atlantic:

Post-Third Position Fascism

Posted on February 4, 2013 by postthirdpositionfascism

Welcome to Post-Third Position Fascism. The purpose of this blog is to provide resources regarding recent permutations of Third Position and New Right fascist movements, especially in the U.S. – as well as groups that are influenced by these trends or work in alliance with them. These include, but are not limited to, groups like National-Anarchists, Attack the System, New Resistance, and others. We’ll also look at the attempts to appropriate radical left symbols and slogans by European groups like Casa Pound and the Autonomous Nationalists.

Third Position fascism is a lesser-known type of fascism that is anti-capitalist, believes in racial separatism rather than racial supremacy (and therefore can unite white and POC separatist groups in what we call reciprocal ethno-separatism), and is often interested in ecology and animal rights. The origins of the Third Position are in Otto Strasser’s wing of the original Nazi party; Strasser condemned Hitler for being “too moderate.” The term itself arose in the 1970s around the Italian “Nazi-Maoists.” These ideas became influential on British groups like the National Front; Russian groups like the National Bolshevik Party; and later on U.S. groups like the Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the American Front, the White Order of Thule, and the National Alliance.

More recently longtime fascist activists, many of whom were involved in groups like the European Liberation Front, and the associated LCRN, have continued to develop and change their ideology. (As right-wing monitor Chip Berlet points out, these are not just followers of similar ideas, but participants in a close-knit, international network of postwar fascists.) These include far right activists like Britain’s Troy Southgate, America’s James Porrazzo, and Russia’s Alexander Dugin. They have developed in different directions, sometimes embracing a Eurasian superstate in opposition to liberal international capitalism, while at other times endorsing a micronational ethnic separatism and even fusing with racist, antisemitic elements of the Ron Paul-wing of libertarianism. All of them deny being “fascist” – while continuing to promote the same ideas they have held for decades.

We’ll keep track of all of them, and expose their attempts at “entryism” in the left; their promotion of holocaust denial and other conspiracy theories; and their attempts to justify and endorse White Nationalists’ supposed “right” to Jim Crow white racial separatism.

We stand in opposition to white supremacy and white separatism; anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish views and conspiracy theories; patriarchy and homophobia – and to capitalism and all authoritarian forms of statist and religious rule.

See more at: http://postthirdpositionfascism.wordpre ... n-fascism/

[jakell]

On behalf of the people of Sheffield, I would like to thank AD for (twice in a row) posting a piece that shows that there is basically sod-all going on there regarding the far right.

A merry Christmas to all RIers BTW

[American Dream]

Here are a couple of relevant links:


Sheffield Unite Against Fascism


Sheffield Anti-Fascist Network

[American Dream]

How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi
Germany throughout World War II





The following excerpts thoroughly document how capitalists really acted during the Second World War. Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other in the interests of competing national interests, international capital quietly kept the commodity circuits flowing and profits growing across all borders.

Trading with the Enemy - war means business as usual for international capital.

Excerpts from "Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949" by Charles Higham;
& "The Coca Cola Company under the Nazis" by Eleanor Jones and Florian Ritzmann

Charles Higham is the son of a former UK MP and Cabinet member.

We begin with some excerpts from "Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949" by Charles Higham; Hale, London, 1983.

This is followed by "The Coca Cola Company under the Nazis" by Eleanor Jones and Florian Ritzmann; From the "Coca Cola Goes to War" website; http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7ECLASS/coke/coke.html

=====================
From the "Trading With the Enemy" cover blurb;

"Here is the extraordinary true story of the American businessmen and government officials who dealt with the Nazis for profit or through conviction throughout the Second World War: Ford. Standard Oil, Chase Bank and members of the State Department were among those who shared in the spoils. Meticulously documented and dispassionately told, this is an alarming story. At its centre is 'The Fraternity', an influential international group associated with the Rockefeller or Morgan banks and linked by the ideology of Business as Usual.

Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland - a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.

But that is only one of the cases detailed in this book. We have Standard Oil shipping enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France; Ford trucks transporting German troops; I.T.T. helping supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London ; and I.T.T. building the Focke-Wulfs that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war."

Continues at:http://libcom.org/library/allied-multinationals-supply-nazi-germany-world-war-2

[American Dream]

Fascists want to shut down the Clapton Ultras

Far-right groups are trying to shut down the anti-fascist Clapton Ultras, following a largely successful campaign at Bristol-based non-league club.



For nearly three seasons the anti-fascist supporters of Clapton FC have been enjoying football with beer, pyrotechnics and an eclectic range of chants, without racism, sexism or homophobia.

But the stand the clubs supporters have taken and their community work, which includes supporting the Focus E15 mothers and anti-raids campaigns, has brought them to the attention of the far-right.

Several far-right groups and individuals from across the country have come together, vowing to shut down the Clapton Ultras and if that fails, the club itself which was founded in 1878.


Clapton Ultras on the scaffold stand at The Old Spotted Dog Ground.

The tactics used in the previous campaign, which saw Mangotsfield United FC's 'Inter Village Firm' effectively shut down, haven't worked, so fascists have started turning up at games.

Last weekend two fascist attacks were successfully repelled by anti-fascists when clashes broke out at Clapton's away game in Southend, but the fascist groups responsible are vowing to return.

Continues at: http://libcom.org/news/fascists-are-try ... s-24122014

[American Dream]

Pegida: a German Right-Wing Anti-Foreigner Populism Emerges



10,000 – 15,000 people marched on Monday the 15th of December through the eastern German city of Dresden in an anti-Islamisation demonstration.

The march was the largest yet for the far-right populist PEGIDA movement.

This demonstration and its background were given great prominence in le Monde yesterday (En Allemagne, le discours raciste se banalise). Le Monde emphasised how the numbers attending weekly marches have grown and grown.

The media had not brought up the eternal ‘German neo-Nazism’ hook but the result of the emergence of a growing anti-immigrant/migrant movement in the Germany, a country that has hitherto been immune to the appeal of UKIP/Front National politics. In other words xenophobia knows no European political borders.

The first signs of these developments was in the rise of Alternative für Deutschland.

“Alternative for Germany received 4.7% of the vote in the September 2013 federal election, narrowly failing the 5% threshold for representation.The party won 7 of Germany’s 96 seats for the European Parliament in the 2014 European election, and joined the European Conservatives and Reformists group in June 2014. The party exceeded forecasts in gaining its first representation in state parliament elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia during 2014.”

The party is anti-Euro and against any transfer of sovereignty to the European Union. Its anti-immigration policies, and its ‘socially conservative’ (that is, reactionary) social stand, marks it even more firmly on the hard right.

Commentators (including Le Monde) observe an “overlap” between the AfD and PEGIDA,

Der Speigel is one of many media outlets to cover the story including those in the UK (Guardian)

15,000 march in anti-Islamisation PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) demonstrations in Dresden.

A record number of demonstrators turned out on Monday to march in support of the far-right populist PEGIDA group. The name loosely translates to “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West.”

“The people are with us!,” the group’s founder Lutz Bachmann shouted at the crowd. Monday’s turnout was 50 percent greater than that of a week ago. The rallies started in October in response to clashes between Kurds and Sunni Muslims over the West’s intervention in Syria.

But the nationalist group has largely been protesting over the immigration system in Germany, which has become Europe’s number one destination for asylum seekers – whose lands of origin include Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as several African and Balkan nations.

The emergence of the movement has stunned politicians, one of whom – Ralf Jäger, the Social Democratic (SPD) interior minister for North Rhine Westphalia state – described PEGIDA’s members as “neo-Nazis in pinstripes.” While some neo-Nazis have been seen among the crowds, those gathered have mostly been disenchanted citizens.

More than 1,200 police kept a close watch on the non-violent crowds. Nearby, about 6,000 counter-protesters – made up of civic, political and church groups – marched under the banners “Dresden Nazi-free” and “Dresden for All.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the wave of PEGIDA marches and cautioned Germans against falling prey to xenophobic “rabble rousing.”

An associated right-wing BOGIDA protest took place in the western city of Bonn on Monday. While approximately 300 of the group’s supporters turned up, they were met by 2,000 counter demonstrators who called for peace and tolerance.

Der Spiegel.

Taz carries more details about Pegida’s opponents whose counter-demo moblised 5.500.

Continues at: http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/20 ... m-emerges/

[American Dream]

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... ever_white

Why The Working Class Was Never ‘White’
by Jon Lawrence

The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one.

First published: 26 December, 2014

I am currently a little over half way through a two year project re-analysing the surviving field notes from a dozen or so classic social science projects from the late 1930s to the late 2000s. My purpose is to use these sources to explore the shifting nature of everyday life and culture through people’s own words. Though I am looking at much more fragmentary and mundane language, in essence I am following Raymond Williams in seeking to map shifts in the underlying ‘structures of feeling’ of working men and women across the last eighty years.

I am particularly interested in the shifting balance between individualism and community in popular culture. One facet of that story brings me into direct dialogue with Satnam Virdee’s new book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider because it is in popular conceptualisations of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that one is most likely to find evidence of the vernacular racism which runs through Virdee’s book. However, when one looks at the issue ‘from below’ – through the recorded speech of working men and women, rather than through the actions of their supposed representatives, the story looks a little different than in Virdee’s telling. Three differences of emphasis stand out to me:

Perceptions of ‘belonging’ tended to be very local – suspicion of the ‘outsider’ was certainly intense, but it was not strongly marked by ethnicity or perceived ‘racial’ differences.

At the supposed high-point of the ‘racialization’ of the British working class (in the 1950s and 60s) abstract discussion about nationhood and race, often linked to the end of empire, was heard much more frequently, and with more emotional force, from middle-class rather than working-class respondents.

In the Powellite moment, when ‘race’ and immigration really took off as issues in working-class districts there was already a strong working-class opposition to white racism – in fact there were two: one socialist and internationalist, the other liberal and parochial. Left-wing politicians and self-acting ‘racialised outsiders’ were able to achieve so much so quickly in the 1970s and 1980s because the British working class was never a monolithic bastion of ‘whiteness’.

We need to start by recognising the force of ‘class-as-place,’ as opposed to ‘class-as-politics’, in British popular culture across the period from the 1880s to the 1950s – the period which historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ross McKibbin identify as the high point of distinctive and relatively homogeneous class cultures in Britain (Hobsbawm, 1984; McKibbin, 1998). Although class feeling has long been a potent force in Britain, the vernacular sense of class has never been easily mobilised through party politics (Lawrence, 1998, 2011). ‘Class’ in everyday usage was (and is) a cultural resource to make sense of social difference and social injustice in a sharply hierarchical and unequal society. This vernacular sense of ‘class’ was strongly rooted in place, and could be highly conservative and particularist (McKibbin, 1998). Moreover, this vernacular culture of ‘class-as-place’ was predicated on an un-resolvable tension between a sense of solidarity against ‘Them’ ─ the ‘outsiders’ who held sway over your own and your loved ones’ prospects ─ and of differentiation and distinction among ‘Us,’ the residents of any given locality. This can be seen very clearly in classic working-class memoirs such as those by Robert Roberts (1971), Louis Heren (1973) and even Richard Hoggart (1988), who first theorised the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ distinction (Hoggart, 1957). Each conveys a strong sense of cohesive and relatively closed ‘urban villages’ that nonetheless were riven by deep internal divisions based on skill, gender, status, religion and, yes, also by ethnicity.

So, when Labour politics sought to construct a political rhetoric which placed ‘the workers’ at the heart of the nation, this was driven less by craven nationalism, let alone xenophobia, than by the need to find some synthetic political language capable of transcending local particularism. Labour politicians and trade union leaders had to find some way to overcome the internal divisions which often fractured the sense of ‘class-as-place’ as politics became about more than how to defend the locality from ‘Them’.

Turning to the testimony in the surviving field-notes of social science, one certainly finds plenty of evidence of indigenous hostility towards ‘outsiders’, and some evidence of explicitly racial hostility. But the bold claim that by the 1960s Britain was divided into two separate, antagonistic working classes, one white and one black, is hard to justify when viewed ‘from below’. It is equally difficult to find evidence from these transcripts to sustain the argument that ‘whiteness,’ or notions of racial superiority, were central to working-class culture in post-war Britain. Interestingly, the testimony from Bermondsey in the late 1950s displays the strongest evidence of ethnic antagonism, but this is directed at Irish migrants moving in from north-west London. Even in the late 1950s there appears to be no recognition of non-white immigration as an issue relevant to local people.

Similarly, the Bethnal Green material from the mid-1950s registers evidence of residual anti-Semitism in this former hot-bed of Oswald Mosley’s BUF, but no evidence of hostility to immigration from South Asia or the Caribbean. This may simply reflect the fact that these were not major areas of first settlement for Commonwealth migrants – but, if so, that still underscores the limited purchase in such working-class districts of racism as an abstract problem about Britishness. By contrast, one does find significant hostility to immigration as an abstract issue in the testimony gathered from the New Town of Stevenage at exactly the same time. Interestingly, most of this overt racism came from middle-class newcomers to the town for whom it was an abstract political issue about national decline and the loss of empire, not a personal issue rooted in local experience.

This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances. But it is to suggest that the concept of a ‘white working class’ needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of ‘White Britain’ analogous to the politics which sustained the idea of a ‘White Australia’ until the 1960s. Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders, including the researchers seeking to study them – but, when it came to race, they were internally divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but we don’t hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell after his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).

But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety, we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist, solidaristic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same working-class interests. Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves, weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal sectarian battles).

Even those who endorsed the Powellite line on immigration were usually quick to distance themselves from overt racism (the English racist’s urge to appear liberal is not a new phenomenon). In a discussion among a group of blacksmiths one man declared ‘We ought to keep the blacks out. They’re no worse than me but they ought to stay in their own country.’ One of his workmates claimed to agree but then offered a striking caveat which exposed both the myths about immigration that were fuelling these fears and his own instinctive liberalism: ‘But if they work a year before drawing National Assistance I don’t mind that.’ This, I would suggest, was the other source of opposition to vernacular working-class racism: a widespread popular liberalism which served to contain, and to some extent tame, instinctive prejudices against outsiders – racialized or otherwise. We too often fail to recognise that liberalism was more than a hypocritical veneer across British society – it was a powerful discursive script which helped to delegitimise intolerance and prejudice in the eyes of many working people. As Raphael Samuel counselled, the myths we live by have great power over us; academics must study that power as well as expose the myth.

Popular culture was not monolithically racist, let alone white supremacist, in the 1960s. On the contrary, it was riven by intense arguments over the meaning of immigration. The scenes played out on the sofa between racist East End docker Alf Garnett and his anti-racist, left-wing son-in-law in the controversial sit com Till Death Us Do Part (1965-75) were taking place daily in workplaces across Britain in the late sixties and early seventies. It was not working people who racialised the idea of the English ‘working class’, but academics and journalists (Collins, 2004; BBC 2008).

The sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.


Jon Lawrence is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge.

This article is part of our series, Race and Class in Britain.

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http://ww4report.com/node/13848

Sweden: Muslims under attack —and Jews

Submitted by NJR on Fri, 12/26/2014

An arsonist set fire to a mosque in the Swedish town of Eskilstuna Dec. 25, injuring five people. Some 20 worshippers were attending midday prayers when the fire broke out. Police said the blaze began when assailants hurled an incendiary device through a window of the mosque, on the ground floor of a residential building. The attack comes amid a fierce debate in Sweden over immigration policy. The far right wants to cut the number of asylum-seekers allowed into Sweden by 90%. On Dec. 3, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats brought down the minority governing coalition after it had been in power for just 10 weeks, refusing to support its proposed budget and forcing a special election. The new election is scheduled for March. (BBC News, Al Jazeera, Dec. 15; EurActiv, Dec. 18; Daily Mail, Dec. 3)

In August, a rabbi from the Swedish city of Malmo was assaulted while walking with a member of his congregation. Assailants hurled objects from a car while shouting "Fucking Jews!" The most dangerous projectile, a glass bottle, hit the pavement and shattered. Dozens of anti-Semitic crimes are reported annually in Malmo. In July—amid the Gaza bombardment—a man was beaten there for displaying an Israeli flag in his window. On April 16, the district of Skane, where Malmo is located, declined the Jewish community’s request to increase the number of security cameras around Jewish buildings. (JTA, Aug. 4)

In November, a rabbi and his synagogue in Gothenburg were threatened in e-mails that called him an "accursed child murderer." Daniel Jonas, director of the city's Jewish community, told the Gotheburgs-Posten newspaper that the unnamed rabbi received the threats via email from a person with a history of threatening the Jewish community of Gothenburg. The letter refers to the rabbi as a "swine" and warns him that his synagogue will be demolished. It also assures he will be "relegated to everlasting fire." (JTA, Nov. 21)

Sweden Democrats leader Björn Söder recently got in hot water when he stated that "most [people] of Jewish origin who have become Swedes leave their Jewish identity," and that it is important to distinguish between "citizenship and nationhood." After outrage from Jewish leaders, he said his remarks were taken "out of context." We read this as he was praising the Jews for being "good" immigrants who assimilate, as opposed to those bad Muslims. (JTA, Dec. 18; The Guardian, Dec. 17)

We have noted the wave of anti-Semitic attacks in Malmo, and the weak official response. We view the proliferation of security cameras as dystopian, but the pressures driving Jews to demand security cameras are part of the dystopia. We must again call out the twin errors that are nearly ubiquitous in commentary on such incidents. One is to deny the context of the Gaza bombardment and portray such outbursts as mere arbitrary anti-Semitism. The other is to deny the anti-Semitic element, as if fire-bombing a synagogue (or even beating up some random Israel-supporter) were a legitimate way to protest Israeli atrocities.

We also don't know if the anti-Semitic threats and attacks have come from right-wing ethnic Swedes or Muslim immigrants. But, in either case, we don't think it is a coincidence that a mosque has been fire-bombed in the immediate wake of the threats and attacks against Jews. As we have had all too many opportunities to point out: anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are genetically linked phenomena.

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No to Golden Dawn in Australia!

Sunday December 14, 2014

During the last 3 years in Greece, savage austerity imposed by the Troika (International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission) has crippled the country’s economy. The austerity has led to a depression that is as bad, if not worse, as the Great Depression was in the United States. Enjoying the atmosphere of anguish and despair associated with economic depression, Golden Dawn has flourished, espousing an ideology of hate.

It is in effect a Fascist party that promotes anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and misogynist chauvinism and has grown to become the third most popular political party in the country. It is this threat which led the Greek government to arrest the party’s leadership and dozens of its followers after a Golden Dawn member fatally stabbed anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September last year. Some Golden Dawn members (including senior leaders) have also been charged by police with bashing defenceless individuals, whom Golden Dawn deemed to be enemies, for causing explosions and for blackmail. A police investigation that has been launched into the party, but has failed to produce clear results. Beyond their racist, bigoted ideology, Golden Dawn draws inspiration from the violent methods of the Nazi German regime of the last century.

External Link:: http://melbacg.wordpress.com/the-anvil

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http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... sh_fascism

Mobilising Passions: Trajectories Of British Fascism

by Daniel Trilling, Tom Mills

The author of 'Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right' on fascist ideology, class and anti-racism.

First published: 17 September, 2012

Verso has just published Bloody Nasty People, a highly engaging and thought provoking account of the rise of the far right in Britain. Its author Daniel Trilling, Associate Editor at the New Statesman, discussed the book with NLP's Tom Mills.


What inspired you to write Bloody Nasty People?

A few things really. Most immediate is that I'd been reporting for the New Statesman on the BNP since 2009, trying to work out why they had been winning votes and how that fit into the wider context of British politics. The BNP, and latterly the EDL, generates a huge amount of media interest and argument, but it's often very shallow.

People like to invoke the far right to justify whatever political position they fancy – the best example of this was last year, when both Yes and No campaigns in the referendum on electoral reform said ‘vote for us otherwise the BNP will get into parliament’. Pretty silly in retrospect.

It's not like I thought ‘I know better than everyone else’, but I was curious and I just kept going until the chance to write this book came up.

Secondly, I'd always had a fascination with the BNP on more of a gut level. Could they really believe all that stuff about Jews running the world? Or that the ‘Aryan race’ was in mortal peril and could only be saved by deporting non-white inhabitants of Britain? And then, even if the people at the heart of the party did believe those things, how did this translate into support at the ballot box? How could a group of hardcore neo-Nazis, with a long history of involvement in often violent far-right politics, convince almost a million people to vote for them, as they did in 2009?

Finally – and this doesn't find its way into the book – my grandmother came to Britain as a refugee from the Nazis. She was Russian Jewish, but had lived in Berlin right up until the summer of 1939, so I grew up hearing stories about Kristallnacht, or having to wear a yellow star and being spat at in the street. Yet horrific as this was, it happened for a time as part of everyday life. And I think this gave me a particular sensitivity to the way immigration or cultural difference is talked about in our everyday lives. In 2002, when David Blunkett made some pronouncement that immigrants shouldn't speak foreign languages at home, I remember my mum and my grandma (who would speak Russian together) sitting at the kitchen table laughing and saying, ‘Well, that's us out, then!’

How do you understand fascism and what makes it distinctive from other political movements?

The word is used to denote all manner of things – from specific regimes that held power in the 1920s and 30s, to an insult thrown at anything the speaker in question happens to find a little bit oppressive – and people can get involved in long and often pedantic arguments about its meaning.

I wanted to avoid that, but at the same time I needed a working definition to show that while the BNP and EDL might not parade around in jackboots and swastika armbands (or at least not in public), their ideas and behaviour are rooted in a fascist tradition. At the start of my book I quote the American historian Robert O Paxton, who defines it in The Anatomy of Fascism as: 'A system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.'

This might sound vague at first, but Paxton is trying to understand fascism as a living thing. Because it's an ideology that tries to bind people around a pole of extreme nationalism, its attributes differ from country to country. But fascists will always try to appeal to what Paxton terms ‘mobilising passions’: fear, betrayal, resentment, a mortal enemy within or without.

The left often understands fascism as something that is used by the bourgeoisie to smash organised labour: that's certainly how fascism has been used in the past – if you look at the EDL today, for instance, its members have threatened or attacked trade unionists, student protesters and Occupy camps – but if you reduce the definition to that alone, then it doesn't tell you very much about why fascist ideology appeals to people, and how parties like the BNP grow or decline.

At one stage in the book a BNP activist tells you that your status on the far right is judged by your anti-Semitism, which isn't too surprising. But he also says you are judged 'on the degree of your intellect'. Actually I was quite struck by the intellectualism of some of the leading fascists but also by the apparent diversity of views. How important do you think ideas are to the far right and how flexible are its ideological aspects?

For several decades after the Second World War, far-right leaders in Britain were just interested in recreating the Third Reich (mainly, it has to be said, in their own back gardens). John Tyndall, who founded the BNP, was a fully paid-up Hitler worshipper, as were most of his followers. Their ideological template was Mein Kampf; their attempts at propaganda came straight from Goebbels.

Nick Griffin, and others around him, attempted to add a dose of updated theory to this, borrowing ideas from the French Front National, the Italian mystic philosopher Julius Evola and at one point, believe it or not, Colonel Gaddafi. They developed a theory of how to build a grassroots political movement, how to win power through the ballot box at successively higher levels of government, starting with local politics – what's known as a ‘ladder strategy’. The story of the BNP since 1999 (when Griffin became leader) is essentially the story of an attempt to put this theory into practice, and its ultimate failure.

The EDL are driven by a slightly different set of ideas. While they're an umbrella group that encompasses neo-Nazis, what keeps the disparate parts together is a shared hatred of Islam, a belief that ‘indigenous’ Europeans have been betrayed by a corrupt liberal elite and that immigrants are given preferential treatment. It's essentially the same ideology as Anders Behring Breivik laid out in his manifesto, which is analysed very sharply in the On Utoya essay collection.

The neo-Nazi belief in a Jewish conspiracy is abhorrent to most people, but unfortunately Islamophobia is less so. That's why the BNP had to conceal its core ideology from public view – and why EDL-style propaganda is potentially much more powerful.

You describe a quite bewildering number of factions and sectarian splits on the far right in the book. I thought this was interesting because this is something which is usually associated with the radical left. What do you think drives this dynamic?

You found that bewildering – I actually had to simplify the ‘family tree’ a bit to keep the argument clear! Two things are behind the frequent splits and splinter groups: one is that these groups have very little power, so it's not much of a loss to strike out alone if you fall out with others. This probably holds true for any small political party, left or right. The other reason is inherent to the far right: despite what they may say about being fans of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, they are authoritarians – and there's only room for one fuhrer in any movement, to put it crudely. So if you don't like the boss, there's not a lot you can do about it except leave. (During one or other of the BNP splits, opponents of Griffin were complaining about his ‘dictatorial’ leadership style, which I found ironic, to say the least.)

One thing that comes across quite strongly in the book is the extent to which fascists have drawn upon mainstream political culture. How important do you think the Conservative Party and the reactionary press in particular have been to the far right in Britain?

The media – and newspapers in particular – play a crucial role in shaping national identity. They are constantly policing the limits of ‘Britishness’ (see the recent debate over ‘plastic Brits’ competing in the Olympic Games, for example) and they're often people’s only source of information about immigrants and ethnic minorities. So when they give a distorted picture of the asylum system, or run endless scare stories about Muslims, or choose to link child sexual exploitation with Asian men alone, this has real, damaging effects. And it's the water in which the far right swims.

The Tories have traditionally been the first to reach for racist rhetoric, but as I argue in the book, all three main parties have pandered to the far right at points when it's suited them. What really opens the door to the far right is when there's a total breakdown of mainstream politics; when people feel that all the traditional options have failed them.

The classic Marxist analysis of fascism is that it is a movement of small business owners – the petit bourgeois. Does this fit with your research? I thought it was interesting that the BNP activists themselves referred to their natural supporters as being small tradesmen.

A more accurate analysis, Marxist or otherwise, is to say that the fascism of the ‘20s and ‘30s was a movement rooted in the petty bourgeoisie, but which also won over a section of working-class support. The BNP seems to fit with this: the inner core of the party has included people from all backgrounds (Griffin, for instance, is the Cambridge educated son of a small business-owner, while one of his deputies used to be the foreman in a car factory), but they saw their ‘natural’ support as among the self-employed or small business owners. When their organiser in Burnley wanted to win votes, for example, he went through the Yellow Pages and sent leaflets to ‘builders, joiners, electricians, mechanics’.

The point about fascism, though, is that it promises to transcend class and unite people around race or nation. But it will only expand into the space it's given. The BNP did particularly well in ‘working-class’ areas (ex-industrial towns in the north-west, outer London and the Midlands) because there was a gap in the market. Areas that had been dominated by Labour for decades were experiencing widespread political disenchantment and the BNP stepped in where nobody else bothered. The plan, as Griffin himself told me, was always to unite this more urban element with discontented right-wingers in rural areas, but they made little headway there, mainly because UKIP proved a very effective barrier at soaking up votes from disaffected Tories.

You conclude basically that the BNP is in terminal decline but also note the rapid rise of the EDL. How distinct do you see the latter movement and what lessons can anti-racists draw from the BNP's failures?

The EDL differs in two key ways. First, it's a street movement and its rapid rise can be explained partly because it provided a kind of adrenaline-pumping excitement that the BNP lacked. Far-right movements have traditionally combined electoral politics and street-fighting, but the BNP had to ditch the latter in order to sanitise its image.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, its core theme – Islamophobia – is much more widespread in society at large. The BNP also targeted much of its propaganda at Muslims, but they were always propelled by a biological racism and anti-Semitism that most people had rejected decades ago.

This makes the EDL potentially a more appealing organisation – but only potentially, because the most important thing to remember is that these groups can and have been smashed by anti-fascist organisation. The BNP were very effectively contained during the 1990s by groups like the Anti-Nazi League, who confronted them in street protests and this is one of the reasons the party gave up holding marches and rallies. When they started winning elections, however, anti-fascists were at a bit of a loss on how to deal with them – shouting abuse and throwing eggs at people didn't work as well when they were grandmothers who had been elected as local councillors. It took a good few years before people could build campaigns that could coax voters away from the BNP or convince MPs from mainstream parties to get off their backsides and start canvassing again.

The EDL has a different aim. It tries to march on a neighbourhood, intimidate the local population, isolate Asian youths from everyone else and provoke a fight with them, knowing that newspapers will most likely write it up as ‘savage Muslims run amok’. That's why it's so important that everyone who opposes them turns out on the street to say ‘no, this is our community and we will not let you divide us’. That's why in Walthamstow, on 1 September, for instance, several thousand people – white, black, Asian, atheist, religious, left-wing or not – blocked the streets, prevented the EDL from holding its rally, broke the morale of its supporters and sent them trudging back to their coaches under police escort. They've threatened to come back in October, but I don't doubt that people will turn out to oppose them once again.

The EDL has now linked up with a political party, British Freedom, and it's telling that a blog post appeared on the British Freedom website the day after the Walthamstow demo essentially saying street politics was a waste of time and that if people really wanted to change Britain they'd be better off winning elections. So we could soon be back to where we were with the BNP a decade ago.

There's still a split in the anti-fascist movement over whether ‘positive’ or confrontational campaigning is the best strategy, but I think you need both – and at different times, different options will be the most appropriate.

One final point: these groups are the beneficiaries of racism and other vicious resentments, but they do not create them. If you don't want the far right to get a foothold in politics then you also need to fight bigotry when it appears elsewhere. People need to challenge newspapers when they play on prejudices to shift copies, they need to put pressure on mainstream politicians not to pander to racist rhetoric, and the left – inside and outside Labour – needs to work out how it can build a popular movement to break austerity. Because the aim should not just be to defeat the far right, but to build a society without the huge inequalities in wealth that lead to resentment; where people are not forced into squabbling over decreasing numbers of council homes, or school places, or hospital beds and where newcomers are not seen as threats to our jobs or our culture, but as equals.


Tom Mills is a freelance investigative researcher based in London, a PhD candidate at the University of Bath and a co-editor of the New Left project.

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http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... nd_fascism

Britain First: Feminism And Fascism

by Niamh McIntyre

With Muslims now the principal target of the far-right, the political terrain has shifted and it is co-opting the language of women's liberation.

First published: 03 October, 2014

This summer, Britain First, a splinter group of the British National Party (BNP) and the fastest-growing far right group in the UK staged a series of ‘mosque invasions’ in Bradford, Glasgow, Luton and London, among other places. The aggressive and confrontational nature of the actions succeeded in grabbing the mainstream media’s attention. It was their Mosque invasion in Crayford, South London though which drew my attention for a different reason: the way Britain First have hijacked the language of women's liberation to foster Islamophobia.

The stated motive for the Crayford ‘invasion’ was gender equality. The ‘activists’ demanded the removal of ‘sexist’ signs which denote separate entrances to the mosque for men and women. The Crayford video reveals Britain First’s attempt to align women's rights and the agenda of the far right.

With nearly 400,000 likes on Facebook, Britain First is in the process of overtaking the BNP in terms of its popular support and the scope of its activities. At first little more than a social media platform circulating racist memes, the movement quickly turned to a programme of grassroots direct action. Its founders are Jim Dowson (who stepped down in June of this year because he felt the movement had become too extremist) and Paul Goulding. Dowson, a former Calvinist Minister who helped run the BNP from 2007 to 2010, is also a key organiser of the UK Life League, a controversial pro-life group who have harassed schools and clinics in the name of ‘Christian’ values. His co-founder Goulding is also BNP renegade, a former councillor for Swanley, Sevenoaks.

The emphatic militarisation of the group’s image and supporters marks out Britain First from the highpoints of popularity previously reached by the EDL or the BNP. Members have been consciously styled as ‘activists’ organised in regional brigades and battalions to form a national ‘street defence organization’. While members have not armed themselves, it has been reported that they have acquired a ‘fleet’ of British Army armoured Land Rovers, which have been deployed in their ‘Christian Patrols’ in East London.

Theirs is a movement with a very conscious and distinctive public image: and images of women, both white and Muslim, are an integral part of their brand, and in very different ways. Traditionally, membership of far right groups in the UK has been overwhelmingly male, with women’s issues sidelined or ignored. However, as Islam is increasingly the principal target for groups such as Britain First, the political terrain has shifted, and the far right is now co-opting the language of gender equality.

‘The problem is, as women, we fought long and hard in this country for equality, and you are taking us back hundreds of years with your segregation.’ says a female Britain First member in the Crayford video. ‘When you respect women we’ll respect your mosques, and you’ve got signs out there segregating men and women’ a male colleague adds.

It’s not often you see far-right extremists objecting to gender binaries, and, obviously that not what a viewer of the Crayford video is really witnessing. But Britain First, whose videos are always careful to show female activists, have understood the PR value of espousing gender equality. The group have produced literature on the subject; their report ‘Women In Islam’ is available to download as a PDF from their website. Its sensational documentation of the far-right bogeyman, the Muslim grooming gang, is combined with coverage of Female Genital Mutilation, an issue on which feminist groups are vocal and active.

Is there any underlying concern for women’s rights here? Perhaps among some members, but if so it is highly misguided. What is clear is that among the group’s leadership there is a conscious and cynical effort to reproduce the discourse of gender inequality for their own divisive and stigmatising agenda.

Britain First aim to create a false dichotomy between the West and Islam in terms of the treatment of women. Their brochure cites some passages for the Qu’ran, claiming that, ‘Mohammed treated women with total contempt and considered them no more than slaves and property’. Given that the group are a self-proclaimed Christian party, it’s worth considering some of the misogynistic attitudes that run through certain Biblical passages. Consider Exodus 20:17, which runs as follows: ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.’ The reputedly more liberal New Testament has a similar outlook on women: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’ (Ephesians 5:22) This like-for-like comparison may be a little reductive, but it is important to note that all Abrahamic religion reinforce misogynistic values in their scripture.

In another official Britain First video, Paul Goulding claims that ‘in this country, since the suffragettes, women have had equality.’ For Britain First, ‘radical Islam’ has reignited sexism which civilized societies like our own outlawed in the early 20th century. Their mission statement sets out a vision of their ideal society in which there is no ‘radical Islam… leading to the suppression of women’.

This is of course a laughably simplistic view of women’s history. And yet this false dichotomy is a common silencing tactic. As a feminist concerned about rape culture, the gender pay gap and sex workers’ safety in the UK, I have often encountered people telling me to be grateful I’m not in Saudi Arabia, a sentiment which projects sexist and misogynistic practises, onto a far-off, Orientalist dystopia.

The reason for the far-right’s sudden interest in women’s liberation is the pressing need to rebrand. The perceived machismo and violent tendencies of far right parties have traditionally limited their appeal to working-class white men. By involving a greater number of women under this pretext of gender politics, Britain First are able to broaden their appeal ahead of the general election, in which it appears they will field candidates.

This tokenism was also visible in the heyday of the EDL, an organization with a specific women’s division: the EDL angels. An important precursor to Britain First in terms of re-framing the discourse of the far-right, the EDL had prominent Jewish and LGBTQ divisions, and similarly adopted the language of liberalism for an explicitly anti-liberal agenda

For Britain First, women are not only an ideological, but a physical battleground. In a Guardian article on the role of women in the BNP, Martin Durham, author of Women and Fascism, asserted that in spite of superficial modernisation and increased women’s participation ‘The most important thing for the far Right is still to ensure that white women have more children’. Like the National Front, Britain First ‘is concerned to reverse those trends which make for a decline in our population qualitatively as well as quantitatively.’ However, in a strategic move, this concern has been disguised with tokenist concern for gender equality.

It may be disguised, but it is not invisible. The emphasis on the need for more white children, which encroaches upon women’s reproductive freedom, emerges from the group’s party political broadcast, filmed ahead of next year’s general election. In-between glowing images of ‘our brave boys’ and Enoch Powell memes, a series of scare-mongering statistics attempts to invoke a reproductive battleground. In the same way that Muslim women are segregated from ‘free’ Western women in Britain First’s campaigns, here the implicit narrative is of a race to repopulate Britain. The video stresses the reproductive threat of Muslim women: ‘If population trends continue, by 2050 Britain will be a majority Muslim nation.’ Not, however, if enough white women have children: in a not-so-subtle call, Britain First claims that ‘for a society to remain the same size the average woman has to have 2.1 children’. Without any sense of irony, Britain First call out an unnamed ‘hate fanatic’, quoted as saying ‘Have more babies and Muslims can take over the UK!’, for employing their very own tactic of espousing repopulation.

The rhetoric of women’s liberation, then, is entirely superficial and is being used to push an extreme, far-right agenda. We must acknowledge, however, that Britain First are not merely co-opting the language of liberalism and the left, they are a product of a broader political culture in which Islamophobia has been normalised. It is this same culture which recently allowed then Education Secretary Michael Gove to declare that schools must root out ‘radical Islam’ and promote ‘British values’. The recent Rotherham child abuse scandal is another example. The increasingly accepted theory that the police officers involved were afraid of pursuing Pakistani or Muslim perpetrators for fear of seeming racist has led to multiple echoes of Britain First’s alarmist literature on ‘Muslim Grooming Gangs’; whilst the Home Secretary Theresa May recently declared in Parliament that ‘institutionalised political correctness’ was to blame for Rotherham’s failures. In Britain First then, we see not just a cynical cooption of the language of liberation, but a grim reflection of the worst of mainstream political culture.


Niamh McIntyre is an English student at Oxford, and a journalist interested in feminism and social justice.