Bastardisation of the East: United Kingdom exports: fuels, manufactured goods, fascism

Monday, June 08, 2009

United Kingdom exports: fuels, manufactured goods, fascism

If King Kong was played backwards it would be the story of a giant gorilla repairing New York and being rewarded with a holiday to an exotic island. If the Zion scenes from The Matrix were removed it would come across as rival gangs of lawyers having a scrap in the street after work. And if the symbols on the opening titles of Dad’s Army were switched around it would seem like British fascists were invading Europe.

Ha, just imagine...

65 years after the Normandy landings and the UK is this time exporting fascism. This election was an almighty balls up, and feels no better for having been so predictable. The left has taken such a hiding in the European elections that I have to look to a parliamentary win for the progressive opposition in Greenland for any cheer. Even Wales voted Conservative. With the UKIP also making a strong showing the outcome really would have been depressing enough without the BNP playing its own grisly part.

Nick Griffin being allowed to come indoors and sit on the furniture was bad, but even before his victory was confirmed we had been cursed with the news that neo-Nazi Andrew Brons, a genteel type chosen to provide a respectable face to the BNP but whose only scruple with Patrick Bateman would be that he was an American psycho, had become an MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside. Respectable indeed - as a teenager this man joined the National Socialist Movement, fraternising with burners of synagogues, before graduating to the big leagues of the National Front where he pontificated on scientific racism. There should be nowhere to hide in Britain for someone who sympathises with the ideology of Hitler and his party, yet 120,000 think we should be seeing more of him. Something has gone wrong here.

The most immediately unpleasant outcomes of this moderate level of success is that now the BNP will have access to the funding they need to peddle their evil in future elections, they can look forward to increased interaction with their equally charming foreign allies and they are in a position to generate the levels of media attention that, in capable hands, could help the party establish itself. I shudder to imagine Nick Griffin on a forum where he can take legitimate anxieties such as the expenses scandals, the war in Iraq and the economic crisis and preach to a mass audience about how his party is aligned with ordinary working people against a distant political elite when, as with all fascist parties, the working people would be among the first to suffer.

As with apparently everything these days, Gordon Brown and friends must shoulder some of the blame for this turn of events. Not only has his dismal party collapsed at the worst possible time, but his reckless slogan of ‘British jobs for British workers’, opportunistic enough before the BNP took the ball and ran with it, has become a centrepiece of the many scattershot appeals for votes launched by a strain of politicians imbued with the same cynicism of European fascists in the 1930s. It is a disgrace that a party as hostile to ordinary workers as the BNP, which opposed the right to strike of fire fighters back in 2003, wanted the army summoned to deal with striking miners in the 1980s and recently demanded that postmen unwilling to deliver their crummy day-glo leaflets should be sacked, should be in a position to represent ordinary British people. These men specialise in obfuscation and opportunism, being all things to all men. This rot is widespread in British politics, and will play a part in David Cameron ghosting in to replace New Labour next year, even though it is as unclear as ever what this guy stands for beyond an eagerness to perform reckless stunts with the British economy in a recession.

Mercifully this brief autopsy is not for a general election, where voter turnout will be higher, and the BNP remains on the fringes for now. It also pays to remember that the Green Party also got two MEPs in and increased their share of votes. But overall it is saddening that a crisis of capitalism and distrust of those in authority has driven voters to UKIP and BNP xenophobia rather than to the progressive parties. As has been the case throughout history, it will be those on the left that will need to continue doing the hard work at the local level day in day out to oppose this infant fascist virus spreading while the mainstream parties tut tut as usual and then resume covering their arses in wait of the next national day of box ticking.

¶ posted by the leech at 6/08/2009

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