Do you remember the night the paramilitary wing of the
Conservative Party went around smashing the windows of Polish shops across
Britain? What about that time they set
up a socialist sympathiser to burn down the houses of parliament? Perhaps you remember how they used that
incident as a pretext to ban opposition parties and to arbitrarily detain
anyone considered to be a political opponent?
What about that night when they rounded up many of their own supporters
and had them shot?
No, nor me.
But reading articles on the blogosphere, posts on social
media, and listening to comments from people who should know better, you might
be forgiven for thinking that Britain had recently experienced some kind of
Nazi coup.
These sentiments trivialise the experience of the millions
of people who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis in the 13 years that
the “Thousand Year Reich” existed.
Putting yourself on a par with Europe’s murdered Jews, Gypsies,
homosexuals, disabled children and people with mental illness because your
country is about to adopt the immigration policy operated by the EU, but on a
national level arguably amounts to Holocaust denial and is at best an example
of the childish whining of affluent
liberal privilege that lets the Tories and their paymasters off the hook.
This aside, the idea that anything much has changed about
the Conservative Party – or those factions in the UK that they appeal to – is
little more than a collective lapse of memory.
The Tories always were the party of imperialism. They have racism in their blood. In the 1920s and 30s, they happily ordered
the use of chemical weapons against rebellious tribesmen in those parts of the
Empire that they could no longer afford to police. Let us not forget that under the Tories in
the 1930s, Jewish refugees were routinely
refused asylum in the UK. Even after
war had broken out, in 1940 Churchill ordered the internment of refugees
alongside their some of their Nazi oppressors on the Isle of Man. It was only after the war that the Tory establishment
chose to highlight the minority of cases – such as the privately-funded Kindertransports – where Britain did
grant refuge, in order to gloss over the way they had actually behaved.
Nor did things improve much after the war. Does anybody remember Peter Griffiths? Griffiths was elected to Parliament in the
1964 general election in what should have been the safe Labour seat of
Smethwick. What was the election
slogan that is thought to have swung thousands of traditional Labour voters
behind him? “If you want a nigger for a
neighbour, vote Labour.” Four years’
later we had Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech. And in the 1970s and 1980s we had to put up
with the casual racism of the Thatcherites – remember Norman Tebbit’s “cricket
test”? What about Teddy Taylor calling
for Nelson Mandela to be shot? Let us
not forget that the Thatcher government – apparently regarding Powell’s warning
as a target – managed to kick off race riots in such places as St. Pauls,
Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth. And
that strand of Tory racism didn’t end in the 1980s either. More recently, we were treated to Zac
Goldsmith’s attempt to channel Peter Griffiths in the campaign to become London
Mayor.
Beyond party politics, anyone who stood on a football
terrace in the 1970s and 1980s will be thoroughly confused by the idea that
there is anything new about racism and racial hatred among Britain’s working
class. Indeed, prior to the Race Relations Act,
trade unionists were often among the worst supporters of racial division and discrimination –
particularly at the workplace and branch level.
No doubt black and minority communities that have suffered
decades of both institutional and casual racism will also be wondering why it
is that middle England has only just discovered that racism is a thing.
As Ian Leslie at the New Statesman says of middle class liberal shock:
“One way to think about the
[Brexit] vote is that it has forced a slightly more equitable distribution of
anxiety and alienation upon the country…
I feel like a big decision about my life has been imposed on me by
nameless people out there. But of course, this is exactly how many of those
very people have been feeling for years, and at a much higher level of
intensity.”
Sadly, the failure of social democracy (which we are seeing
across the developed world) to respond to the needs of working class people in
the ex-industrial regions has helped to fuel the emergence of extreme right wing
populist parties like UKIP, Golden Dawn and the Five Star Movement. In the UK this has not been helped by 40 years
of politicians from all parties blaming Europe for every unpopular policy they
chose to implement, while shouting at the top of their lungs that there was no
alternative.
What is less obvious is that the centre-right is also in crisis. David Cameron only promised the Brexit referendum as a
device to win voters from UKIP in May 2015.
He no doubt assumed that he would find himself in another coalition with the
LibDems, who would force him to drop the proposed referendum. When this backfired, he blithely assumed that
he could win the referendum using the same “project fear” that won the Scottish
independence referendum. Given the choice between business as usual and a
gamble that things just might improve by leaving the EU, 17.5 million Britons
voted to leave. (Still, at least UKIP is
in meltdown – so we can congratulate Cameron for achieving one of his aims).
Teresa May is, of
course, desperately trying to clear up the mess. A large part of this project involves making
the requisite noises on immigration to appease the sizeable UKIP tendency
within the Tory Party while she desperately seeks a way of delivering a form of
Brexit that meets the needs of the Tories’ elite corporate backers. The reason that, for May just like Humpty
Dumpty, “Brexit means whatever I want it to mean” is precisely because the
moment anyone writes down what it actually means, the Tory Party will rip
itself apart. Anything short of a
complete and unequivocal withdrawal from the EU will send the head-bangers
rushing for the exit. Anything short of
full access to the single market (with all that that implies) will send the
centrists over to the Blairites, LibDems and (out of self-interest) the SNP,
with the possibility of an anti-Brexit national government.
It is hardly a coincidence that the left is also split. Neither the Blairites nor the Momentum
movement has put forward a realistic alternative to the Tories. Nor is it likely that the millions of working
class voters who haven’t been roused to join the Labour Party in order to back
Corbyn (still less Owen Smith) are going to twiddle their thumbs until the left
finally gets around to developing a manifesto that at the very least addresses
the hardships that they have had to put up with for the last couple of
decades. In the absence of this alternative, these millions may well be persuaded to tip the balance once more in favour of a right-wing agenda.
Herein, perhaps, is the most important lesson we should draw
from the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
For while those who wish to associate the current Tory Party with the
Nazis are quick to point to the fact that the Nazis were elected (although Adolph
Hitler was not – he was roundly defeated in the 1932 Presidential election by
Paul Von Hindenberg 53% to 37%); they neglect to point to the fact that the
Nazis never had a majority. The reason
they were able to take power was because the much larger German left was
divided between the social democrats and the communists, who each chose to
regard the other as a greater threat than the Nazis.
Today there is far more common ground in practice between
the left social democracy of Corbyn (who is no more a communist than May is a
fascist) and the centrist social democratic Blairites within the parliamentary
labour party. Nevertheless, at a moment
of extreme national crisis (itself reflecting a growing international crisis) it
is the left that has chosen to publicly rip itself apart.
If you are really concerned about fascism you would do well
to ignore Teresa May’s Tories altogether.
After all, that particular leopard will never change its spots. It will play on fear of immigration and hatred
of the other to divide and conquer. But
this can only work if it faces a divided opposition that can offer no
alternative (beyond turning the clocks back to 1997 or 1983) to speak to the
contemporary needs of millions of ordinary people. As the ill-fated Mr Miliband demonstrated last year,
that “alternative” has to be something more radical than standing a cigarette
paper’s width to the left of Amber Rudd.
So if you really want to do something that counts, stop
empowering the Tories by responding to their agenda. Instead, start banging some Labour heads together
and remind them that this is not about them. They are there to represent the interests of
ordinary working people (the clue is in the name) and if they feel that is too
much for their fragile egos to handle, then perhaps like the rest of us when faced
with a job we don’t like doing, they should stand down and let someone else
take their place. It is Labour (and
Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru and even LibDem) MPs who will determine how this national crisis
pans out. It is about time they got
their heads out of their collective arses and got on with the job.
