The UK, BNP, and the Modern McCarthyism
From the desk of A. Millar on Tue, 2008-07-22 09:24
Just over a week ago, Daniel Finkelstein highlighted in his ‘Comment Central’ blog – in the online edition of The Times – an advertisement for a Researcher for BNP Assembly member Richard Barnbrook. The advert had been placed in the staunchly Left-wing, pro-multicultural Guardian newspaper by the Greater London Authority. The blog headline was, “Wanted: Neo Nazi with typing skills,” and the opening line, “Fancy a career as a neo-fascist?” The entry consisted of only a few very short lines that suggested the author’s utter amazement at the advert in question.
Finkelstein could have used the appearance of this advert to ask why a party that he himself denounces as “fascist,” has been elected to a seat on the London Assembly, and, moreover, to question the direction in which the country has been heading in the last decade, or why there has been so little dissent by so many opposition politicians, despite an increasingly despairing public. Indeed, this is surely the duty of newspapers and outlets for political discussion, Left or Right. It is no-one’s prerogative to hold up the journalistic equivalent of placards. Comment Central was, on this occasion, not merely intellectually below par of an institution like The Times, but it –unintentionally, unthinkingly, perhaps – justifies the harassment of individuals in the workplace, for their private or perceived opinions, and this is the point I mean to address here.
The BNP emerged about a decade ago, as a tiny party on the far-Right (which it acknowledges). It moderated under the headship of Nick Griffin, and claims, among other things, to have weeded out the bad apples. The party describes itself as Britain’s foremost “patriotic” party. As the Labour party came to power, also about a decade ago, it abandoned its traditional issues based on the concerns of the working class, and, instead, adopted what many people believe to be a radical multiculturalist ideology. With this, issues such as mass immigration, were made utterly unmentionable in mainstream politics. Due to its uncompromising anti-immigration stance, the BNP benefited from this, winning over Labour voters in particular (Barnbrook was once a Labour activist). Some “anti-fascist” campaigners claim, however, that the BNP is merely ‘dressed up fascism,’ or the ’acceptable face of fascism,’ etc., and points to its opposition to (radical) Islam as supposed evidence.
I am not a member of the BNP, and so cannot validate the claims of either side, and nor is that my purpose here. It is beyond dispute, nonetheless, that the party’s membership has changed, and that it now attracts many ordinary, non-ideological people, and has both Jewish members and one Jewish councilor. (This new face of the BNP was highlighted in The Daily Mail earlier this year, when it ran a story on one Donna Bailey – who was then running for the BNP in local council elections – describing her as, “[…] an elegant, utterly respectable, middle class mother of three.”)
But, there is also a flip side to the accusations of “anti-fascists,” and that is that protesting against the BNP, or, more specifically, protesting or discriminating against its members at the places of their employment, has become the entirely acceptable face of an increasingly oppressive “politically correct” ideology.
Last year, when the English National Ballet’s then prima ballerina Simone Clarke’s membership of the BNP was published in a Guardian newspaper exposé, “anti-fascist” protestors turned up at the ballet’s Coliseum to loudly denounce her. Clarke quit the profession not long after.
Richard Barnbrook has said that his work in the teaching profession “dried up” after his membership of the BNP became known.
In 2006, some senior members of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) called for the expulsion of Peter Phillips, and denounced him to the Guardian, after he acknowledged his membership of the BNP. (Phillips, a member of RIBA’s governing council, was then running for the position of president, and had received the backing of 60 fellow architects.)
Mark Walker was suspended from his job as a technology and design teacher, Arthur Redfearn was fired from his position with West Yorkshire Transport Services, and Tina Wingfield was suspended from her job as a care worker, all, allegedly, because their BNP membership became known to their employers.
From what I have been able to ascertain, none of those named above could reasonably described as “fascist” (at the time of protests against her, Clarke’s partner was a fellow ballet dancer, of Chinese-Cuban extraction, with whom she had had a baby). Perhaps it seems more trouble than it is worth to defend members of the BNP, who have had their careers ruined simply for belonging to a legal party. No doubt, in the US’s McCarthy era, in which members of the communist party fell prey to the same tactics, the public likewise thought it was too much trouble to get involved. But, as I have suggested, there is a broader implication to all of this. If BNP members have found themselves fired or harassed, the threat of the same has been brought to bear on politicians of other, mainstream, parties, and, by implication, on the public itself.
When Conservative MP Baroness Warsi sensibly attempted to encourage an open and honest debate on mass immigration, for example, she was denounced as “pandering” to the BNP. It did not matter that Baroness Warsi is of Southeast Asian roots, a founder member of Operation Black Vote, and a Muslim. By raising an issue of importance to the majority of British citizens (including non-White citizens) she had joined the leagues of the “fascists.” The invocation of “BNP” against Warsi was an implicit, though very clear, threat to her position. And, by extension, it was a threat to the livelihood of any dissenter to the prevailing, and increasingly stifling political ideology. This has not only created a climate of fear and resentment among the general public, it has helped to establish an anti-intellectual consumer politics, in which ill-conceived, unworkable ideas are presented to the public as pearls of wisdom.
This is a dangerous way of doing politics. Democracy, for sound reasons, is predicated on the existence of dissenting opinions, discussion, and open debate. The harassment of individuals at their employment, solely on the basis of party affiliation, private or perceived opinion can have absolutely no place in a democracy.
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