The BNP laughs while the left falls out

It’s been a depressing weekend for anyone who’s opposed to racism and concerned about the rise of the British National Party. On Saturday, in case you missed it (which you probably did, since both the pre-publicity and the turnout were tiny), there was a central London ‘march and carnival parade’ organised by Unite Against Fascism. It was predominantly youthful, colourful and vibrant, but if there were more than two or three thousand present Trafalgar Square has got a lot bigger since I was last there. That’s a long way short of the 60,000-plus who turned out in the rain for the Love Music Hate Racism event on the weekend before Dismayday (see 'Just like '78'); and no more than turned up at short notice to say hello to George Bush on his visit to London a week ago.

Far more depressing than the turnout on Saturday, however, has been the sectarian squabbling and repetitive point-scoring that erupts over every discussion of anti-racist organising (or almost any other form of organising) these days in the left-wing blogosphere. The participants have long since lost any sense of how they appear to the 999,999 people in every million who have not the slightest interest in their internecine catfights and wish only that they would go away and rattle some other tin roofs rather than keeping the rest of us awake at night.

Their arguments can be summed up in a couple of sentences. (If you really want to read them in detail you can find a representative sample here, under Liam MacUaid’s in itself unobjectionable assessment; or here on the ever more inappropriately-named Socialist Unity blog.) On the one side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a Socialist Worker’s Party front, regard the SWP as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left. On the other side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a model of broad front mobilising, regard those who didn’t support it as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left.

Meanwhile, the BNP (642 wards contested in the Dismayday elections, winning an average 13.4 per cent of the vote; 130,174 votes in London and a seat on the London Assembly) must be laughing all the way to the polling stations.

One of the arguments over Saturday’s march concerns the fact that it clashed with door-to-door leafleting, organised by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, in one of two wards in east London where the BNP has hopes of winning council by-elections in two weeks time. It’s clear that this sort of local campaigning is an essential part of first halting, and then reversing, the advance of the far right. But it seems equally clear to me that big set-piece events on a national stage are an essential part of the campaigning mix too. That, after all, was the basis for the success of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism the last time the far right posed a significant electoral threat; and the sad thing is that if you strip away the sectarian tensions I don’t believe that anyone is seriously arguing otherwise.

What also seems clear to me, though, is that the old anti-Nazi formula is inadequate to the current challenge. I was born and (in large part) brought up in Stoke-on-Trent, and my ex-partner of 20-odd years was born and brought up in Barking, the two main centres of BNP electoral success and ambition at the moment. So I know both places well; and I know the kind of people who are now backing the BNP. Dammit, some of the people in our families are among them.

The simple anti-Nazi demonising doesn’t work in the way that it used to for a number of reasons. First, the BNP has sunk real roots into some of these communities – far more so than the left. Whatever its ideological origins, whatever the backgrounds of some of its leaders, the BNP is not the same fringe Nazi organisation as its predecessors; and in places like Barking and Stoke voters know this from their personal experience. Outsiders coming in and telling them otherwise simply doesn't wash.

Second, the core anti-Nazi message is in any case weaker now than it was 30 years ago, when many people of working age still had direct personal experience of the war against fascism and couldn't stomach a supposedly 'nationalist' message that was at odds with what they and their parents had fought for in 1939-45. Put crudely, the patriotic appeal of anti-fascism has lost its punch; it’s much harder to combat the far right on this terrain than in the past. Expose them for what they are, yes, but the new-look, besuited-not-booted image is not just window dressing. As Magnus Marsdal (‘Underdog politics’) and Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas MP and Searchlight editor Nick Lowles (‘Nothing is more important’) outline in the June/July issue of Red Pepper, we are facing a Europe-wide phenomenon in the shape of the rise of a newly ‘respectable’ far right that cannot be combated on the simple basis of old-style anti-fascism.

This new far right is reaching parts of the white working class that the left is failing to touch. The reasons are many, but they boil down to two: the absence of an alternative political appeal in the form of a credible left-wing programme (exacerbated by the surrender of New Labour and other European social democratic parties to the forces of neoliberalism and global capitalism); and the absence of alternative political organisation rooted in the experiences and needs of people who have been to a large extent abandoned by the mainstream political parties and the left alike.

In the course of writing this, I dug out for reference a piece I wrote for New Society back in February 1985 (‘I’m not racialist but …’). Reading through it, I was struck by how I could have written virtually the exact same article yesterday. And if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.

Photo: Saturday's march/parade in London, courtesy of Harpymarx, who has other good pics too

Fucking immigrant? Idiot more like

In my new capacity as spokesman for the Almost Supporting Chelski Fan Club, I'd just like to say that I don't believe that a member of the Chelski ground staff called Patrice Evra a 'fucking immigrant' on Saturday, as has been reported today. I've heard some racist abuse in my time but calling someone an 'immigrant' doesn't usually feature highly in the numbskulls' vocabulary.

'Fucking idiot' I can believe, especially if the Man Utd players were getting in the way of the lawnmowers and the ground staff wanted to get off home.

It reminds me of a game of football I played a few years ago when one of the opposing team (white) called one of ours (black) a 'fucking donkey' after he clattered him with a clumsy tackle. Not nice admittedly, but then neither was the tackle. Our player was convinced he'd said 'monkey', though, and it used up all of my anti-racist credits to persuade him that maybe, just maybe, he'd misheard.

Just like '78

For a moment it could have been 1978 and I was pushing six-month-old Rachel through the park gates in her battered, red and white striped pushchair with the handle held together with gaffer tape and the ‘Babies Against the Nazis’ placard above her head. There were punks and goths and rastas and rude boys, and there were trade unionists in their suits and paper sellers with their buckets, and I’d got a knot in my stomach and a tear in my eye at the sight of so many people from so many different backgrounds coming together to say no to racism to the sound of the music of a generation that had grown up together and was prepared to stand together now.

I didn’t expect to be so moved by the Love Music Hate Racism carnival today at Victoria Park, in Hackney, east London. I’d feared that it would be a shadow of the big anti-racist events of the 1970s; that it might not draw the same numbers, that it might feel old and tired, populated by too many people like me, old soldiers recalling past campaigns, who’d never be convinced that anything could compare with Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League and the Clash.

I knew I was wrong from the moment I saw the people who were approaching the park. Young and determined, with an energy and a fire that needed no one to pass on old torches to inflame them. Diverse and committed, queuing up (queuing, for Joe Strummer’s sake!) to buy t-shirts and badges. Confident and proud, as certain as we were 30 years ago that the future belonged to them, not to some narrow, bigoted bunch of no-marks who believe that the colour of your skin, or the names you give your gods, matter more than the strength of your character or the nature of your principles.

The family of Blair Peach, murdered by the police at an anti-racist protest in Southall in 1979, were there. So was the daughter of David Widgery, a one-time Hackney doctor, committed socialist and anti-racist fighter, who was one of the finest people (and best writers) to emerge from the revolutionary movements of 1968, and who died desperately young in 1992, aged 45. And so, of course, were the bands and the musicians and the MCs and the DJs who, for an afternoon at least, were mixing some politics in with the beats. I even thought Amy Winehouse was singing from one stage (why wasn’t she?) before getting close enough to hear that it was just a recording of her to fill in time before the Paddingtons.

Despite everything, I don’t expect Love Music Hate Racism to have the same profound effect that the ANL and RAR had in 1977-79. One of my abiding memories of the 1978 carnival was of the small gangs of National Front supporters who had gathered at a handful of locations along the route of the march to Victoria Park from central London. Anti-NF protests were dangerous things at the time, with real prospects of violence. At the very least, the NF fans expected to have a good time abusing and putting the frighteners on their opponents as they passed by.

I remember, in particular, watching a group of NF thugs outside a pub in Hackney as the march came past. It went on and on and on, a seemingly never-ending parade of people, tens of thousands of them, who were opposed to everything the NF stood for. The cockiness and self-assertion of the racists visibly drained from them that day as they were confronted by the inescapable fact that it was they who were the minority - and a tiny one at that.

From a situation in which it was racists who could intimidate those who opposed them into silence, things were transformed almost overnight. Now every racist statement or other manifestation of their hatred began to be challenged, to carry with it a burden of ostracism and shame. It seemed as if almost everyone in London began to wear ANL badges, on buses, on the tube, in the pubs, in the street. Suddenly, a burgeoning fascist movement looked pathetic, wormlike and small, along with the people who had backed it.

The modern-day racists will not be so dramatically deflated by today's carnival. For a start, they have built bases for themselves that will not easily be swept aside. They have, to some extent, avoided the Nazi tag that was so successfully laid upon them in the 1970s. Remember that in 1978, most people – including, still, a considerable proportion of the working population – had a direct personal memory of the war against fascism. The idea of supporting a party whose leaders associated themselves with the beliefs and principles of the Nazis was anathema even to most of those who perhaps shared some of the NF’s views on race and immigration. Today’s leaders of the far right have recognised the importance of distancing themselves from their Nazi antecedents, downplaying the thuggery and the violence, even avoiding open confrontation and the marches they loved to organise into multiracial territory.

In 1978, moreover, the left – including in the Labour Party and the trade unions – was much more numerous, more active, more organised and, crucially, more connected to the white working class than it is today. It represented a more credible alternative than it does now. Disillusion and disengagement was not so intense.

On the positive side, though, Britain has changed massively culturally – and for the better – since 1978. Certain key anti-racist principles are deeply entrenched in our social psyche, as well as legally and institutionally. There are many battles yet to be fought, of course, but today’s festival has given me hope and confidence beyond what I ever imagined that they will not only be fought – but won.

Every failure to vote on 1 May is a vote for the BNP

I bumped into Ken Livingstone this morning, canvassing for the May elections at the Nag’s Head shopping centre, on Holloway Road, with my local MP Jeremy Corbyn. On a day when all the headlines were about Ken’s ‘secret’ kids and Boris Johnson’s teenage drug-taking (neither of which was actually ‘news’ or, to most people, surprising), Livingstone was raising a more important issue – and one that may prove to be of the most lasting consequence when the votes for the London Assembly are counted.

This is, quite simply, ensuring the biggest possible turnout on 1 May to prevent the British National Party from gaining representation in the government of London.

As Ken Livingstone’s campaign declared today, ‘One of the things at stake in this election is London's future as a united diverse city, where all communities and individuals feel they belong. The British National Party is a direct threat to that unity ...

‘We have to get across one simple fact: there’s only one way to stop the BNP, which is by actually going out to vote against them. A low voter turnout will help the BNP get elected. For the fascists, success means getting 5 per cent of the total London vote. The higher the turnout the harder it is for them jump the five per cent hurdle.’

Earlier in the week, at the London Evening Standard hustings, when asked to sum up his message in 60 seconds, Livingstone devoted most of his allotted time to an appeal for voters of all parties to turn out to stop the BNP. ‘Vote for me, Boris, Brian Paddick or Sian Berry, but don't let the BNP get a seat,’ he said.

It’s not exactly a revolutionary appeal from the one-time author of If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It, but it’s none the less important for all that. The BNP’s attempt to make racism respectable has enjoyed more local successes, including in parts of London, than any far-right party since the second world war. Even one of their number obtaining a platform at City Hall would be an advance to top all that they have achieved so far.

No excuses, then, my anarchist friends: every failure to vote on 1 May must be considered a vote for the BNP.

Dread beat and blood

The dub poet and radical icon of black British resistance culture, Linton Kwesi Johnson, who appeared at the Barbican on 9 March, has his own take on the guns that are taking such a toll in black communities across the world. In Britain, he puts it down to an increasing materialism and the shrinking of collective political alternatives. And he questions why the police find it so difficult to deal with the supply of guns to those communities in the first place. ‘Why is it so easy for young people to get hold of these guns?’ he asks the audience at a concert that marks that start of his fourth decade of recording.

For people of my generation, many of whom cut their political teeth in the anti-racist mobilisations of the 1970s, LKJ is a symbol of much that was best about the left during those times – not the least of which was an openness to all cultures and colours and an utter determination to stand together against racists and fascists of all descriptions.

Some of dem say dey a nigger hater
Some of dem say dey a black beater
Some of dem say dey a black stabber
Some of dem say dey a Paki basher

Fascists on de attack?
Don’t worry bout dat
Fascists on de attack?
We will fight dem back
Fascists on de attack?
We will counter-attack
Fascists on de attack?
We will drive them back!

(‘Fight dem back’, from Forces of Victory, 1979)

My daughter Rachel was born within a couple of weeks of the huge anti-National Front mobilisation in Lewisham in 1977, at which I was knocked senseless by the police and carted off on a stretcher but more importantly the NF attempt to march was broken up and defeated. Her first demo (complete with ‘Babies Against the Nazis’ banner) was the 80,000-strong Anti-Nazi League march through east London, which took place 30 years ago this April.

These mass demonstrations and the campaigning that went on around them helped turn the fascist tide, and despite the recent electoral gains by the British National Party in places like Barking, the London into which Rachel’s son was born a few months ago is an immeasurably more open and tolerant city than the one that greeted her back then. Sometimes, it’s good to celebrate our victories as well as preparing for the fights to come.

We’re the forces of victory
An we comin’ right through
We’re the forces of victory
Now what you gonna do?

Leon Greenman

Britain’s anti-fascist movement has lost one of its greatest fighters in Leon Greenman, who died aged 97 on 6 March. A Holocaust survivor who lost his wife and young son at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Leon was in the front line of the struggle against racism and fascism to the end – often literally so. In 1993, at the age of 83, he took part in the big demonstration against the BNP headquarters in Welling, south east London. When riot police charged the demonstrators, with Leon at the front, he had to be hoisted to safety over a garden wall. His autobiography An Englishman in Auschwitz was published in 2001.

I saw quite a bit of Leon in the early 1990s. Two things that he told me during our conversations left a particular mark. The first was that as a British citizen living in Holland he and his family should never have been sent to Auschwitz anyway, but the necessary papers proving his status didn’t arrive with the relevant official – who was unwilling to delay his departure – until a day after the transport had left, with him on it. The second was about sharing his meagre concentration-camp bread ration one day with an exceptionally persistent sparrow. ‘He was only trying to scratch a living,’ Leon said, ‘like the rest of us.’