The BNP and the Egging Laffer Curve

the usual crowd of wowsers and pursed-lip good-government types come out of the woodwork, sorrowfully wagging their fingers and telling us “this is just what the BNP want”, and “this sort of thing makes people sympathetic to the BNP”.

As I recall, the fascists didn’t like it when people chucked bricks at them back in 1936; Mosley’s Blackshirts didn’t gain political support after that, they lost it. Egging by comparison is rather gentle.

And a bit tragic. While Griffin cops a dry-cleaning bill, he also gets a complement of staff, a million quid, an office in Brussels, compulsory time on the BBC, and votes in real grown-ups legislative chambers.

What do the socialist pie-throwers get? No votes from constituents, no media respect, no power.

All they get is the nagging question, why have the British people sent Griffin and his mate to Brussels, and not any of you lot?

People keep making the point that the overall votes for the BNP are down from 2004, so clearly they don’t have increased support. I agree that’s one possible interpretation, but it hardly seems like the obvious one. Is there public polling data to support the idea that BNP support hasn’t risen recently, and/or that BNP supporters are more likely to go out to vote while others stay home?

Otherwise I would take this election result at face value and conclude there are an increasing number of white-supremacist/fascists in the UK

Unite Against Fascism ought to agree to allow Nick Griffin to give his press conferences in peace and without interruption, and in return the BNP ought to schedule an opportunity at the end of each press conference for their leader to stand around being pelted with eggs.

Git-for-splat?

Is there actually a right to hold press conferences? Racist goons can surely get their message out in other ways, say by emailing insane press releases to newspapers or blogging in green Comic Sans, so I don’t see how systematically and forever egging them within a few seconds of their appearing in public could ever amount to a serious and therefore deplorable attempt to “silence” them.

IANAHRL, but I suspect that Strasbourg would probably find that there was implicitly a right to some sort of parity of treatment for political parties. In any case, we can afford to be generous and it pays to move slowly up the Laffer curve until we reach the optimum; the press conferences and other public appearances are the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.

#14: well it does a bit, specifically in that it too finds a significant minority prepared to assent to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Ian Dale’s quoted comment is odd. these anti-fascists are “using fascist methods”? Which fascist group threw eggs? Sounds like something out of P G Wodehouse.

Er, that should be WHY. Comment #4 that is, though strangely this one has gone through fine.

“Ian Dale’s quoted comment is odd. these anti-fascists are “using fascist methods”? Which fascist group threw eggs? Sounds like something out of P G Wodehouse.”

It is because they are likely to be left-wing. In Iain Dale’s mind, both the actual left and the BNP are simply two forms of leftism, which can not help but fly into thuggery.

The best way to deal with them in Iain Dale’s mind is possibly not inviting them to a tea party, or possibly a sternly worded letter.

Daniel

Thanks mate. My post does contain THAT word, for pretty obvious reasons I would have thought given the topic. ;)

Just watched the clip on the Times site, with Oliver Kamm calling for “stiff exemplary sentences” for eggers. …. Hang on, aren’t “stiff exemplary sentences” characteristic of Kamm’s prose style?

Thanks Daniel.

I’m not sure how helpful it is to fling “fascist” around like confetti. Fascism was a peculiar response to a peculiar time. It is wiser to treat the BNP in terms of its own time and context.

@16 Well sure, they both support a finding that was already widely observed in other polls. No surprise there.

But the basic conclusions that M&M claimed from their poll has no resemblance whatsoever to anything in this poll. I mean, we’re talking about a percentage of far-right fringe BNP voters confirming a clearly-articulated anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in one poll, vs in another poll a *higher* percentage of main-stream Democratic voters providing an answer that *may* indicate an acceptance of anti-Semitic theories, but may reflect something altogether different.

I’m not sure how helpful it is to fling “fascist” around like confetti. Fascism was a peculiar response to a peculiar time. It is wiser to treat the BNP in terms of its own time and context.

Generally I’d agree, but if you have a party whose leadership have suggested, behind closed doors when the peons are not listening, to take Britain into something rather like that peculiar response, and indeed rather admire the architects of that peculiar response, I think flinging “fascist” about is, for once, very useful.

I am afraid that the opponents who bang on about “fascism” are just as much an obstacle as the BNP.

Freshly Squeezed

But among how many Brits, Scandinavians, Indonesians, Australians, or Americans do you think shrieks of “fascist” resonates in 2009?

I’m not sure how helpful it is to fling “fascist” around like confetti.

Or to fling it like… an egg?

Anyhow, I’d normally agree. So, does anyone have a good read on what score the BNP would receive from Britt’s metric? (And are those 14 defining characteristics taken at all seriously by people who study fascist states, or what should I be referring to here?)

But the basic conclusions that M&M claimed from their poll has no resemblance whatsoever to anything in this poll.

Speaking of which, I was happy to see that Dr. Malhotra posted the full distributions with the comments, “Obviously, one of the problems with Likert scales is that the true meaning of each particular response option is somewhat ambiguous” and “The other thing that concerns me (but I don’t have a solution for yet) is that respondents tend to trust the interviewer/researcher, so perhaps the question signaled that it is OK to blame Jews, since a high-status person is asking a question like this.”

Anyhow, apparently 10% of D. voters said {a lot / a great deal}, as opposed to 4.3% of R. voters. Given that, I can see why it wouldn’t stand out as inappropriate to interpret {a moderate amount} as a positive rather than negative indicator: the R/D proportion of positive indicators is roughly the same. Strange and worrisome, even given the variety of issues raised about the survey.

it contains a reference to “socialism”, the once popular political ideology which contains within it a six letter string that is also the name of a widely spam-promoted erectile dysfunction treatment.

Just as well then for the health of this thread that the more modern “racism” has come to replace its slightly longer predecessor.

re #28: Tony Blair had a similar workaround.
Coincidentally, the act of a processed ham.

No-one wants to silence the BNP. As you know, Bob, BNP members have been officially warned off blogging by their führer because of the things they tend to say. No, we want them to speak and then look ridiculous.

The BNP vote was up about 150,000 nationally. It went down in those constituencies, yes, for reasons I don’t claim to have a handle on, but the idea that this isn’t a gain is wrong. It’s a smaller gain than 2004, though.

It went down in those constituencies

The two constituencies where a BNP MEP was actually elected.

but the idea that this isn’t a gain is wrong

Explain please.

The two constituencies where a BNP MEP was actually elected.

Yes, but nationally it went up considerably! Is that irrelevent?

Explain please.

Original post: “In fact this isn’t true; the absolute number of BNP votes was slightly down on 2004, and their electoral success was purely an artefact of overall low turnout.”

Comment #6: “People keep making the point that the overall votes for the BNP are down from 2004”

Neither of these seemed to be talking just about the North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber. Hence these statements simply aren’t true, unless you have a funny definition of “absolute” or “overall”. Either there’s a collective lack of clarity in this thread, or people are mistaken.

I still don’t see why people worry about the BNP. France has had comedy fascists as part of the political scene for decades. Better in a separate fringe party than exerting shadowy influence on a mainstream one. Racist scum are racist scum, and there are a lot of them around. Making them instantly identifiable can only help the clarity of political discourse. Or is there some thought that ‘we’ could, as if by magic, make ‘them’ just go away?

I still don’t see why people worry about the BNP. France has had comedy fascists as part of the political scene for decades. Better in a separate fringe party than exerting shadowy influence on a mainstream one.

But the problem has been that New Labour has seen the rise of the BNP, and concluded in its normal attitude of ‘that must be what the electorate want’, that it ought to be more anti-immigrant. When New Labour politicians talk about listening to the concerns of the white working class, they don’t mean building enough council houses so there’s less comeptition on waiting lists, they mean hassling asylum seekers more.

The appeal of fascism is an appeal to strength to sort out the mess. Like Spode, Griffin can’t afford to look like an idiot if he’s to get on. Under these circumstances, it doesn’t matter if the anti-fascists also look like idiots: their job is not to get elected themselves, nor to get respected or taken seriously, merely to stop the fascists attaining these goals.

I take Zamfir’s point about moving from pies to bullets, though: deadly violence aimed at fascists, if it serves any purpose at all, serves only a strategy of tension. The 43 Group obviously knew this; they had the right skill-set to start killing members of the Union Movement, rather than kicking them, but they chose not to implement it.

I think a lot of leftist analysis of this vote is falsely reassuring.

Conceivably, but then again – as on nearly any given issue – a lot of leftist analysis says something rather different, so it’s not really a helpful generalisation.

I still don’t see why people worry about the BNP…..better in a separate fringe party than exerting shadowy influence on a mainstream one

Well, one way to answer the first point is to observe that the second is not to be relied on. Not historically, and not entirely in the present. And I’m not necessarily thinking of the Tories.

Of course it’s worrying. It’s true that their overall vote didn’t go up, but it’s also true that you can’t be sanguine about their vote remaining solid where turnout is down (not least because it also suggests that some of those votes must be new ones). It’s true that much of their vote is old working-class Tories, but it can’t be true of all of it. It’s true that fascists have been around the French scene for years (though I doubt that their targets would consider them “comedy fascists”) but it’s also true that they weren’t around, in any numbers, on the British scene for years. It’s true that where a similar bunch won in Doncaster, that was in a situation of a noticeably corrupt and torpid local Labour Party, but it’s also true that that description would fit a lot of local Labour Parties in very working-class towns. It’s true that fascists tend to make fools of themselves when they speak in public, but it’s also true that a lot of things they say, though foolish, are believed by a lot of people.

We can, if we wish, decide that this is all a combination of low turnout and David Cameron, the first of them making the fascists seem bigger than they are, the second making their natural political home less attractive to them. I don’t doubt that these are elements and perhaps, at this point, the most important elements. But I also think that it would be most unwise to rely purely on those factors and neglect others: for me, in particular, the long trend in which the nastier elements of political life in working-class towns have been talked up and pandered to, while the idealistic elements (and the organisations attached thereto) have withered to the point of disappearance. There’s been a long period of rot – which I have absolutely no idea how to reverse, by the way – and I think that’s likely to be the basis of more of this sort of thing.

Or maybe we can deal with the problem simply by laughing at the silly fascists and quoting PG Wodehouse. Maybe.

Let’s be honest here. The only Leftist analysis to be done starts with the reality that 2 BNP guys are off to Europe with business class flights, compulsory access to the BBC, real political decision-making power, oh and a million quid; while no s0c1al1st is going anywhere apart from back to her red-brick tutorial room or his Peckham internet connection to bloviate on blogs.

And will folks PLEASE get over this “fascist” crap. Fascism is always a reaction against soc1al1sm. Clearly there was no s0c1al1sm in Britain to react against. The BNP victory was just opportunistic coordination of anti-immigration types, racists, and xenophobes who have always existed right across the political spectrum from Nazi to fascist to communist to s0c1al1st to liberal to conservative.

Nice little hermetically-sealed worldview you’ve got there, Jock. Since multiculturalism and antiracism are core components of whatever might remain of ‘the s-word’ in the UK today, who says the fascists aren’t reacting against that?

The other side of it, of course, is that if there is something to worry about, then it’s not the BNP’s fault. They’re just filling their ecological niche, like a particularly nasty virus. The complete failure of mainstream politics to innoculate the population against that virus, that’s where you might start looking for something to trouble yourself.

Tim — if you’re in UKIP, I withdraw the parenthetical comment. (Could anything I say be more flattering than that?)

And! The current surge in right-wing terrorism here in the US is less a reaction to leftist politics than it is an outburst of horrified racism at our Dear Transgressive Leader. In combination with the awful economic circumstances, which find straight white men feeling the pain in ways they’re not accustomed to. In my opinion.

“Tim—if you’re in UKIP, I withdraw the parenthetical comment. (Could anything I say be more flattering than that?)”

Very flattering indeed. And yes, I’m in UKIP. Was the newspaper side of the press office in the recent campaign.

One information point. 1,200 more votes for UKIP in the NW region would have given UKIP a second seat and left Griffin out in the cold. Close run thing….

Mmm, but that’s not an answer to the question, is it?

“it contains a reference to “socialism”, the once popular political ideology which contains within it a six letter string that is also the name of a widely spam-promoted erectile dysfunction treatment.”

Hmm, I guess that I’ll have to rename my ‘road to agrarian’ movement from ‘ViaGraism’.

I’m continually surprised by the way the British middle class think that British fear of immigration is a thing of the past

a. when you say “British middle class”, who are you thinking of?

b. why do you think they believe that ” British fear of immigration is a thing of the past”? Can you provide us a source for anybody actually saying that?

Methinks ’tis not the people who fill in forms that the fear is about, whether artificially whipped-up or not. Anyway, it wasn’t clear whether sg meant the immigration is “out of control”, or the paranoia about it. Benefit of the doubt and all that.

The strange thing is that people appear to believe that some dreadlocked type throwing an egg at Nick Griffin gives him credibility and makes the BNP more likely to get elected, while Phil Woolas talking about the country being “full” and Gordon Brown talking about “British jobs for British workers” doesn’t. This “conversation” we’re meant to be having with the thin million fascist voters this country always has had and always will have is a mystery to me; what possible state of affairs could we actually give them where they’d say “yes, that’s fine, this is a level of nonwhite population that I can totally live with, everything’s fine now and I’m going to vote Labour”? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – we need to send a clear message to the self-styled “white working class”, and that message needs to be “Kiss My Arse”.

I’ve no idea, by the way, why someone said above that the PVV were the second biggest party in the Netherlands. They’re not, they’re the fifth biggest (as are the BNP over here), with roughly 5% of the vote (as have the BNP over here), and their success in the 2009 European elections is every bit as much a low turnout artefact as the BNP’s was here.

I’ve no idea, by the way, why someone said above that the PVV were the second biggest party in the Netherlands.

(One of the few agreeable side effects of the alleged successes of the BNP is that British persons and media are less keen to seize the moral high ground about Nasty Geert Wilders.)

adamhene

Your point about the relationship between fascism and s0c1al1sm is well made. I should have been clearer: Fascism always procedes from s0c1ia1sm, whether as a growth from or a reaction against.

sg

What “conversation” did Australia have about race? My understanding was that the Hawkeating Labor government silenced debate on immigration. The “conversation” ended up brewing on the ground before the talisman of Pauline Hanson finally ignited the race/immigration hullabaloo from the mid/late 1990s. Howard poured petrol. It is still raging.

It is always worth remembering that xenophobia is not some artificially-whipped-up political issue, but a basic human trait – a healthy [or if you prefer, deeply unhealthy] fear of difference has been the glue holding together pretty much every society, since long before ‘nationalism’ in its modern forms arose. Thus the work of combatting it, of getting people to see that the forms of difference they fear are not actually anything to worry about, is not a once-and-for-all trick, it is and will always be a struggle.

Of course, when there might be something to worry about; say, the inevitable long-term decline of a overcrowded island from its peak of post-imperial wallowing in entitlement to a status more consonant with its actual productive capacity in the global economy, well then, xenophobia, along with resentments of many other kinds, is going to be like a whack-a-mole, popping up [almost?] too fast for anyone to cope with, and certainly not the bunch of numpties currently at the helm of our great and historic political movements…

I’m continually surprised by the way the British middle class think that British fear of immigration is a thing of the past … There were strikes against foreign labour this year.

There were, and (a) they were strikes against foreign labour being shipped in & used to displace local workforces; (b) the main strike was run by a committee including some very sensible soc1alists, and run on explicitly non-rac1st, non-xenophobic grounds; [c] the fasc1sts did turn up at the picket line and try to get a foot in the door, but they were told to p1ss off.

As I said on my blog, this wasn’t so much a case of “We don’t like ‘foreigners’ taking ‘our’ jobs” as of “We don’t like the boss taking the jobs we were doing off us”. And I’m really struggling to see the latter as a reactionary statement. Sometimes “they” actually do “come over here and take our jobs” (or rather get brought over here); objecting may be racist, or it may just be anti-losing-my-job-ist.

I agree, mostly, with ejh – particularly the part about how the disappearance of old ideas that put working-class people first [is] habitually followed by their replacement by newer, nastier ideas that told some of them they were going to be put first again. But I also think that Euro elections generally have a low turnout (because people don’t care about the results) and a disproportionately high turnout for anti-European parties (because a sizeable minority of people care enough to cast a protest vote) – and that these elections took place in a climate of general disgust for politicians in general and the Labour Party in particular, which would lead anyone to expect an even lower turnout than usual and an even higher protest vote.

sg

The White Australia Policy had effectively ended by the late 1960s, years before Whitlam came to power. And Multiculturalism was introduced by the Liberals under Malcolm Fraser. The previous Labor Whitlam government had refused to accept Vietnamese boat people, deriding them as “Vietnamese Balts”.

The Hawke-government commissioned the Fitzgerald Inquiry into immigration, which confirmed an anti-Asian sentiment within the Labor heartland, so Labor changed the emphasis of immigration policy to favour family reunion of Lebanese Muslims. They were considered easy to lock in as Labor voters, and effective branch-stackers.

For the Vietnamese boat people, the ALP built desert concentration camps, and changed the Migration Act, so that they had little to no access to the courts, and could be held indefinitely.

So please do not insult our intelligence people by sugar-coating and misrepresenting Labor’s anti-Asian xenophobia and willingness – and skill – at exploiting ethnic/immigration/race issues for political gain!

“Italian fascism emerged directly out of socializm, not against it; the same was more or less true in Germany”

‘Adam’, that’s spectaucularly untrue, and I suggest that you read a book on one or both of these topics before you repeat it again, otherwise more and more people are likely to concluded that you are ignorant (which can be fixed) or stupid (harder to fix) . Kershaw’s _Nazi Dictatorship_ and Bosworth’s _Mussolini’s Italy_ would do for starters.

I agree with you, Phil. If education is poor, language training suffers and working-class Britons can’t compete in Europe.

Jock, the White Australia Policy was ended by Whitlam, with the implementation of a non-racist immigration policy. You’re completely misreading the Fitzgerald Review, while recycling a commonly-made conservative smear about ALP attitudes towards migrants (that, while being racist, they simultaneously bring in extra migrants to “use” for branch-stacking). The family reunion recommendations of the review had nothing to do with the race of migrants. Well done recycling right wing talking points though.

sg, you seem to have misunderstood the point I was making. Nobody has the same level of exposure to non-English second languages that almost everyone has to English: language teaching in schools could be much better (and it certainly should be much better), but it wouldn’t begin to level the playing-field as between English as a second language and almost anything else as a second language. In any case, Poland’s a relatively poor country (and Bulgaria and Romania are absolutely poor countries): in those countries it makes economic sense to come to a country like Britain, rough it for a few months and go home with money in your pocket. Those incentives don’t exist for British workers.

But I think your premise is mistaken. Free movement of labour within the EU is set up to benefit people who employ labour & don’t want to pay labour any more than they can get away with. It’s not set up as something which everyone can benefit from, however competitive they are.

If education is poor, language training suffers and working-class Britons can’t compete in Europe.

And what makes you think they either want to or should want to ‘compete in Europe’?

If education is poor, language training suffers and working-class Britons can’t compete in Europe.

It’s not purely about language, it’s also about geographical mobility or the lack of it. There are some working class communities where moving away from one’s town/city (or either from a particular area of one city) is seen as an unfamiliar or even dangerous thing to do, taking you away from the support network of your friends and family. (That’s one thing stopping some working-class children going to university). If that kind of community safety-net is vital to you (and there may be reasons why it is), then free movement of labour within the EU means that ‘they’ can come to your city and take jobs there, but you can’t imagine going to theirs.

Whereas I think more middle-class people, even if they would have no intention of going to work elsewhere in the EU, would know people who had done so, so it’s more obviously a two-way street. I don’t know whether working class cultures with more of a tradition of expecting to go ‘away’ to get work are as hostile to immigrants. My impression is that overall Scotland is less anti-EU immigrants than England, for example.

71 – ‘I’m no historian’

Nope, you really aren’t

My grandad thinks they should bring back national service, whereas I believe all middle class students should participate in an obligatory gap year consisting of voluntary work in the inner cities of their own country. Perhaps this would lead to a more informed understanding of working class experience, rather than simply viewing it as incipiently backward and fascist.
Perhaps also we could have enforced multiculturalism/enrichment on the doorstep of the decision makers.
Once these policies are in place then perhaps we could have a more balanced ‘conversation’ about the real issues dividing this country: individualism, consumerism, break down of community, alienation, lack of social mobility, priveledge, confused social cohesion etc…hardly dissolusioned Tory voters!

As an Australian, I have to say Jock Bowden is simply misrepresenting the state of play in Australia.

For a start, most of the immigrant communities are Labor bulwarks (hence Howard’s attempts at dogwhistling to isolate them). The notable exception is UK immigrants who are the biggest pool of anti-Asian sentiment. For a second Australia takes in more immigrants per capita than Britain, and from more diverse sources (I reckon the last bit is a key to minimising nativist resentment, BTW).

I wouldn’t argue that xenophobes don’t exist in Australia, but IME they are considerably less prevalent than – if quite as nasty as – British xenophobes.

“In short, the issue of race and immigration in Australia has cut across political lines and neither accusations of racism nor celebrations of openness belong exclusively to either side of the house.”

But not so in Japan, where opposition to non-racial Japanese immigration is relatively non-controversial and widely accepted across the political elites and the voting population. Yet that policy isn’t generally defined by whites as racist …

claw’s summary is great, but to those ALP apparatchiks above who deny a century of ALP anti-Asian racism and policy? You’re dreamin’.