On its 75th anniversary, much attention was given to the Battle of Cable Street, where Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts were prevented from marching through the predominantly Jewish working class East End of London. But Cable Street itself was the culmination of a wider tradition of direct physical confrontation with fascists both at the time and throughout most of the 20th century.

The publication of Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (Freedom Press) has re-asserted the importance of this disparaged and neglected tradition. Michael Calderbank spoke with Gary and Andy, longstanding members of Red Action who helped to initiate AFA, about their controversial new book.

Michael: Maybe we could begin by talking about the history of physical confrontation with the fascists in Britain?

Andy: Well, if you’re a Jew living in the 1930s or a working class Communist then it’s in your face, you’re dealing with Blackshirts who are on your street corner. It’s something you’ve got to react to and deal with in the here and now. You’ve also got people looking at the wider strategic picture – what was going in Spain was very real, what was going on in Italy and Germany was very real – and people with foresight understood that if you don’t put something in place to prevent that then you’re going to be in trouble yourselves.

After the war, when it was totally clear what fascism could lead to, you had the ’43 group which, although it had CP members in its ranks, was largely an apolitical purely paramilitary body who would go round attacking the fascists. They were tough people, physically aggressive who had often served in the armed forces, many from Jewish backgrounds, who had seen a lot in their few years – these are young people – if you’ve been through that and don’t understand it, you’re never going to understand it. So people who have gone through that, seen it in the cinemas, or even in your own family over in Europe – and then you’re just going out and minding your own business, and you see some geezer on a soapbox talkin’ about the same stuff, it’s gotta be obvious to you, yeah?

Gary: There’s an example when a group of Jewish lads went past Mosley’s secretary [Jeffrey Hamm] after the war speaking up at Jack Straw’s Castle [near Hampstead Heath], and they were incredulous. I’m mean, here was the same old Jew-baiting going on after the war as you had before the war – with everthying that had gone on! So they gave ‘em a good shoeing and found: ‘these fuckers are everywhere!’ I mean, y’know, it’s ridiculous, we’re not havin’ it.

There was a huge strain of anti-semitism in the British establishment that Mosley hoped to profit from but never did. And so when Jews who had just got back from the war met fascists on the street they weren’t gonna petition the council to get see if they could do something! They were just gonna get on and do it themselves.

Andy: When people’s whole family lines have been wiped out and turned to ashes, what are you gonna do with people like that, try and debate with them in that situation?

Gary: And they wouldn’t wouldn’t debate with you either, that’s the point. If you went up to them and said, ‘excuse me, I’m a member of the Jewish faith and could you…’ [laughs] they’re not gonna argue the point, you’d be hit be a cosh. But, you might not be out looking for any trouble particular, but they’re there. And that situation doesn’t go away, it’s like that later on. You’ve gone to the football or something and you’re standing next to some guy who gets a bottle smashed over his head, a black kid who they’ve chased down, do you stand back and say ‘right we’ll get onto the council to do something!’?

Andy: It’d depend what kind of circles you moved in to. I mean I don’t want to generalise too much, but many of the people involved on the left at the time would have come up through a university background and lived in this sealed kind of world from what I could tell. But I didn’t know, I didn’t come from a political background. Everywhere I went I met these people, they were in your face. And Britain at the time was a violent and anarchic sort of place in some ways. I mean you’d go out round the pubs on a Friday night, have a disagreement, or you’ve gone to the football or a gig or something, and you run in to these geezers with all sorts of badges, handing out leaflets, maybe taking the band off the stage and attacking the band! I’ve seen that happen! It’s not like you’d read in some textbooks about what should or shouldn’t be done, it was an instinctive thing. These people are bullies, they’re not people who can debate with. It’s not alien if you come from that kind of background.

Gary: Yes, and the left has to understand that as soon as they appear, it’s because your own side has been making mistakes. Fascists won’t appear in very small numbers, they’ll wait until it’s right for them. I mean they look at it strategically as well, they’ll take it onto a physical level when they think there’s something for them to gain. So it’s not a matter of waiting until they attack our people – we’ve got an investment in smashing up their meetings, their paper sales and the rest of it. You don’t want to wait until they’re some kind of respectable opposition. If it gets that far, you’ve already lost.

Michael: And at what stage, after the war, had the left started to fail in your view to such an extent that you started to see a fascist threat beginning to make its presence felt on the street?

Gary: Well, most of our people come into it from outside politics, with a completely fresh look, with no political hinterland at all. So there was a lot of cynicism from our side towards the existing organised left from a very early stage. I mean we supported emotionally and intellectually the basis for the whole left concept, and there was some stuff happening from on the picket lines (which was where I was recruited) and on things like the right-to-work marches, but even in the mid-Seventies it wasn’t clear cut and we certainly weren’t winning. There was a real lack of leadership across the board, not just on the revolutionary left but across the entire labour movement.

And at the same time as you had the start of the neoliberal stuff, you’d get the fascists upset at over-reaching in ’79 thinking - let’s not hang about let’s go for it now. The whole Anti Nazi League Mark I was a huge success for the left and beat back the first wave of the National Front electorally. There was incredible resentment about that, and they lose a bit of what discipline they might have had. They could just attack anyone now. So, as Andy was saying, you could retreat into your sealed world. Or you could stay where you were and stand your ground. And they were – the arenas then football, gigs, street sales, their meetings, our meetings and the rest of it…

Andy: They were an extremely violent group of people. So if you’re looking to organise, you’re thinking, what streets can I walk round, what pubs you can go in talk to people, where can I talk about stuff on the football or at a gig? All that’s contested territory. Are these aren’t the kind of people who believe in freedom of speech, and I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way, I mean literally! You’d get a glass smashed in your face. To me it’d become obvious. When their election campaign failed, there was people there who wanted revenge. And so all this territory needed to be fought for.

Michael: Reading the book, as we said in our review, some of the violence described is not exactly for the faint-hearted. And many people reading the book might be thinking, isn’t there a danger of becoming just like them, being brought down to their level? What would you say to those who say, when you end up like two groups of thugs who are as bad as the other, you don’t win the wider public around?

Gary: Well, it wasn’t always a pretty business, there’s no denying that, but it’s not a path we’ve just chosen for ourselves. They’re the point of aggression, the tip of the spear. If you approach them you’ve got to be prepared for violence to be done to you. And if you know that in advance, if you’re going to contest the territory you’re duty bound to prepare to do violence to them it’s as simple as that.

In terms of complaints, we didn’t get much complaints from the Jewish stallholders when the NF paper sale got scatttered from Chapel Market [Islington], in fact the police couldn’t get a [single] witness to testify. But the pub landlord in King’s Cross, the who was making literally a thousand pound [a week] from opening his pub to bonehead gigs for his mates like Ian Stewart [Donaldson, lead singer of fascist band Skrewdriver] was going to complain when the place - course he was. He wasn’t interested in blacks or homosexuals getting attacked – which they did after the pub closed – he was after making money. He was raking it in!

But when AFA marched through Bethnal Green, and into Whitechapel, it was like a seige had been lifted. Little Asian kids running about in the street - that was there attitude to us!

Michael: Actually, reading the book, it struck me that – judging from the state’s reaction – that’s what they feared most. When it looked like it might have been possible to link up between white working class communities and black or Asian areas…

Gary: …on a political basis, yes. The state was concerned but the left weren’t, what does that tell you? I mean the left wasn’t trying to do what we were doing, not on an organised basis. But the state thought there’s a germ here that might develop. Not good, not from their perspective. So did they say, we’ll just see if we can put someone in and steer it a bit? No! They smashed it straight away, that was their approach. It’s quite a useful little anecdote. ‘You can do that there…upto a point…but you can’t do it here. No way.’

Andy: I think we were conscious that we didn’t want to get trapped in a siege mentality. Us looking after ‘our’ areas, the fash looking after ‘theirs’, the wars, us looking for them, them looking for us, we always wanted to break out of that. When RA [Red Action] helped to form AFA we tried to grow it as wide as possible within reason, and eventually when people tried to take politics back into the community, via the IWCA [Independent Working Class Association], that was our effort, we did what we always wanted to do, to go to working class communities and try to grow a political movement there. I mean we can argue the toss about how successful that was, but that would be a different debate. I’d never say it was entirely successful but I don’t think it was a total failure either. We got some things very right, but you’d have to look at the time and the context, what we’re up against, but that was us trying to put our vision of political organisation in working class communities into effect. And that was always our intention. We never thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could fight an ongoing war with a load of other people’.

Michael:  I mean there would be that accusation, that you’d ended up participating in a sub-culture, that you’d have your sales, they’d have theirs, you’d have your bands, they’d have their bands, etc.

Gary: Well, let’s look at the alternative. They have their subculture, you have nothing. They have their sales, you don’t. They have their bands, you’ve got nobody. Then they have the football fans, and you have nobody. And they have the working class estates and you’ve got nobody….

Andy: And the thing is, in Islington with the IWCA, we always knew there’d be people with racist ideas on the estates, of course there are. We’re living in the real world. But the one thing we knew is that we didn’t have to keep looking over our shoulder, we could meet the people from the tenants’ association in the local pub and talk about how to organise against plans to sell off social housing in the borough. So we needed that space to get on with doing what we wanted to do. I’d reject that idea that we got sucked into looking forward to the next confrontation with the fash, that was never our vision. Never. Now, if you’re gonna ask me were there elements drawn to AFA who did get off a bit on the excitement or hanging around on the fringes, possibly. But every movement gets that. And there weren’t that many if you ask me. Certainly not amongst what I would call the leadership. That was never how we tried to shape the organisation, never how we sold it to people.

Michael: Without going into the various anarchist critiques – and in part for obvious reasons like you need people around you that you totally rely on and won’t leave you in the lurch – it sounds like you had a pretty centralised model going on, with a definite core…

Andy: Actually AFA was very democratic, when compared with say the ANL. On the street if wasn’t – couldn’t be. But as a broader organisation it was very democratic in the way it operated, on political campaign work etc. Similarly with Red Action. We’re a democratic organisation but when it came to the streets it couldn’t be and everyone understood that.

We had it opposite to the rest of the left from what we could see. We thought when it came to politics you should be democratic and open, but they couldn’t take that, they had very tight control. But on the streets they’d say [in mocking tone], ‘let’s involve as many people as possible and everyone can come along to an open organising meeting’, and we’d say ‘that’s ludicrous, who do you know is sitting there!’ [laughter]. I’d say they’d got that the wrong way round.

Michael: I’m sure you’ve heard all this before, but the Leninist groups would say ‘you are basically trying to substitute yourselves for the organised working class, setting yourselves up as a small urban guerrilla army to be the noble defenders of the class instead of mobilizing those larger sections of society…’

Andy: That’s just projection by them. No-one leafleted more working class council estates in East London than us. We organised all the carnivals [between the end of the ANL Mark I and the relaunched version], it was us that organised an exhibition that we invited schoolkids along to, there was this whole side of organising. Admittedly, that doesn’t perhaps get as much prominence in the book. But there was a large amount of campaigning, and a lot of efforts made to reach out to movers and shakers among the black or Asian youth…

Michael: …at which point the state came in to stop it. Do you think there were intelligence agents operating inside AFA?

Gary: Undoubtedly they’d have tried. The problem was for them the ‘split-screen’ structure. You could say what you want in the organising meeting and try to steer it round. But on the streets it was top-down. They’d latch on but you could shake ‘em off.

Michael: So you could spot who they were?

Andy: Sometimes. Who knows? Listen, if they could penetrate the IRA they could penetrate us. But do we think they managed to effectively push us off course? No, no. I think we done what we wanted when we wanted to do it. We made decisions when we wanted to make them.

Gary: Yes, there’s no evidence of that looking back with hindsight. I mean as you can tell from the book there’s people there with a huge question mark over them. But in terms of the way things got done, no. Being hierarchical like that you couldn’t slot somebody into a middle-manager type of position. But we were also democratic. It was asymmetrical so it worked really well. If it had been asymmetrical the other way around, as Andy said, we wouldn’t have lasted out a weekend.

Andy: We’d have ended up in the same jail together!

Michael: And people did occassionally get jail terms…

Gary: But as the book explains, we’d go out of our way to avoid that at all costs. Out of fidelity to the volunteers if you like. I mean we needed people – we had people who worked full time but they were on the dole, they didn’t get paid. And you’re dealing with a finite number. So you had to maintain morale. And also, even simple convictions could – in time – lead to jail.

Andy: We were mindful, we learnt a lot from Ireland, right, that’s a simple fact. And we learnt that if someone has been left adrift by the leadership having done something and copped time for it, and it seems like no-one gives a [toss] about them, how easy is it for the Old Bill to turn that individual. You’ve got to look after your people, do right by ‘em, on the street, in custody…

Gary: There was this one time in Hammersmith with Martin Webster [leading NF activist] and when they fled his arse was still hanging out literally of an open door, and one black kid dragged an NFer out, and he [the NFer] got left behind on his own. Ended up in hospital without even a bunch of grapes! I thought that was terrible PR.

Andy: Never looked after their people. But it’s a dog eat dog world for them.

Gary: They’d stand and fight individually, but they’d never look after each other. For us that was verboten. No-one got put in that position, in as much as you could.

Andy: We even went out of our way to help some people on the left avoid getting caught out by their own stupidity. We were doing surveillance around the time of the ANL relaunch in the East End, and they were gonna go out leafleting, and we knew that there were some well-known faces in the area. And we went down the ANL and said, ‘this is not good right, we’ve seen certain people’, and they said, ‘nah, don’t be stupid’. And people ended up in hospital. We said alright then, nothing we can do here, and got back in the car and [drove] off. And as we’re driving down the road, the ambulances are already passing! And one of the guys who got injured quite badly came over to AFA straight after that.

 Gary: The left often only really wanted to get involved when they thought it was in their interests to do so – and often they made a mess of things that had already been achieved.

Andy: Yes, when AFA organised the first major national march against the BNP in the East End – and it was really big, considering we were mainly based in Central London – it came on the radio and this woman came on and said it had been organised by the newly relaunched ANL! Seriously, they’d done all the organising!

Andy: That’s why I never take it really seriously when people moan ‘oh why didn’t AFA work with other people’ and all that. We did, we tried. The amount of time our people went to talk to them and try to get them involved, and say ‘yes, OK, we’ll give you two places on the committee as long as it does’t ease anyone else out’ and make it as broad as possible. And we were relatively successful. At one stage there were anarchists there – the Direct Action Movement – along with dogmatic Trotskyists, people like Workers Power, and they were all co-operating. Things weren’t always smooth. But it went along, and it showed that we were able to show a level of political maturity that’s rare on the left. Were the SWP prepared to come in on the same footing as us? Nah. They couldn’t deal with that. But we had CP people involved, even individuals from the local Labour party.

 Gary: Including at the rough end of it! Cos we’d go out in a group of 30 or 40 people and we’d have like 15 stewards there on the ground, while the rest could go up to the flats and do the political work, leafleting and what have you. So not everyone was expected to do the fighting, but there’d be people who wanted to campaign with us and supported what we were doing.

Michael: And were women involved, or was it all blokes?

Gary: There were women at every level, every level. But particularly in the intelligence work. They’d go into pubs that fellas hadn’t got the balls to walk into! They’d give you a whole run down of who was in there, what they were up to…
Andy: We tried using a geezer once, and all you got was ‘there’s fuckin’ loads of ‘em, but we could have ‘em, we could do this and that’. Obviously working class women knew the score, got themselves dolled up – look the part – and engaged them in conversation and found out real stuff you wanted to know: who were the real movers and shakers, what were relations like between the fash and landlord and bar staff; how are the locals treating them, will the hangers on bolt, that sort of thing. Women would get that information, because they’d have far less of an ego. And that’s why in West Germany when the police were fighting the Red Army Faction they said, ‘shoot the women first’. The women were so effective, because they were colder and more logical and systematic in their thinking.

Gary: If they were ever rumbled – when they walked into a pub in jeans and jacket, maybe a little bit of eye-liner – if the fash did think they were after information, they’d assume they were police. As long as they could hold their nerve they could get themselves out.

Andy: And horny fash can give up loads of information, rendez-vous points and all sorts to our people! (laughter) That’s a fact. Human nature. But you need to be seriously talented people to do that kind of work – to tell us exactly what we need to know. And they were treated at all times as equals. The left would sometimes say ‘any women involved are all like gangster’s molls’, all this insulting, patronising [rubbish]. The women didn’t feel like that. It was just that the roles were different, a lot of the time their skills were better used elsewhere. But not all the time. Sometimes they were involved on the street, and that’s a fact.

Michael: Clearly the nature of the far right threat has changed a lot since those days, with the changes to the BNP under the leadership of Nick Griffin. In the introduction of the book your talking at a point when the the BNP on are a high, after the European elections. Since then after the General Election it appears that – as an organisation – they don’t seem to be in a position to go much further. So what threat do you see them posing today?

Gary: What you said there was important, ‘as an organisation’ – it doesn’t take away from the support they’ve shown they can establish. I think with the BNP it’s partly that they never had the experience of high political office, didn’t have the opportunity. To begin with they didn’t have the middle class types, they were having to fight for the same survival thing which we drew them into, they were all on the streets even Griffin. They were stuck in waiting rooms on stations on Stockport and all that – they never had the chance to step out of the scenario. Next thing, they’re MEPs, they’ve dozens of councillors. Where have they done the planning for that? They’re used to planning Blood and Honour gigs in backrooms of pubs in Deptford. Suddenly they’re elevated. Not equipped – first thing. Second thing – they’ve felt the long arm of the state, no question. Inside, everywhere, every which way – diced and sliced – and at at the same time the key component was to decapitate the organisation, which they’ve failed to do, which was a key [state] objective.

The BNP might limp along, but the die has been cast, right, in the sense that the radical alternative will come from the far right within the constituencies we’ve identified. The left has not done anything to address that – at all – in thirty years. They’d no appetite do that, less appetite to do it now, even. There’s nothing on the left that could organise it on a national level. They’ve tried it – Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party, Respect and all that – they’ve nearly all fallen at the first hurdle, some of ‘em didn’t even get to the first hurdle! What does it tell you about Respect – talk about enclaves or sub-groups and insulating yourself! That kind of mindset was partly what we were fighting against, that you could retreat from your core constituency and fight somewhere else on identity grounds. We saw it coming. We said in 2001 that the BNP would prove that – in contrast to the left – they did have traction, could mobilise support in white working class communities. And in 2002, boom!

Where would the far right be if they had a free run at it for the last 30 years? Imagine if they never had to fight a war of attrition and could have brought in all the people with the organisational skills, the media skills and all that in? They’ve had none of that, the BNP leadership.

They never got the head-space because AFA weren’t going to give it to ‘em. But imagine if they had a clear 30-year run like they got in France and a number other European countries where they’ve basically been unchallenged – with a free run, imagine where we’d be?  If all the AFA stuff, all that ingenuity and effort, had been applied behind the BNP instead of against them!

Michael: There’s another account of what cut across the rise of the BNP which I’m sure you won’t like at all, namely that Searchlight and their allies in Barking and Dagenham managed to mobilise the existing community groups, trade unions, faith groups etc along with all the residual support that exists for the Labour party in order to unseat every single one of their councillors.

Andy: They had all those resources and completed a full circle – you had the state, so-called anti-fascist and anti-racist groups, religious groups and what have you – to reinstate the status quo. The status quo is back. Labour rules. Why did people vote BNP in the first place?

Gary: And also the BNP vote went up didn’t it? That’s the future you’re looking at. Not that they’ve been unseated for now because Labour’s woken up. Take the Isle of Dogs. We saw the portents were obvious a long way out. The ANL knocked out [Derek] Beacon…

Andy: …and they were actually popping champagne corks that night, the ANL. His vote went up!

 Gary: That was the future – we could see it then; they [the BNP] could see it then. Like Barking and Dagenham it was just a technical knock out.

Andy: I mean Margaret Hodge, what does she stand for?! She’s fine now. Everything’s sorted. She’s back in power, they’ve got all their councillors in – nothing to worry about. Thank you very much. So people have joined ‘respectable’ anti-fascism, the church, the local Labour party, the state, the police, the trade unions, using all the wealth, the resources, the intelligence to take back that seat that was needed. Now, I don’t want the BNP to win in Barking and Dagenham or anywhere else. But don’t let anyone try to kid themselves that that’s any kind of victory for what I would call working class politics. Cos it ain’t.

 Gary: If it was the IWCA or the Socialist Party or something like it that had stopped the BNP in Barking and Dagenham that would be a different matter. Really something to celebrate, right? Not to bring it back to where it was originally.

Excerpts from this interview appeared in the Dec/Jan 2012 print issue of Red Pepper.

Instead, Barking and Dagenham Council is now exclusively represented by Labour Party councillors. So what does this mean for the political future of the borough? Have we now seen the back of the BNP? And how can local residents make Labour councillors sit up and take notice in the absence of any opposition on the council?

Despite the terrible headline results, the national BNP vote almost trebled from the previous general election in 2005 – in large part because it stood more candidates. Even in Barking, Nick Griffin increased the BNP vote slightly in absolute terms. There are still some 15,000 BNP voters across the borough despite the BNP’s internal disarray, so complacency is certainly unjustified.

The BNP was defeated because of the substantially higher turnout. Unite Against Fascism claims that its efforts to unmask the BNP as a ‘Nazi’ party, working intensively on a door-to-door basis in parallel with the team of Labour incumbent Margaret Hodge, helped to alert wider sections of the electorate to the dangers of electing far-right candidates.

However, turnout also rose across the country at the May elections, as a tightly fought contest encouraged voters in London to turn back to Labour at the prospect of a Tory government. The capital saw several notable swings to Labour, helping the party to win control of councils such as Harrow, Brent, Camden and Islington. The increased Labour vote in Barking must be seen in this context.

But as Hope Not Hate campaign organiser (and newly elected Labour councillor for Barking) Sam Tarry told Red Pepper, ‘Although Labour party members and activists have played an important role in fighting the BNP, we could not have been certain of pushing them back simply by raising the Labour banner. The truth is that the local party had lost touch with the voters. Hope Not Hate has worked incredibly hard to activate and mobilise groups right across our community to fight for positive change rather than politics of hate and fear.’ Hope Not Hate has tried to carry through the spirit of the Obama campaign to use online campaigning tools to help drive offline activism on the ground, with the capacity to target specific groups such as pensioners, women, faith groups and residents associations with tailored messages.

As Tarry is quick to observe, ‘Hundreds of people have become actively engaged in local politics for the first time during this campaign. But we can’t just let this new force evaporate. People from right across Barking now have greater expectations about the sort of changes we want to deliver. The old political structures can be totally rejuvenated if they are willing to open up. As councillors we’ll pay the price if we don’t show that we are really listening to people.’

The Labour group itself appears split on ideological lines over the critical issue of housing. A group around Hodge wants to follow the example of Sir Robin Wales in Newham and push stock transfer to arms length management organisations (ALMOs), seen by groups such as Defend Council Housing as step one of a two-step housing privatisation process. Meanwhile a large group closer to Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas is seeking an expansion in council investment into its social housing stock.

The latter faction appears to be winning out, with the election of Liam Smith as council leader. However, against a context of a Tory government slashing public services, it remains to be seen whether the council can really make inroads into the shortage of council housing, which is widely seen as having opened up the door for the far right to stir up racial tensions.

For his part, Griffin appeared to concede that the party has no long term future in the area. Clearly shocked by the results, he told reporters, ‘I would say this to the people of Britain. It is going to be too late for Barking, but it is not too late for Britain.’ The BNP looks to be heading for a period of further internal schisms. That said, the far right vote in Barking has shown itself to be resilient. It would be deeply complacent to believe that the political alienation that underlies it has gone away.

But the picture of the far right across Europe is more subtle than that. For every country where the far right picked up votes and won seats, there was another where they were hardly even noticed.

Of course, there is more to the far right than elections. But it is winning elections that allows them to access the resources – and ‘respectability’ – to build mass organisations on the ground. (The non-electoral far right may be vicious, but it is also tiny.)

If we are to fight the forces of the far right, we need to look at where they are strong and where they are weak – and, most important of all, ask: why?

On the up

The highest vote for the far right in all of Europe – 17 per cent – was, remarkably, in the Netherlands. Often considered a paradise of freedom and liberalism, the Netherlands has little history of voting for the far right (although the anti-immigrant List Pim Fortuyn had made some gains in local elections before its leader was assassinated). But this time around, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Freedom Party), led by Islamophobe extraordinaire Geert Wilders, came from nowhere to win four seats out of 25.

How did that happen? After all, the party is entirely centred on one man, Wilders – it is not a mass movement and has few activists. Wilders appears to have managed to build up his vote by manufacturing controversy and relentless self-publicising. He gathered a following after the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, as well as frequent threats on his own life.

Wilders built on this by putting out the virulent anti-Muslim hate film Fitna and posing as a ‘free speech’ martyr whenever he was banned from showing it. An attempt to prosecute him for hate speech backfired when the Freedom Party’s poll ratings just rose even further.

Wilders paints himself as a sort of leftish-libertarian, concerned about ‘extremist Muslims’ who are against women’s rights and so on. He makes a point of enthusiastically supporting gay marriage. He even calls himself an anti-fascist, claiming that the Koran is a ‘fascist book’.

The growth of the Freedom Party shows no sign of relenting. Gerrit de Wit of De Fabel van de illegaal (‘The Myth of Illegality’) says, ‘The polls for the national elections in 2011 have shown for months now that the Freedom Party will be the biggest party. They are only polls, but it’s still quite scary. Other parties in Holland aren’t able or willing to fight the Freedom Party – they’d rather take some of its views in an attempt to win back voters.’

Wilders was banned from visiting the UK for his hate speech. But the question of the nature of Wilders and the Freedom Party is one that the Dutch media find much more difficult to grapple with. René Danen of Nederland Bekent Kleur (‘The Netherlands shows its colours’), points out that the media generally describes the Freedom Party as ‘populist’ rather than racist – even though Wilders has said that race riots are ‘not necessarily a bad thing’, and that he wants to ‘tear down the mosques’, ban Islamic schools and stop all immigration.

But Wilders’ eclectic ideology, combined with the lack of party structure, has made it difficult for the left to confront him. De Wit adds, ‘Wilders is far right, extreme right, and sometimes he acts and talks like a fascist, but he’s not a neo-Nazi.’

Jeroen Bosch of Dutch anti-fascist group Alert contrasts Wilders with the more traditional far right. Out-and-out Nazis are ‘never allowed to rent a place for a meeting, have a public concert or a quiet demonstration,’ he says. ‘The neo-Nazis demonstrate roughly eight times a year and we meet them with counter-actions. But Wilders is not a classical ultra-right extremist, which makes campaigning very difficult. He uses parliament and the media as a platform to communicate with his electorate. There is no party structure – he is the only member. So there are hardly any meetings to picket or whatever.’ The left has struggled to find new ways of confronting Wilders.

The Freedom Party is not an isolated case – it is just the most successful of the new, Islamophobic parties of the far right.

Another example is the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party), which won 15 per cent of the vote in Denmark (twice as much as in 2004), going from one MEP to two. The party has been making steady gains since it first won seats in the Danish parliament in 1998, but its poll ratings rose sharply after another manufactured ‘Muslims versus free speech’ controversy: the ‘Muhammad cartoons’ published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Like the Freedom Party, the People’s Party compares the Koran to Mein Kampf, draws parallels between the veil and the blackshirts, and opposes what it calls the ‘Islamification’ of society. Party leader Pia Kjærsgaard says there is no east-west clash of civilisations because ‘there is only one civilization, and that is ours. The others want to implement ferocity, the primitive, the barbaric, the medieval’.

The People’s Party has found itself in an influential position as a ‘kingmaker’ in the Danish parliament, supporting the governing right-wing coalition but insisting on a hard line on immigration in order to do so. The result of this has been that Denmark now has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe.

Anne Nielsen of Denmark’s SOS Against Racism says, ‘The problem in Denmark now is not so much the extreme right parties, but more the fact that several political parties have been influenced by the Danish People’s Party, which is a very xenophobic, anti-Muslim nationalist party. They have succeeded in getting most of their xenophobic and discriminative policies into Danish law.’

This strategy of inclusion and concessions has only helped the far right to grow. The trend towards Islamophobia is also reflected in the UK, with the British National Party winning its two seats mainly by stirring up anti-Islamic tensions (although Wilders claims the two parties have nothing in common, calling the BNP ‘disgusting’). The far right has always been able to shift its rhetoric to target the most recent wave of migrants, and in western Europe it is Muslims who are currently bearing the brunt of that.

Meanwhile, in eastern Europe, ‘throwback’ far-right parties hardly even bother to disguise their fascistic leanings, outright racism, Holocaust denial, homophobia and so on, combining ‘traditional’ anti-semitism with violence against Roma populations and demands for immigrants to be ‘sent home’. These are parties that are not afraid to form street militias and make Nazi salutes in public – something the likes of the BNP has long since shied away from.

The rise of the Jobbik party, which won three seats in Hungary (see box, previous page), is by far the most frightening example. And far right parties standing on similar anti-Roma platforms gained three seats apiece in Romania and Bulgaria, as well as one MEP in Slovakia.

A ragbag of other parties made gains across the continent. Greece’s Laïkós Orthódoxos Synagermós (Popular Orthodox Rally, known as LAOS) gained one MEP, taking it to two, on 7 per cent of the vote. Many in LAOS are anti-semitic, homophobic and worse, and have been known to make ‘Roman salutes’. LAOS is split between its fascist and populist elements, but the party stands as part of an alliance with Chrysi Avyi (Golden Dawn), an ‘uncompromising’ Nazi party which is widely believed to have infiltrated the Greek police. Golden Dawn has openly called for, and been linked to, attacks on immigrants and the left.

In Austria, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party) picked up two seats on 13 per cent of the vote – double the vote it got in 2004, but nowhere near the dizzy heights of the 23 per cent the party reached in 1999, shortly before it joined a coalition government. The Freedom Party suffered from infighting brought on by the pressures of power and criticism from other countries (many of which refused to work with the government), with the party effectively splitting along the lines of populists against the harder nationalist elements. But it has been able to make a gradual recovery.

The Finnish Perussuomalaiset (‘True Finns’) is perhaps Europe’s strangest far-right party, winning its first seat on 10 per cent of the vote – up from just 1 per cent and no seats in 2004. Formerly the Finnish Rural Party, it strenuously denies being part of the far right and does not even advocate anti-immigration policies (probably because it doesn’t need to – Finland already has a no-immigration policy). Yet many of its members are openly racist, including former wrestler Tony Halme, one of its best known candidates, and the party’s name is based on the fact that it wants to put ‘true Finns first’. It advocates a sort of back-to-the-1950s set of policies and has most of its support base among pensioners.

The most confusing picture, though, is in Italy. Italy has an incredible array of fascist and fascistic parties for voters to choose from, and probably the most diverse far right of any in Europe. Some would argue that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is himself a creature of the far right – his party, through various mergers, includes many one-time Mussolini supporters in senior positions.

Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League) – another part of Berlusconi’s ‘fascism-lite’ government alliance – now has nine MEPs (up from four), the highest number of seats of any far-right party in Europe. It gained 10 per cent of the vote, double what it got in 2004.

The Northern League is keen to distance itself from fascism, but that didn’t stop it from getting openly fascist Gianni Alemanno elected as its candidate for mayor of Rome. The rise of the right has seen anti-Roma pogroms sweep the country. Another Northern League mayor banned poor, homeless and unemployed people from living in the town of Cittadella, in the Veneto region, and organised volunteer ‘security patrols’ that bore more than a passing resemblance to fascist paramilitaries. As part of Berlusconi’s coalition government, the League managed to get the state to turn away boats full of asylum seekers, sending them back to take their chances with Libya’s authoritarian regime.

But at the same time as the Northern League was gaining seats, the hardcore neo-Nazis of Forza Nuova (New Force) and Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore (Tricolour Flame) lost their two MEPs. Confusing, ever-shifting alliances and splits, combined with the populist appeal of the League, drove down their vote.

Going down

While the far-right is advancing across must of Europe, there is another side to the story.

In France, the Front National, once Europe’s largest fascist party, was reduced to a rump. And in Belgium, another of the most established parties, Vlaams Belang (‘Flemish Interest’, formerly Vlaams Blok) also suffered a significant setback when it lost one of its seats, cutting it down to two MEPs. The name change from Vlaams Blok to Vlaams Belang came after the party was prosecuted for violating anti-racism laws in 2004 – a move that meant it would lose all state funding and access to television broadcasts. Vlaams realised that it could get around the ban by reconstituting itself with a new name and some slightly less racist policies in its manifesto.

Vlaams appears to have suffered since the ruling, with its vote falling from 23 per cent in 2004 to 16 per cent this year. But the Belgian far right shouldn’t be written off yet. It has historically derived its strength from its connection to the Flemish independence movement – a movement that has lasted 150 years and counting. Vlaams is so entrenched that the anti-fascist movement does not seem to hold out much hope of inflicting a final defeat on it. Anti-fascists end up relying on the other parties to operate a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Vlaams Belang (refusing to make any alliances with it).

Patrick Coeman, of Belgium’s AntiFaNet, says, ‘Vlaams Belang has a state income of six million euros per year. It employs a hundred people. We are working with peanuts – we’ve lost the battle, because the big money rules. We have no impact on it. They lost a lot of votes, but they went to two new right-wing parties.’

Going nowhere?

Thirteen of the 27 EU countries – almost half – did not elect a single far-right MEP: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. But that does not mean that half of Europe is Nazi-free.

Fascist parties across Europe organise occasional violence whether or not they get elected – from anti-Roma attacks in the Czech Republic to violence at gay pride marches in Sweden.

Europe’s largest and strongest extra-parliamentary Nazi movement is in Germany, where there are an estimated 50,000 active neo-Nazis scattered across five different groups. Nazis are thought to have murdered more than a hundred people in the last decade.

In four countries – Cyprus, Estonia, Ireland and Luxembourg – the far right appears to have no electoral organisation at all, failing to even put up any candidates in the Euro elections.

Ireland’s only far-right party, the Immigration Control Platform, was one that stayed out of the Euro elections altogether. It did stand in a by-election in Dublin Central, but was humiliated, winning only 614 votes (2.1 per cent). Meanwhile the Labour Party picked up three more MEPs, and the genuinely left-wing Socialist Party won one as well.

The failure of the far right to build a viable independent political force in Ireland begs many questions. But the Republic’s political history is such that for the moment, at least, it is the left that stands to benefit from people’s dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties.

One party that is trying to build a presence in Ireland is Libertas – the pan-European party that, while not quite fascist or racist in itself, has made alliances with far-right parties across Europe. Founded by Irish multi-millionaire Declan Ganley, a key figure in the campaign against the Lisbon Treaty, Libertas contested 531 seats across Europe (out of 785 in total in the parliament) – the biggest united populist right challenge ever.

So how many seats did they win? One. Libertas’s only elected MEP is Philippe de Villiers of Mouvement pour la France, who is often described as far right and is infamous for his anti-Islamic views. And his election was not a victory for the Mouvement so much as the party only just managing to cling on – it had 3 MEPs in the last parliament.
In Poland, Libertas managed to lead one of Europe’s biggest far-right parties (in terms of MEPs) to total wipeout – Liga Polskich Rodzin (the League of Polish Families), an anti-semitic party, went from ten seats to zero after a split.

In-fighting: the far right’s fatal weakness

Overall, the far right may have increased its total seat count, but the balance of populist versus fascist forces is now such that the likes of the BNP will find alliances very difficult.

As ideologies, nationalism and xenophobia do not lend themselves well to transnational coalitions. Much of the far right is not in elections for their own sake, so much as to gain a veneer of respectability and – more importantly – funding for their street-level organisations, but maximising that funding requires them to make deals with ‘foreign’ parties.

How many seats the far right has depends on your definitions, but it is somewhere between 30 and 40. So it must be galling for them to have been so internally divided that they have not even been able to come up with the alliance of 25 MEPs from seven countries needed to get funding as a recognised grouping in the European Parliament.

The parties that are strong enough to be part of governmental alliances, or believe they soon will be, do not want to be seen hanging around with fascists – Italy’s Northern League, the Dutch Freedom Party and the Danish People’s Party have all refused to play ball with the rest of the far right, realising it could prove dangerous to their more mainstream appeal.

There are ideological splits as well

As Jeroen Bosch of Alert in the Netherlands notes, ‘For the neo-Nazis, Geert Wilders [Dutch Freedom Party] is a friend of Israel, so they don’t hook up.’ The anti-Islamic parties such as the Dutch Freedom Party and Danish People’s Party tend to be enthusiastically pro-Israel – a position that does not please the ‘old school’ anti-semitic parts of the far right.

And western nationalist parties generally regard eastern Europeans as ‘immigrants and criminals’, while the eastern European far right is virulently anti-Hungarian – with the exception of Hungary’s Jobbik party, which pledges to defend ethnic Hungarians everywhere.

It was these kinds of tensions that brought down the last attempt at a pan-European far-right alliance, Identity Tradition Sovereignty (ITS), which lasted 11 months in 2007. The group included MEPs from Italy, France, Austria, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as one from Britain (a former UK Independence Party member). Alessandra Mussolini (granddaughter of the dictator), at the time an MEP for Italy’s Social Alternative, said in a newspaper interview that ‘breaking the law has become a way of life for Romanians’ – much to the offence of the five MEPs from the Greater Romania Party, who promptly left the alliance. It then no longer had enough members to carry on as an official parliament group. In other words, an alliance of xenophobes was brought down by its own xenophobia.

This time around, the BNP’s ‘informal’ group has thus far only been able to attract 12 MEPs – themselves, Front National, Jobbik, Vlaams Belang and Attack (Bulgaria). The Greater Romania Party appears to have been excluded because of the fallout from the collapse of ITS – but it was the collapse of France’s National Front, which has tended to provide the backbone of alliances in the past, that put the final nail in the coffin.

The schism between far-right populists and open neo-fascists will potentially lose the parties of extreme reaction as much as a million euros a year in funding for staff, office costs and publications. On the other hand, each MEP will anyway still get paid thousands of euros a month that they can use to build their organisations bigger and stronger – not just for the next election, but out in the ‘real world’ too.

So how do we stop them?

The rise of the far right, all things taken together, is not huge – and the 2009 European parliament will have fewer outright fascists than in 2004. It is right-wing populism that has been the main beneficiary of the surge in far-right voting. This represents the neo-Nazis’ failure to use the economic crisis to their advantage.

At the same time, the percentage increase in the far-right vote is significant – 50 per cent more voters cast a vote for the far right in 2009 than in 2004. And the situation in a few individual countries is nothing short of terrifying.

The Netherlands demonstrates that where ‘anti-Islamic’ rhetoric is not challenged and unmasked as the flimsy disguise for racism that is, it can grow. And Hungary shows that we should not imagine outright Nazism is dead in the 21st century. Where ‘mainstream’ parties have shied away from confronting the far right, preferring to soft-pedal it, incorporate it and try to solve its grievances through policymaking, it has grown. The far right craves respectability and legitimacy – so the left does best when it is able to hold the line against the establishment’s temptation to give in. Far-right parties are, in the final analysis, dogged by their own infighting and internal contradictions.

A broad coalition can be held together by power, or the promise of power. But failure and the feeling of retreat brings with it financial pressure and splits over strategy and tactics. A few important defeats can rapidly unravel and destroy parties that are based on nothing but hate and opportunism. The role of anti-fascists can be to bring these divisions to the fore – by humiliating the far right, demoralising them, and hounding them off the streets.

Ultimately, the appeal of the far right needs to be countered by a credible left alternative capable of defending the jobs, homes, and services of people from all backgrounds from neoliberal attacks. But where there is little in the way of such a movement, there needs to be a full debate about the most effective way to defeat the far right. It is a debate that needs to be informed by the lessons from those places where the far right has made gains, and where they have been successfully held back, in order to defeat the fascists.

Hungary: The march of Jobbik

Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (the Movement for a Better Hungary) won three seats at the election on 14.8 per cent of the vote. The far-right party came third overall in Hungary, not far behind the ruling centre-left Socialist party, which is currently running a minority government.

Jobbik is, to put it bluntly, a scary organisation. Its campaign focused almost entirely on attacking the Roma population over supposed ‘gypsy crime’, and proclaiming that ‘Hungary belongs to the Hungarians’.

Unlike the softer populist far right that made gains elsewhere in Europe, Jobbik is an obviously neo-Nazi party. Its leader, Gábor Vona, is also the leader of a militia called the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard) that openly operates as Jobbik’s armed wing. It marches through the streets wearing black uniforms with the symbols of the Hungary’s second world war era pro-Nazi government (Jobbik says it is just ‘traditional Hungarian clothing’).

The Guard was recently declared illegal, but is still openly organising anti-Roma and Holocaust denial marches. Five Roma have been murdered in the past few months. (Jobbik claims the murders were committed by ‘other gypsies’.) Gay, women’s and socialist groups have also been attacked.

Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard are making inroads into the police force, where they appear to believe they can find recruits. In April, they gained control of the Independent Police Trade Union – a union that represents 5,000 members, or 10 per cent of the police force.

The police union’s leader is a Jobbik candidate, Judit Szima, who has called for an ‘armed battle’ against Jews and Roma. ‘We should expect a Hungarian-gypsy civil war,’ she wrote in the union’s newsletter, Prepared for Action, ‘fomented by Jews as they rub their hands together with pleasure.’

The Hungarian Guard has managed to attract hundreds of recruits and crowds of thousands at its rallies, and it has won some support from sections of the mainstream conservative opposition, Fidesz. Fidesz MPs have attended Hungarian Guard rallies, and the party has refused to condemn the racist paramilitary force. It has even formed coalitions with Jobbik in some local councils.

Hungarian democracy is still relatively new and unstable – it is only 20 years since the end of the ‘communist’ regime there, and the government is still dominated by corrupt former Stalinists. Since the election they have started to crack down on the Hungarian Guard, only for Jobbik to vow: ‘We will retaliate.’ Things could quickly turn nasty.

Jobbik is a close ally of the British National Party. It should be a standing retort to those who argue that the BNP’s ‘Nazi past’ doesn’t matter.

France: Collapse of the Front National

The Front National is one of Europe’s longest-established far-right parties, founded in 1972 by Holocaust denier and anti-semite Jean-Marie Le Pen and a group of second world war Nazi collaborators. It has long acted as a leader among the European far right, initiating the Euronat alliance of European fascist parties among other initiatives. It claims a membership of 75,000 – huge compared to, for example, the BNP’s 10,000.

The Front National might have never got far if it wasn’t for avid supporter Hubert Lambert dying in 1977, leaving Le Pen a multi-million franc fortune (and a castle, too). The party got its first MEP elected back in 1984 and used that extra funding to further build up its organisation. By 1997 it was running four local councils. But Front National administrations were characterised by staffing cuts, massive expenditure on police and outright corruption. They used local libraries as political weapons, banning left-wing newspapers and authors and ordering the purchase of far-right literature instead.

Voters did not take long to turn against such petty dictators. At its peak in the mid to late 1990s, the Front National was getting more than 10 per cent of the French vote – enough for 11 MEP seats. This year, its vote collapsed to 6.3 per cent, leaving it with just three MEPs – the fewest it has had since it started standing.

In July the party had a chance to win its first town hall for seven years when Marine Le Pen (the veteran FN leader’s daughter) reached the runoff vote in the town of Hénin-Beaumont in industrial northern France. In the end, though, an alliance of every other party was enough to defeat her – although only by a narrow margin. Under first-past-the-post, Marine Le Pen would have won comfortably: in the first round she had 40 per cent of the vote to the eventual winner’s 20 per cent. But France’s runoff system makes it easy for people to vote anti-fascist in the final round, just as millions did in the presidential election in 2002.

The collapse of the Front National is not just a matter of electoral mathematics, though – it is also a reflection of the growing strength of France’s working-class movements. Instead of the far right being able to pick up support from people’s dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, in France it is the left that has seized the initiative.

There may have been no breakthrough yet for the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anti-capitalist Party), but it is clear that it is on an upward trajectory. Meanwhile, the Front National appears to have had its progress checked.

Despite our best efforts, Barnsley has found itself labelled the fascist capital of Britain, with the BNP achieving its highest percentage of the vote here. Disregarding the factor of the collapse of the Labour vote, it became obvious that simply saying ‘don’t vote BNP/they’re Nazis’ plainly hadn’t worked – again!

There is certainly a need for new ways of taking on the BNP as they become an increasingly more serious threat to everything we have been fighting for all these years. We’ve begun this reflection in Barnsley.

First, while in the past we were just active around elections, we will be active all year round, in the market place, on the streets, on Facebook, in the local press, around football matches – really involving the people of Barnsley. We’ve set up a Barnsley FC supporters group against the BNP, and we are reclaiming the market place.

Second, we are becoming much more deeply engaged with local campaigns addressing the root causes of the many social issues and problems in Barnsley that allow the BNP to capitalise on people’s disaffection. This means defending the health service, campaigning for affordable/social housing, defending jobs. We marched through the city centre last month against job cuts. The BNP had nothing to say.

It would obviously be great if we had candidates standing in the next elections who could offer an alternative, but this is something that will no doubt be discussed in the future.

However, for those of us in localities like Barnsley where the BNP is active and visible, we cannot afford to completely ditch our existing structures, contacts and networks in order to start afresh. We need to maintain our relationship with local trade unions, regardless of what we feel about the Labour Party (I, for one, would not be actively encouraging people to vote for them). The unions provide a vital link to organised workers within the area – significantly, this is something the BNP does not like. We need to learn from what hasn’t (and what has) worked, and develop new strategies and methods, hopefully involving a wider layer of campaigners. We need to be realistic about what works, and what doesn’t. The stakes are far too high to be dogmatic.

Paul White is a trade unionist, socialist and Green Party member

See Anti-fascism isn\’t working and Paul Meszaros response

His piece casually runs together the Hope not Hate (HNH) and Unite Against Fascism (UAF) campaigns, two organisations he says have ‘broadly similar approaches’, and in doing so blatantly confuses their methods and approaches.

The first important thing to say regarding HNH is that it is a constantly evolving campaign. Because we are not stuck with any old dogma we are able to gauge what works, refine those elements that are helpful and move away from tactics that do not work. For a long period, especially during the 1990s, anti-fascism was something of a minority interest, with a few committed groups and individuals either spying on or beating the far right. This approach might be described as proportional as the BNP offered no political threat in those days, although they posed a physical threat to those they targeted.
This changed in the early years of this decade as the BNP for a number of reasons was able, under Nick Griffin’s leadership, to present itself increasingly as a political solution to the problems faced in certain communities.

Since that time we have seen a growth in the far-right vote that is without precedent. During this period the anti-fascist movement has had to learn how to deal with a party that knows how to win elections. We have also had to deal with an organisation that has moved out of its traditional strongholds and is able to gather a sizeable vote almost anywhere. The BNP vote can now longer be dismissed as a protest; rather, the BNP has become the first choice for a significant number of voters.

Certainly, 10 or 15 years ago, the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight would highlight the criminal convictions of far-right activists and candidates. However, this tactic is used far more sparingly these days as we know it has a limited appeal. Rather what we have seen is a growing realisation and understanding that anti-fascism has to address the political, social and economic issues that are giving rise to the far right.

At HNH we know that most people who vote BNP are not Nazis, and we also know that there is a whole host of issues on which they feel ignored. Even here, though, there is an ongoing debate about what these social issues are. We are told often that it revolves around job and housing insecurity. These clearly play a part, but it is also about other less tangible discontents.
We are sometimes told that the question is about identity and in particular English and working-class identities … but are we really being told, in a polite way, that the big issue is immigration? The BNP has managed to give racial ideology and, in particular, fear of immigration a growing political outlet. It is tapping into large reservoirs of racism that have for too long gone unchallenged.

For HNH, taking on the BNP is primarily about working with those communities under threat from the BNP. We have seen in some of our exemplary work, such as in Keighley, that grass-roots campaigning where local people take ownership of the fight against the BNP can be absolutely effective in defeating them. Keighley went from being a BNP ‘capital’ in 2004 to having no BNP organisation or even candidates by 2007. This was achieved by some old-fashioned proper community development work with residents on the threatened estate. Ironically, the leaders of that particular community came from the mums at the local Sure Start, which suggest to me that it is vital to defend what working-class communities have gained what has been gained over recent years, something Farrow neglects to mention. It is through this careful and patient work that the broad-based alliances necessary to defeat the BNP can be built.

There is also the point that third-party campaigning is limited in what it can achieve. For the BNP to lose an election, another party has to win. Hope not Hate is not an appendage of the Labour Party, but clearly it is often the case that Labour that needs to get more votes than the BNP for the BNP to lose!
We disagree entirely with the claim that the BNP can never fulfil its programme and that its real crime is delaying the rise of independent working-class opposition. This seems both complacent and self-indulgent. It almost seems that Farrow believes that voting Labour is a worse crime than voting BNP. What is astonishing is that our hard-left critics have not managed to make any headway over the past few years; their derisory election scores are indicative of how irrelevant they are to the working class of which they speak so much and understand so little.

Farrow is right to suggest that the battle for hearts and minds continues on the estates devoid of the far left. But if at the end of this the working people reject the hate of the BNP and vote Labour it will be called a victory.
The election of Griffin and Brons as MEPs is devastating, but we must bear in mind that there was no massive surge to the BNP. Rather, the Labour vote collapsed. It is worth remarking, however, that in Bradford, for example, where HNH is long established, the BNP vote went down while the Labour vote went up. Intelligent community-based campaigning exposes the BNP for what it is, as well as providing a defence of civil society.

Paul Meszaros, Hope Not Hate Yorkshirehq[at]hopeyorks.org.uk

See also Paul White’s response

Its overall vote has risen in successive local, general and European elections. At locals it has risen to an average of around 15 per cent, while in the European elections the party polled 943,598 votes nationally, 6.2 per cent of the total (up 1.3 per cent on 2004). At Westminster level there are three constituencies where the aggregate ward votes at the 2008 local elections put it in first place.

The BNP had 10,000 members at the end of 2007 – a figure that is likely to have risen since – providing it with a large and expanding activist base. It is not, by national standards, a huge organisation; it is a ‘large small party’ – at best the sixth biggest in the country. Nor, despite its advances, does it pose any immediate threat of gaining serious power. The real danger lies elsewhere, as will be outlined later.

Nonetheless, if the BNP’s absolute vote is giving pause for concern, it is its trajectory that is truly worrying. The European elections saw its national vote rise by almost a fifth against a background of falling turnout. The small falls in its absolute vote in some areas, including the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, where it won its seats, are misleading as they ignore the lower turnout and factors such as the impact of moving from an all-postal ballot to a traditional election. To exaggerate the significance of these absolute figures risks obscuring the party’s continued increase in its vote nationwide and breakthrough successes in county council level.

Failed approaches

Contemporary anti-fascism is represented by two main groups, with broadly similar approaches. First, there is Hope not Hate, an umbrella group for unions and individuals within the broad labour movement but open to all. This group was formed by the Searchlight Network. Second, Unite Against Fascism (UAF), an organisation set up by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and National Assembly Against Racism, which also has some union and other backing. For the SWP, UAF is clearly designed to continue in a similar vein to the Anti-Nazi League, and is not shy of drawing on the ANL’s reputation and experience.

Both groups concentrate their activities on two main approaches: first, exposing the criminal records, past activities and political beliefs of leading BNP members, candidates and activists; and second, calling on people not to ‘vote Nazi’. Instead electors are urged to vote anyone but BNP (with slight differences in how this is interpreted by each group), in an attempt to raise turnout and block the BNP electorally. This approach formed the basis of both groups’ failed interventions into the London mayoral and European elections.

What is wrong with these two approaches? The most obvious objection is that they don’t work. They don’t work today and they haven’t worked for some time. This isn’t to say that they haven’t worked in the past, just that they cannot form the central core of an anti-BNP strategy in today’s conditions.

Exposing the BNP’s various criminal and political records has had no discernible impact. In a country in which more than 40 per cent of all men can expect to have some form of criminal conviction during their lifetime, pointing out to voters in the sort of areas the BNP targets that a candidate has a conviction for assault or theft is likely to have a limited impact. If this were not the case we would today be seeing declining BNP votes and councillors not being returned post-exposure. But we’re not. We’re seeing a steadily rising vote and increasing re-elections.

This tactic has been pursued over the past decade on a scale never seen before. Every section of the media has got in on the game, every candidate has been hammering home their BNP opponents’ convictions. If this strategy was ever to make an impact it would have done so in these almost ideal conditions; instead the far right vote continues to rise. We have to conclude that this approach is ineffective.

Exposing past political views – for instance, BNP leader Nick Griffin’s association with Holocaust denial in the 1990s and earlier – has suffered a similar fate. Griffin has proved adept at moderating his most extreme opinions for the benefit of the media. He will now acknowledge the Holocaust as a historical ‘fact’ and, as he put it to the Observer in 2002, he claims that the only reason ‘people like me’ are not always ‘polite and reasonable’ on the subject is ‘frustration with how it is used to prevent any genuine debate on questions to do with immigration, ethnicity and the cultural survival of the western nations’.

In doing so, he can effectively neutralise the issue. If, despite his denial of Holocaust denial, an interviewer presses on regardless, it permits Griffin to turn the tables and ask if he or she wants to talk about politics. The same thing happens on a larger scale electorally

As with the exposure of BNP candidates’ criminal convictions, if this approach of bringing up the death camps and Nazi Germany was going to have any impact it would have done so in the especially favourable conditions of recent fevered mass media scrutiny of the BNP. This approach did find success in the three or four decades after the second world war, when a real folk memory of the sacrifices made by millions was still alive. Today, in different conditions, it cannot, has not and will not make the same inroads on BNP support.

Appealing to the status quo

These, though, are merely tactical problems, bred by past success and turned into conservative substitutes for effective intervention. Far more damaging on a strategic level is the second approach, calling on the electorate to ‘vote anyone but BNP’.

This position is a de facto appeal to support the status quo. It effectively calls on people to support the social conditions that have given rise to their radical discontent – to support the very same parties that have introduced and are pledged to maintain those conditions. In the bluntest terms, people will simply not vote for the parties they now blame for their situation and no amount of cajoling or mentions of the Holocaust will change that. The collapse in the Labour vote over the past few years makes this patently clear.
The ‘anyone but BNP’ approach helps ensure that the conditions that are producing the BNP are going to remain in place. So we’re back at square one. And it allows the BNP to make all the running as the anti-establishment party during a once-in-a-lifetime time opportunity for anti-establishment parties to make a real breakthrough.

The way to undercut this is to work towards dealing with the root causes of the BNP support: in particular, the political abandonment of much of the working class in pursuit of the narrow section of the electorate classified as ‘swing voters’. Parties have privileged the interests of a section of the electorate that rarely shares the same interests as ‘core’ Labour voters in working-class areas. And this has led to the setting of parts of the same communities at each other’s throats in the fight for resources under the name of multiculturalism; the closing down of schools and hospitals; wages being driven down; debt; sub-standard housing; rising rents; under-funded services – all the conditions of our social life being attacked and commercialised by a class that has shown itself incapable, in the most basic terms, of being able to run the system for the benefit of all. This is what needs to be challenged as a priority, not people’s reactions to those planned and deliberate failures known as neoliberalism.

And this is where pro-status quo anti-fascism is falling down and demonstrating both a misunderstanding of where we are today and a real lack of political courage. A call to ‘vote to stop the BNP’ is, in most areas where it is raised, a barely-disguised call to vote Labour. That is why the unions are funding the millions of leaflets delivered by Hope Not Hate. (We can dismiss the suggestion that this slogan is also a call to vote Green. The BNP and Greens are not competing for the same vote. Nor need we dwell on those areas where the slogan translates into voting Tory or Lib Dem beyond imagining how an implied call to ‘Vote Thatcher to stop the National Front!’ would have been met.) An anti-fascism tied to support for the parties that have imposed the conditions people are protesting against is a failing anti-fascism. It is sacrificing all credibility by joining hands with the very establishment that people are so fed up with.

The combined party membership of mainstream parties has dropped from more than three million in the 1960s to barely half a million today and it is still falling. In conditions where large sections of the electorate are abandoning all the mainstream parties, for anti-fascists not to be supporting or initiating local projects that are prepared to confront rather than support the Labour Party is to politically abandon those communities to the BNP.

No platform?

Other aspects of current anti-fascist activism should also be questioned. This includes the widespread policy of ‘no platform for fascists’. Following the egging of Nick Griffin on College Green, at Westminster, the day after his election as an MEP, it has become evident that – beyond the confines of those who are already politically opposed to the BNP – ‘no platform’ has very little popular support.

In a country where the myths of democracy and freedom have a great hold over the public political imagination, a ‘no platform’ approach to the BNP is dangerous in a number of ways. First, via the functioning of that democratic myth, it associates the left with authoritarianism, violence and telling people what they can and cannot hear or read – exactly the sort of high-handed arrogance that is leading many people to reject the mainstream parties.
Second, it acts as cover and support for top-down or state-led manoeuvres such as the closure of the BNP’s bank accounts by Barclays, which led to a Palestinian solidarity account being closed as well, or the plans by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the party’s constitution and membership rules.

How easy would it be to turn these initiatives against us? Already there are calls for a Berufsverbot for public sector workers, banning BNP members from those professions. This plays directly into the hands of the establishment. Of course, a community-led and supported refusal to allow the BNP to operate in their area is a very different matter, but we’re currently seeing a top-down version of ‘no platform’ substituted for this effective grass-roots one.

On a related note, Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) is an attempt to continue the cultural fight of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism by holding music festivals and similar events. Again, questions need to be asked.
The problem is that today they simply attract those who are already against the BNP. In the past they were real arenas of conflict, battlegrounds for the hearts of young people. Today that context no longer exists and the far right has no hold over the young – it lost that battle years ago. Energy and resources channelled into LMHR would be better off directed at helping to deal with the problems working-class communities face as part and parcel of squeezing the BNP.

Missing the real danger

What all the current anti-fascist approaches have in common is that they miss the real danger. This doesn’t lie in the BNP taking power, in the possibility of concentration camps or any of the other scare stories we’ve been hearing recently. It lies more immediately in the far right colonising the anti-mainstream vote and developing party loyalty, thereby blocking the development of an independent working-class politics capable of defending our conditions and challenging neoliberalism.

The BNP’s politics is being normalised, with the consequent racialisation of social issues and a massive shift to the right. Each step they take forwards knocks the ‘left’ backwards. This represents an immense defeat for the left – one that could take us decades to recover from and leave us as outsiders (even more so than today) in working-class communities, the very places that we all recognise as being key to real social change. That is what will happen unless the job of defending the needs of those communities is seriously taken on and our counter-productive, outdated ‘anti-fascism’ is discarded.

I offer a few positive suggestions towards a new approach.

1 Community unions

We could form ‘community unions’, unconnected to Labour, possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational independence assured, that would work directly on helping to meet the needs of those politically abandoned working-class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. These would be based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities – which can only pit them head-to-head against the BNP and the political mainstream.

The types of small victories that can be won on this terrain should be viewed not only as being worthwhile in themselves, but also as contributing to the re-emergence of community confidence in political self-assertion, the necessary first steps towards achieving further-reaching change. There are already existing groups engaged in this sort of practical activity, such as the London Coalition Against Poverty, Haringey Solidarity and the Oxford and Islington Working Class Associations (see Red Pepper Oct/Nov 2007).

The need for these to be open membership union-type organisations rather than party membership-type groups is a simple practical one. People will join unions at work as they recognise collective needs that exist over and above the heads of political disagreements, and the same is true of community needs. And once there is widespread identification (even passive) of the needs of an area/workplace with the existence of a union it becomes very hard to shift; that identification becomes a power in itself. Parties are too narrow to play this role under today’s conditions – they exist on a different level – but there is no reason why they cannot play a role within these broader open groups.

2 Focus on policy

We should develop the ‘expose them’ model into one that, instead of revealing ineffective details about individuals, concentrates on why their polices will not deal with the social problems driving people into their arms. If we cannot make this clear to those already intensely concerned with these issues then our propaganda is failing and is at best talking to those who would never vote BNP anyway. This will require a direct challenge to Searchlight/UAF and other mainstream anti-fascists as they continue to empty their publications of all but the most inane type of content criticised above. This, of course, needs to be linked to the activity of the ‘community union’ type groups mentioned above.

3 Abandon Labour

Searchlight need to abandon their default pro-Labour position and use their existing networks and resources to get behind local campaigns, actively challenging the conditions that are breeding support for the far right. (This seems unlikely to happen.)

4 End the marches

Stop the marches, labelling, shouting, and so on. Marching into an area that you do not know and have no continuing interest in and shouting what’s right for that area is alienating and counter-productive. People do not like being told what’s best for them and will kick back against or simply ignore this sort of activity.

All of this can be performed without capitulating to racism and without writing off vast swathes of the population. It has to be.

See Paul Meszaros and Paul White replies

The UK is a prime example. The continuing scandal over MPs’ expenses has turned many voters away from the three main parties, especially Labour, leaving the way open for other parties to benefit. At the time of writing the UK Independence Party looks to be the main beneficiary, but the British National Party still believes its chances of securing seats have never been greater.

Across Europe, far right fringe parties are very much in evidence, contesting the ballot in 23 countries, the exceptions being Cyprus, Estonia, Ireland and Luxembourg. Even Malta has the long-time nazi Norman Lowell standing under the flag of his grandly-named Imperium Europa party, in the forlorn hope of winning one of the island’s five seats.

If Lowell represented the spearhead of the far right’s intervention in the elections, there would be little to worry about. But the attempt by the far right to take up more room on the European bandwagon is taking place against a backdrop of increasingly difficult economic and social circumstances resulting from the world recession and, looming on the horizon, the spectre of massive population movements within and from outside Europe resulting from climate change.

It is hard to measure the likely impact of the right wing extremists and populists because these parties function with varying degrees of professionalism and competence. There are 57 MEPs in the outgoing parliament whose politics put them to the right of the conservative mainstream. This is more than double the 24 far right MEPs in the 1999-2004 parliament.

The more competent racist and right wing populist parties that hold seats in the outgoing parliament are the National Front (FN) in France, Flemish Interest (VB) in Belgium, the National Alliance (AN) and Northern League (LN) in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria and the Danish People’s Party (DFP).

‘Post fascist’ rebranding

Of these the biggest single group is the AN, with nine MEPs. They are joined from Italy by two from the far-right separatist LN, the convicted fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore representing Social Alternative (AS), the fascist veteran Pino Rauti and a lone MEP from the fascist Tricolour Flame. The AN continues to rebrand itself as conservative and ‘post fascist’ but its roots lie deep in Mussolini fascism.

As for the rest, the FN had seven MEPs, now has four and looks like losing at least one more. The VB has three MEPs and is likely to lose at least one, the Freedom Party has one MEP and hopes to gain another, while the DFP also has one MEP and could make gains.

All these parties will field full lists of candidates but the FN is beset by internal financial and political crises, while the VB has seen sections of its electoral support and membership ebb away to the Dedecker List, the new kid on the Belgian populist block.

It was noteworthy that in the previous parliament even the most serious attempt to weld together the disparate right wing extremist and populist parties, under the banner of the Identity Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group, failed at its first test.

It blew apart when one of its members, Alessandra Mussolini, expressed her view that Romanian migrants were criminals, a move that did not endear her to her colleagues from the Greater Romania party, who promptly walked out, leaving the ITS to crumble and lose official recognition when its numbers fell below what was needed to form a group.

Away from the more professional parties, the picture of far right participation in the election is varied. In Germany, the two main far right competitors, the Republicans and the Germany People’s Union, will compete with each other for the fascist vote and guarantee that the far right will again fail to send an MEP to Brussels.

In Austria too there are two far-right parties standing, the Freedom Party and the late Jorg Haider’s breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria, which, polls suggest might also grab a seat.

In the Netherlands, the only recognisably far right party on the ballot paper is Geert Wilders’s populist and fanatically Islamophobic Freedom Party (PVV), which might well provide the country’s first far right MEP. Interestingly, Wilders seems to want any MEPs elected for his party to plough a lone furrow and retain their independence from other far right formations. This may be attributable to the fact that Wilders is strongly pro-Israel and knows only too well that other far right parties are either overtly or latently anti-semitic.

In northern Europe, the DFP finds a little echo in Sweden where both the Sweden Democrats and its even more extreme offspring, the National Democrats, are fielding candidates. Neither holds any seats, a situation unlikely to change in this election. In Finland, the far right is represented by the bizarre anti-immigrant, anti-EU Real Finns party, which could sneak a seat under the country’s proportional representation system.

On the Iberian peninsula, the anti-immigrant Partido Popular in Portugal has two MEPs and may retain them, but the fascist National Renewal Party, which is also standing, will not be sending any MEPs to join them. In neighbouring Spain, a ragbag of five fascist parties will stand for the 50 available seats in the hope of winning one. Their prospects are not very bright. In the 2004 elections, the four fascist outfits that stood were lucky to take just over one per cent of the vote between them.

In Greece, voters will find Europe’s arguably most openly and violently nazi party, Golden Dawn, sharing the ballot paper with the other ultra-right outfit LAOS which has one MEP, Georgios Georgiou, who has a chance of re-election.

Eastern Europe

In eastern Europe too the prospects for the far right look mixed. The outgoing parliament has 16 far right MEPs, ten of them from the homophobic and racist League of Polish Families (LPF). It is difficult to forecast the performance of the far right this time because the political configuration has changed with the formation of a new party, Libertas, led by the bitterly anti-EU Irish millionaire Declan Ganley, which is swallowing up huge chunks of the far right including the LPF and even a motley crew of nazi skinheads.

Three parties will fight the election in Latvia – the ultra right Osipova Party, which is linked to Russian nazis, the nationalist All for Latvia and the right wing national conservative LNNK. LNNK had four MEPs in the outgoing parliament but is unlikely to have so many this time round and the Lithuanian Centre Party is fielding candidates in Lithuania.

Zmago Jelincic’s Slovene Nation Party (SNS) will fight for all Slovenia’s seven seats, on its strongly anti-migrant, pro-Serbia policies. The far right will also try to make an impact in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, though it is unclear to what effect.

In Slovakia, the extremist Slovak National Party, which wants the rehabilitation of Hitler’s bloodstained wartime puppet Josef Tiso, will campaign for re-election on its anti-Hungarian, anti-Roma and anti-Jewish policies. In the Czech Republic three racist and fascist parties, including the National Party led by the BNP’s friend Petra Edelmannov, are standing without entertaining much hope of election. Their ideas are reciprocated in the fascist Jobbik party in Hungary, which is also assiduously building up its own anti-democratic private army, the Hungarian Guard.

In the two newest member states, the parties that have registered to carry the torch for racism and fascism might be termed ‘the usual suspects’- the anti-Turkish, anti-Semitic Attack in Bulgaria and the racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic Greater Romania party in Romania.

The number of far-right MEPs looks set to rise in the new parliament but whether they will succeed in forming any official groups are impossible to tell. At its biggest, the ITS was unable to command the support of even half the elected ultra-nationalists, right wing populists, racists and fascists in the parliament.

The biggest problem the nationalist right has is that it is not internationally minded and many of its protagonists would like nothing better than to slit each other’s throats. All of them might share the same xenophobic, homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Turkish, anti-trade union, anti-EU and Islamophobic mindset and have the policies to match but they stand, largely for nothing other than idiotic ideas about racial superiority and autarchy.

The tragedy is that a few million people will be deluded into wasting their votes on them, letting them get their snouts into the EU financial trough and so make Europe a less pleasant and humane place to live.

Links:
www.searchlightmagazine.com
www.stopthebnp.com
http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/content/home/suit
The compiled researched countries’ data can be found on the UNITED website under \’projects\’

Graeme Atkinson is the European editor Searchlight

With this in mind, the BNP has picked the North West out of the 12 UK constituencies, as its primary target for concerted electioneering. The party won 6.4 percent of the vote here in the previous European Parliament elections of 2004 – compared to 0.7 per cent nationally in the last general election – and hopes to make serious gains this time round. It has certainly started work early. The European elections are already central in BNP campaigning and publicity, with activists out on the streets canvassing around the region. Buoyed by the recent acquisition of a council seat in Swanley, Kent – ending a 40-year Labour incumbency with 41% of the vote – the BNP claims it is about to mount ‘the largest and most sophisticated campaign in the history of patriotic politics.’

The party’s lead candidate is its leader, the holocaust denier and former National Front member Nick Griffin. If successful, he would become one of eight North West MEPs, drawn from the UK’s allocation of 72. The voting system means Griffin is practically guaranteed a seat if he wins 9 per cent of the vote. Depending on the spread among other parties, he could get one with only 7.5 per cent.

Keeping the BNP out will be a challenge. Anti-fascist campaign organisation Searchlight sees low voter turnout – 41.1 per cent in the North West last time around – as a boon to the extreme right. Searchlight’s ‘Hope not Hate’ campaign aims simply to get people out to vote – for anyone but the BNP. Based on the 2004 results, it calculates that an additional 35 non-BNP voters in every council ward (on average comprising 6,000 people) would be enough to stop the BNP.

The key battlegrounds will be the densely populated conurbations of Greater Manchester and Merseyside. Renowned BNP strongholds such as Burnley have seen declining activity and lost council seats (down to four in Burnley from eight at the party’s local peak). However, in some of the more deprived areas in north and east Manchester, such as Blackley, Charlestown and Miles Platting, there has recently been an upsurge in BNP campaigning. The BNP’s Derek Adams received 27 per cent of the vote in last May’s council elections.

‘You’ve got to be creative’

A Blackley resident speaking to Red Pepper (she asks not to be named), who has lived in the area for the past 20 years, described her shock on seeing a BNP leaflet drop through her letterbox prior to the elections. In response, she ordered £30 worth of Searchlight’s ‘Hope not Hate’ leaflets and distributed them around the neighbourhood, speaking with people about the issue. She likes the non-divisiveness of the campaign. ‘Most people here have switched off, so you’ve got to be creative,’ she says. ‘Even if I managed to change one person’s mind it would be worth it.’

She feels efforts such as hers are hampered by the distanced attitude of her local Labour representatives. ‘What really incensed me was that not one of our local councilors even bothered to come round,’ she says. She emailed to complain, but received no reply. ‘Whatever I think of the BNP, they were out there speaking to people. People here feel hard done by and not listened to, and the Labour government doesn’t seem to care.’

Other anti-racist campaigners in the area attribute the BNP’s rise to loss of faith in the main parties, and in electoral politics more generally. The BNP does best when turnout is low, and attracts protest votes more than committed supporters. If it’s anywhere near as difficult for residents here to speak with their political representatives about these issues as it was for Red Pepper, it’s easy to see the problem. Repeated attempts to talk with a range of Labour Party councillors in Manchester were ignored, forgotten, prevented by holidays abroad, or outright refused.

One Labour politician who was willing to speak was Theresa Griffin. Already a North West MEP, she is running for re-election, and considers the BNP ‘a very real and present threat’. Griffin feels the recent experiences in the London assembly provide ample warning: ‘They’ll use it as a platform not for serving constituents, but for promoting the BNP.’ She states that the Labour Party’s anti-BNP campaign strategy is underway, as constituency parties around the region attempt to spread the word about the benefits of the EU parliament, and the ‘fair, inclusive and prosperous society’ New Labour is building.

Responding to claims that New Labour’s distancing itself from the working class has aided the BNP, she says: ‘We’ve got to embrace those criticisms, and make sure we campaign and speak to our constituents all year round. Actually, we are doing a shedload of fantastic work for deprived communities, we just need to be able to communicate that clearly.’

An urgent information war

One non party-political organisation attempting to stop the BNP filling the political vacuum is North Manchester Against Racism. NMAR activist Bernie Murphy feels they are engaged in an urgent information war. ‘The welfare state has been shrinking, and so has all the security we had,’ she says. In such situations, scapegoating outsiders has extra purchase. The group holds community meetings tackling the BNP’s pet issues, such as housing, Islam and immigration.

The extreme racist and nationalist views of the BNP are, they stress, divergent from mainstream opinion in the BNP’s strongest areas. The far-right capitalises upon apathy, they explain, and attempts to harness the anger of communities still reeling from de-industrialisation. ‘We need to find ways of making people feel positive and having a bit of pride in their area,’ Bernie asserts.

The NMAR’s efforts have attracted BNP attention, with activists arriving to disrupt meetings in large groups. Denise McDowell experienced this at an immigration workshop she ran. She feels migration into the area isn’t the principle cause of the BNP’s rise, and disagrees with the strategy pushed by immigration minister Phil Woolas, of ‘getting tough’ on migrants to draw attention from the BNP. ‘Most people think the arrival of migrants here is fantastic,’ she says. ‘It’s a more vibrant and interesting area,’ with more people occupying houses and setting up businesses. The BNP myths, she explains, are fuelled by the opaque procedures of government: ‘Nobody came to explain why such rapid changes in the area were happening in such a short time. People react to changes in negative ways when they’re powerless. There was no support for the community to adapt, and people are treated as if they can’t have these conversations.’

Similar concerns proliferated at the Convention of the Left recall in January. In a packed public services seminar, the BNP was a hot topic. Many agreed the decline and commercialisation of social housing provision was a key factors behind the successes of the BNP, which has pinned the blame for housing problems onto immigrants. Speakers stressed the need both to refocus on community engagement and issues of everyday concern, and to provide a voting alternative to Labour. Could the Green Party represent this? In the spirit of cooperation fostered by the convention, Respect North West has backed a Green vote for the European elections. The combined Green and Respect vote in 2004 was 6.8 per cent, higher than the BNP’s, so this is no empty gesture.

Crucial percentage points

Peter Cranie, Green Party candidate for the North West, explained to Red Pepper that these percentage points are crucial. Contrary to Hope not Hate, he claims defeating the BNP requires similar levels of tactical analysis used against the BNP on a local level in first past the post. A draft Green Party election strategy document given to Red Pepper, based on projections from previous European elections, claims the deciding factor will be the tussle between the smallest parties.

By winning between eight and nine per cent of the vote, the Greens argue, the party finishing fourth gets the seat. To shave a crucial single percentage point from the BNP total, they say, Labour’s vote would have to increase by four per cent, compared to the Green Party’s one.

Recent polls and past projections show that if the elections were held tomorrow, the BNP would finish fourth by a narrow margin, and win a seat. However, the failed attempt to form an electoral coalition with UKIP and results in the London mayoral elections suggest the BNP won’t experience a surge in support like the five per cent it achieved between 1999-2004.

Divisions remain over how to deal with the BNP, both at the ballot box and on the streets. Each party, of course, makes the case for its own vote being the best. Recent demonstrations in Liverpool, and at the ‘Red, White and Blue’ festival in Derbyshire over the summer, show that disagreements over the levels of militancy appropriate in confronting the BNP remain entrenched. However, the spectre of the BNP in a position of high office should be enough to make a divided left focus on what it has in common to prevent it happening.