Arriving at the site last week, we were greeted by an elderly man who looked up at the remnants of the children’s rope swings hanging from the trees and said ‘What is there to live for? What hope do we have? My wife and I have talked seriously about ending it all. This is no way to live.’ While the trauma of the eviction is still vivid for the residents, it is what happens next that worries them most of all. Kathleen, an articulate five-year-old with an acute awareness of the challenges facing her community, explained the situation to me: ‘Basildon Council and the police came and they broke everything. They broke the walls, and my granny’s caravan, and they broke all the ground, and even my mum’s back [Kathleen’s mother was hospitalised with a fractured spine during the policing operation]. We were crying and we were so scared. Now, Basildon Council want to move us again, but they can’t put us out on the road because where can we go?’

It is this last question that remains unanswered for the Dale Farm residents. Contrary to reports that the Dale Farm Travellers owned property in Ireland, the 83 families who lived at Dale Farm are now homeless. Long before the eviction, the Travellers said they would willingly leave Dale Farm if culturally appropriate alternative housing was provided, but Basildon Council have refused to acknowledge any duty to provide solutions for the community they evicted from their homes. Instead, they are pouring their resources into preparing a new set of enforcement notices, expected to be issued in the next few weeks, which will force the community out of Dale Farm and into car parks and lay bys. The children, who are the first literate generation of Dale Farm Travellers and have continued to attend school throughout the upheaval, will be uprooted from both their education and their community. Conditions at Dale Farm are dismal, but life on the road will involve endless evictions. As Mary Flynn put it, ‘No one would ever stay here if they had a choice, some place else to go. But if they evict us again, we’ll be on the road to nowhere’.

The situation at Dale Farm is not just a product of local tensions, but is symptomatic of the wider problems facing the travelling community. There is a shocking deficit of Traveller sites in the UK: 20% of the caravan-dwelling Gypsy and Irish Traveller community do not have a legal or secure place to live. In the mid-1990s, Travellers were encouraged by central government to buy their own land and settle.[1] However, planning permission is rarely granted to Traveller communities; according to the Commission for Racial Equality, more than 90% of Travellers planning applications are initially rejected, compared to 20% on average.[2] The double standards of planning applications can be witnessed in Basildon, where the Council have recently authorised a dogs’ home on the same ‘protected’ greenbelt on which Dale Farm is located.[3] In this context, Council leader Tony Ball’s maxim that ‘the [planning] law must be upheld’ begins to appear rather hollow. Indeed, while the government have recently injected some much needed cash into the provision of Traveller sites, they have simultaneously removed the duty of local councils to provide sites, increased powers to evict ‘illegal’ encampments and undermined the ability of travelling communities to challenge eviction.[4] The Dale Farm Travellers, like many others belonging to this marginalised community, are stuck between a rock and a hard place as their traditional way of life is criminalised; they cannot travel, they cannot buy their own land and settle, and local councils like Basildon are offering them no alternatives. As Basildon Council issues statistics claiming that, at a cost of over £7 million, the eviction of this community came cheap, urgent questions need to be asked about the immense human cost of institutionalised prejudice.

The Traveller Solidarity Network is organising a national speaker tour about Dale Farm throughout the month of March. Find out when it is coming to your town here: http://travellersolidarity.org/traveller-solidarity-tour/

[1] Department for Communities and Local Government, Gypsies and Travellers: Facts and Figures (Department for Communities and Local Government, March 2004).

[2] Sarah Cemlyn et al, Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities: A review (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2009), p. 8

[3] Basildon Borough Council, PLANNING APPLICATION NO. 11/00433/FULL (Basildon Borough Council, December 2011): http://www.basildonmeetings.info/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?AIId=26527.

[4] Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, Submission to Communities and Local Government Select Committee inquiry into the abolition of regional spatial strategies, (Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, September 2010). Lord Avebury, Legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill (Hansard, 24 January 2012), c. 928-941.

But there was no solemn communique of sympathy on this year’s Roma Extermination Remembrance Day on 2 August. The day marks the 66th anniversary of the corralling of 2,897 men, women and children into the Zigeunerfamilienlager, or ‘gypsy family camp’, at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. And this summer it came amid a fresh wave of persecution meted out to Europe’s Roma community and travellers by some of the most powerful member states in the union.

The week before, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced he was to destroy some 300 Roma encampments and cleanse France of around 700 Roma adults and children, later upped to 850. While human rights groups note a chilling echo of les rafles, the French round-ups of Jews during the second world war, the Elysee Palace claims the repatriations are voluntary, as the government is paying each adult EUR300 (plus EUR100 per child) to return to Romania or Bulgaria.

From September, the government is to store the fingerprints of those who have enjoyed an ‘assisted repatriation’ in a biometric database in order to stop them from receiving any such ‘assistance’ in the future, should they return to France, as by EU law they can do immediately.

Much ink has been spilt over Paris’s anti-ziganist ethnic cleansing, but Germany, Denmark and Sweden have been engaged in much the same behaviour, albeit more quietly and with not with the same law-and-order, vote-seeking pronouncements from their capitals.

That same week, Germany announced that it wants to expel 12,000 gypsies, including 6,000 children and adolescents, back to Kosovo, whence they had fled in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, accused of collaboration with Serbia. Headlines in Sweden revealed how the government was in violation of domestic and EU law for deporting Roma for begging.

Meanwhile, the city of Copenhagen was asking the Danish government for assistance, including the use of force, to expel Roma. And a caravan of 700 travellers was chased out of Flanders to take up temporary residence in Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon region. Local authorities there gave them only days before they had to move on once more.

Beyond the pale

Nomads of any description remain beyond the pale. At the end of July, the UK saw a fresh wave of evictions and court actions against gypsies and Irish travellers as Eric Pickles, communities and local government minister, announced plans to give police new powers to evict and arrest people for trespass on public land.

The latest wave of cleansing comes atop a 2008 state of emergency declared in Italy that continues to this day, whereby thousands of Roma have been evicted. Two years ago the European Commission shot down Italian plans to expel EU citizens facing two-year jail sentences – but it gave the all-clear to a scheme to fingerprint Roma, including children.

Politicians in Italy routinely fulminate against the community. In the same year, interior minister Roberto Maroni of the farright Northern League declared: ‘All Romany camps will have to be dismantled right away, and the inhabitants will be either expelled or incarcerated.’ When a mob attacked a camp in Naples with Molotov cocktails two months later, he responded: ‘That is what happens when gypsies steal babies, or when they commit sexual violence.’

In eastern Europe, from whence so many Roma are fleeing, the situation is dire. The Czech Republic engages in a practice of automatically sending Roma children to ‘special schools’ for the mentally handicapped. One bright spot has been in neighbouring Slovakia, whose new government in August pledged to end the practice – although the ultra-free market ideology of the coalition makes it unlikely that Bratislava will be willing to provide the economic resources so that Roma children can be integrated into mainstream schools.

Bulgarian and Romanian Roma face forced evictions, poverty, high unemployment and low literacy levels. In Hungary, where the openly anti-gypsy, far-right Jobbik party won 17 per cent of the vote in the recent general election, eight Roma have been murdered by individuals thought to be linked to the party’s Magyar Garda paramilitary wing.

In late August, France announced it would hold an informal meeting of interior ministers in September from four of the larger EU member states, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK, as well as Greece, a major transit point for migrants trying to enter Europe, to discuss ‘migration’. In a highly unusual move, Paris also invited Canada’s conservative immigration minister, Jason Kenney, as Ottawa currently has ongoing arguments with the Czech Republic and Hungary over the number of Roma from the two countries applying for refugee status. Romania and Bulgaria, home to many of Europe’s Roma migrants, were conspicuously absent.

Where is the EU?

Where is the European Commission in all this? The EU has considerable powers to put a stop to these rafles nouvelles, in a way that no actors had during the second world war. Article 7 of the EU Treaty states that in cases of a ‘serious and persistent breach’ of human rights, penalties up to the withdrawal of voting rights in the European Council and even expulsion from the union can be imposed.

Amnesty International believes now is time to act. ‘The EU, under the Lisbon Treaty articles 2, 6 and 7 has the responsibility to address human rights within the 27 member states,’ says Susanna Mehtonen, the group’s executive officer for legal affairs in the EU.

But the European Commission wants to stay as far away as possible from the issue. Pressed by journalists, the spokesman for Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, said: ‘When it comes to Roma and the possibility of expelling them, this is up to the member states to deal with, in this case France, and for them to decide how they are going to implement the law.’

When the Charter of Fundamental Rights came into force with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty last year, the EU heralded the moment as a new dawn for human rights in Europe. Throughout the campaign to convince the Irish to vote in favour of Lisbon, the charter was repeatedly invoked to win over progressives unnerved by the treaty’s pro-market bias.

But the charter, the commission now clarifies, is not a bill of rights for citizens. Rather, it is just an instrument covering two very narrow areas: acts of the EU institutions themselves and EU member states when they implement EU law. The moves of France and other countries in this case thus lie outside its responsibility, the commission insists.

Privately, commission officials are well aware of the fact that the situation is grave, and even, as one official who did not want to be named put it, that France’s policy is entirely a populist response to Sarkozy’s poor support in the polls. But, ‘it is possibly the most sensitive issue there is,’ the official added, so ‘a decision was made to give a very institutional response.’

Towards the end of August, however, Commissioner Reding finally issued a statement saying: ‘I regret that some of the rhetoric that has been used in some member states in the past weeks has been openly discriminatory. Nobody should face expulsion just for being Roma.

‘Europe is not just a common market – it is at the same time a community of values and fundamental rights. The European Commission will watch over this.’

Whether Reding acts on her words or they just come from the same emotionally hollow source that feeds the Condolence-O-Matic remains to be seen.

Leigh Phillips is Red Pepper’s Europe correspondent

But while the emphasis was on race and ethnicity, the message was not directed at minority voters (whom the Bush camp would have to effectively disenfranchise in order eventually to steal the election). ‘What the Republicans are doing is aimed more at white Americans,’ said David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. ‘Moderates do not want someone who’s negative on race. It says something very significant about America as a whole.’ Race had simply become a signifier of their desire to look like they were not mean-spirited.

They call this ‘diversity’. A decent idea – that an institution should look like the people it serves and the world in which it operates – that has spawned an industry of consultants, advisers, quangos and departments that between them have corporatised identity beyond all meaning. Having eviscerated the issue of representation from all notions of fairness, equality and justice, equal opportunities morphs effortlessly into photo opportunities – a way of making things look different and act the same. It is what the radical black activist Angela Davis once described to me as ‘the difference that brings no difference, the change that brings no change’.

‘The Republican administration is the most diverse in history. But when the inclusion of black people into the machine of oppression is designed to make that machine work more efficiently, then it does not represent progress at all,’ Davis told me. ‘We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions. But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder.’

When it comes to issues of identity and politics we have a serious discursive problem. Put bluntly we have failed to find a way to talk intelligently, honestly and progressively about how human diversity, and the experiences that come with it, relate to our politics.

Labour’s token contest

In few places has this been clearer recently than in the battle for the Labour leadership. Faced with the prospect of four white men duking it out, in the final days before nominations closed the party resolved that a black woman, Diane Abbott, should be allowed to compete. This was neither presented nor understood as an attempt to combat racism or sexism in the party but openly conceded as a desire to appear less racist and less sexist. Not to act different but to look different. Not equal opportunities but photo opportunities.

This kind of tokenism inevitably creates cynicism. When the Labour hierarchy conceded Abbott’s inclusion they were keen to look different even as they carry on acting the same. This alienates many white people who feel someone has gained advancement on purely racial grounds that would not be open to them, even as it gives nothing to black people.

This is not the fault of Diane Abbott. She had every right to stand, to get nominations where she could and to set out whatever stall she pleases. She cannot be held responsible for the patronising motivations for those who backed her for poor reasons, any more than any other leadership candidate. I am glad she is there. She is as capable, intelligent and talented as any of those she is up against and her reception at many of the hustings suggests her views are more in tune with mainstream Labour Party members than her challengers.

Unfortunately, however, Abbott has occasionally played up to it, pointing at her challengers and saying: ‘Look at my running mates. If you vote for them it will be the same old same old.’ It gets some laughs. But it also offers hostage to fortune, for it works just as well for Sarah Palin or Condoleeza Rice. There is nothing inherent in any racial category or gender that makes it necessarily more radical than another and no intrinsic link between black and female advancement and black and female electoral representation.

Widening gap

Since Barack Obama was elected in the US the gap between black and white has widened. Unemployment is still rising among African Americans and stands at almost twice that of white people. For black teens, unemployment is 43.8 per cent. Meanwhile, home foreclosures among African Americans are increasing almost 50 per cent faster than for whites.

Six of the countries that rank in the top 20 for women’s representation are also in the top 20 for per capita rapes. Meanwhile, a global gender gap index, compiled by the World Economic Forum, which assesses how countries distribute resources and opportunities between the sexes, reveals glaring discrepancies. Angola and Nepal, which stand 10th and 17th respectively in terms of representation, are 106th and 110th in terms of equality. Ireland and Sri Lanka, which rank eighth and 16th respectively for equality, are 87th and 125th for representation. In 2008, two female party leaders locked horns in elections in Bangladesh, producing the country’s second female prime minster in a decade. Yet according to the WEF, gender inequality in Bangladesh is bad (it is 94th) and getting relatively worse (in 2008 it was 90th).

This does not undermine the campaigns for more diverse political representation but should sharpen the arguments that support them. Representative democracies that exclude large sections of the population are not worthy of the adjective.

Nor should the power of symbolism be underrated. Black Americans may have fared worst under Obama, but they are also the most likely to approve of his presidency. A Pew survey released in January showed the highest ever number of African Americans believing they are better off now than they were five years ago – even though economically they are not.

The fact that five of the 10 countries with the highest female representation are in the top 10 for gender equality is also no mere coincidence. Since the push for parliamentary parity is often part of a larger effort surrounding equal rights, greater representation is more likely to be the product of progressive social change than a precursor to it. The relationship between identity, representation and equality is neither inevitable nor irrelevant, but occasionally contradictory and always complex.

Where Abbott is concerned, the problem is a Labour Party that did manage to recruit and stand large numbers of women and black people over the past 25 years but then singularly failed to promote any of them to the point where they might be broadly considered for a leadership role without condescension.

These two trends were not accidental. During the mid-1980s there was a concerted political push from the left and the then Labour Party Black Sections to get black MPs into parliament. This resulted in the election of four in 1987 – one of whom was Abbott. That trend continued, albeit slowly, to the point where we now have 15 non-white MPs. A similar push from the left to ensure greater female representation included all-women shortlists, which helped propel a significant number of women into parliament.

Both of these initiatives were opposed at the time by the Labour leadership, although they were happy to take credit for the achievements once they had happened. And when they were there, both black people and women found it very difficult to penetrate an incredibly white and macho leadership culture. This was not simply a matter of looking different. Since the campaign to get more black and female MPs had originated on the left, many of the MPs those campaigns produced came from the left. As Labour drifted to the right there was little scope for advancement within its ranks.

This internal stasis left Labour drawing not only from a demographic gene puddle but an ideological one as well. The problem of ideological diversity and gender and racial diversity did not just coincide – they were intimately interlinked. Where Abbott is concerned this is particularly ironic because her primary contribution to the debate has not been her melanin content or hormonal composition but her anti-war, anti-racist stance that has forced the consideration of a far more progressive agenda onto the contest.

Critical mass

This makes sense. Notwithstanding Angela Davis’s comments, the fact is that our differences do often make a difference. While there may be no singular, definitive black or female experience, evidence suggests that a critical mass of certain groups can have an effect on outcomes. A 2008 study in the Colombia Law Review discovered that ‘when a white judge sits on a panel with at least one African American judge, she becomes roughly 20 percentage points more likely to find [a voting rights violation]‘. A 2005 Yale Law Journal study revealed not only that women judges were more likely to find for plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases than men but that the presence of female judges increased the likelihood that men would find for the plaintiff too.

One doesn’t need a overly fertile imagination to appreciate how different our race and immigration policies might have been if parliament had not been all white for almost 60 years between 1929 and 1987, or how gender equality issues might have been dealt with if the Commons had ever been more than 10 per cent female before 1997.

One would expect that the importance of such perspectives would be readily recognised on the left. After all, it is there that great strides were made from the 1960s onwards thanks to the advances of civil rights, gay rights, feminism and anti-colonialism. But by the early 1990s large parts of the left had come to regard the politics of identity as an obstacle to further progress rather than an opportunity for it. ‘Identity politics’ – which after a while began to mean whatever you wanted it to mean so long as you didn’t like it – was blamed for having created an atomised, sectarian culture on the left that had simultaneously elevated individuals who traded on guilt while relegating the possibilities for real solidarity and electoral victory.

‘The vanguard, without question, is the identity movements; people are identified and described as representatives of this or that community, and these are the categories in which people reflexively think,’ argued Michael Tomasky in Left for Dead. ‘With tiny constituencies come tiny ideas. Very little has emerged from today’s left except agendas pursued mainly on the basis of group membership and mainly through the law and the courts, rather than through the broad-based moral suasion of the public.’ 

In Europe, in particular, Enlightenment values have been evoked as a bulwark against multiculturalism in general and political Islam in particular. Communist deputies in France called for the banning of the burqa; Labour politicians in England called for an end to multiculturalism; anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobia were deployed in defence of gay rights and feminism with considerable force.

In Holland a government video showing gay men kissing and topless bathers, introduced with the specific aim of testing Muslim attitudes, was made compulsory viewing for all would-be immigrants. ‘We have lots of homo-discrimination,’ explained Dutch Labour MP Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who sits on the parliament’s immigration committee. ‘Especially by Muslim youngsters who harass gay men and women on the streets. It is an issue here.’ 

Given that almost all religions have a reactionary attitude towards women’s equality and gay rights, efforts to draw attention to the tension between protecting religious freedom and defending human rights should be welcomed. But to single out Islam alone, at a time when the Church of England was bitterly divided over gay clergy and the Catholic church was reeling over child sex abuse, seemed perverse.

The audience for these broadsides against the Muslim community was anything but universal and the effect was not more equality but less. Far from encouraging greater integration – the professed aim of this rhetoric and the politics it embraces – these attacks further bolstered nationalism and xenophobia, thereby isolating a relatively small, poor minority during a time of war, terrorism and escalating racism. And as the hostility increases so does the currency of fundamentalists, who are given the opportunity to present themselves as the staunch defenders not of dogma but community. After a Labour minister criticised his Muslim constituents for coming into his office wearing the niqab both racial attacks against Muslim women and sales of the niqab rose.

Identity and class

For others on the left the journey into the more vague area of identity marks so great a departure from the hallowed class struggle that they are simply unable to take it seriously. Orthodox Marxists believe anyone who has been distracted by the fickle matters of gender, ethnicity, race, religion – basically anything that cannot be reduced to the relations of production – has essentially been duped.

They have half a point. To the extent to which class is about the distribution of resources, there is very little in politics that makes sense without understanding its class dimension. But similarly there is very little that makes sense when viewed only through the prism of class.

So while it might be true that the powerful exploit difference in order to divide the powerless and thereby strengthen their grip, it is no less true that the powerful did not invent difference and oftentimes need do little to keep it alive. Otherwise the only way to explain poor white Republicans or Hindu nationalists is as people who don’t understand what’s best for them.

‘The anguish and disorientation which finds expression in this hunger to belong, and hence in “the politics of identity” … is no more a moving force of history than the hunger for “law and order”, which is an equally understandable response to another aspect of social disorganisation,’ writes Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism. ‘Both are symptoms of sickness rather diagnoses, let alone therapy.’ This would be news to Zimbabwe’s Shona, Serbian nationalists and British jihadis – to mention but a few – who have ‘moved history’ in ways that have little connection to the therapeutic.

None of us comes to politics from a vacuum – we each arrive with affiliations that mould our worldviews. ‘Every human being at every stage of history is born into a society and from his earliest years is moulded by that society,’ argues E H Carr in What is History. ‘Both language and environment help to determine the character of his thought; his earliest ideas come to him from others. His earliest words come to him from others. The individual apart from society would be both speechless and mindless.’

But we are not bound by those worldviews and have the capacity to make connections and effect solidarity beyond our own experience. ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections,’ wrote Edmund Burke in Reflections on the French Revolution. ‘It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.’

Gary Younge’s latest book Who Are We? is published by Viking

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

A pamphleteer and an organiser, rather than a writer of books of theory, he is best known for a series of trenchant essays published from the early 1970s onwards, each focused on the immediate political priorities of the day. But implicit in all of his work has been a set of coherent and powerful ideas on culture, imperialism and political change.

Sivanandan has been receiving renewed attention since the recent publication of a collection of his non-fiction writing, Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation (Pluto). At the heart of it is a visceral sense of the painful experience of racism and imperialism.

‘There is all sorts of personal pain in a colonial society,’ he says. ‘Especially when you have an English education and you come from a poor village where hardly anybody speaks English.’ Yet the absorption into European culture that at first alienated him from his people also provided the basis for his political activism. ‘I was able to articulate the pain of imperialism with the language that the Englishman gave me. I have taken the tool from the system to fight the system with.’

Sivanandan was born to a Tamil family in a small village in the north of Sri Lanka, then a British colony and known as Ceylon. His father had risen from a poor, tenant farmer background to become first a postal clerk and then a postmaster. But his Gandhian politics got him into trouble with his British bosses, who punished him by assigning him to one malaria-infested country post office after another.

To avoid this disruption, Sivanandan, the eldest of five children, was sent off to stay with his uncle in the capital Colombo, where he was able to enrol at a top Catholic school on discounted fees. ‘My uncle lived very close to the school but in a more or less slum area. So I played around with the slum boys and went to school with the petty bourgeoisie.’

Encountering Marxism as a student in 1940s Colombo, Sivanandan felt a resonance with some of the things that his father used to say. ‘Anything that is bad has a good side. Anything that is good has a bad side. In other words, there are contradictions. Nonetheless, life moves in terms of those contradictions. Life examines you and that is how knowledge grows.’

Still, activism with any of the Marxist sects did not appeal and Sivanandan was soon working as the manager of a large bank, firmly ensconced in the elite society of newly independent Ceylon and somewhat notorious for marrying across ethnic and religious lines – he was a Hindu from the minority Tamil community, his wife a Catholic from the majority Sinhalese. Then, in 1958, state communalism led to an eruption of anti-Tamil pogroms – the first salvo in the civil war that has continued on and off to the present day (see pages 43-47).

Disillusioned, he came to London. Soon afterwards, his marriage fell apart. And racial discrimination relegated the former bank manager to the lowly status of a tea-boy at a north-west London public library.
Double baptism of fire

These two experiences – of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and racism in Britain – became the twin poles of his politics, his ‘double baptism of fire’. One inscribed in his soul the dangers of ethnic separatism, the other brought home the need for a black politics autonomous from the established left.

It was these, potentially conflicting, demands that drove his political creativity in the following decades. A perennial question would be how to steer a course between an inward-looking separatism on the one hand and oppressive absorption into another political culture on the other. Because that same question lies behind current debates on multiculturalism and globalisation, even his early work still has continued relevance.

For Sivanandan, culture is a vehicle for political and personal growth and ‘no culture grows except through bastardisation – a pure culture is a dead culture’. As he says of himself, ‘I am a bastard – culturally!’ Through colonialism, ‘the Portuguese have messed me up, the Sinhalese have messed me up, and so have the Dutch and the British. And I find myself a rich man because all these cultures are sitting inside of me.’

Coming from the north of Sri Lanka, where, as he puts it, ‘nothing grew, except children’, he has made ‘organic’ growth the touchstone of his thinking. He introduced the idea of ‘disorganic development’ to refer to the imposition of a capitalist economy on a feudal society, which is thus unable to produce the kinds of ameliorating social democratic tendencies that emerged with European capitalism. Breaking with the left dogma that took the western class struggle as the sole, legitimate progressive politics, he argued that, in conditions of disorganic development, political struggles emerge that take the form of mass resistance to the state and to imperialism with culture and religion rather than class as the rallying cries. Moreover, new technology had dispersed the hard edge of capitalist contradiction from the European factory floor to the imperial periphery.

In the process, the western labour movement had lost its political radicalism and become vulnerable to racial prejudice. The then common practice on the left of subsuming the question of race to that of class – on the grounds that once you have a classless society it will also be a raceless society – needed to be rejected. ‘We had to have a different politics,’ he says.

A different politics

The creation of that ‘different politics’ – carving open an intellectual and institutional space on the left for anti-racism – has been Sivanandan’s most important contribution to this country. Ironically, with the waning of the class struggle itself from the mid-1980s, he was forced to defend that space from more narrowly conceived forms of ethnic identity politics, which effectively piggy-backed on the opening up of left dogma that he himself had helped foster. Throughout, Sivanandan maintained his insistence that only in the symbiosis between race and class struggles could a genuinely radical politics be found.

Ultimately, what has remained constant in Sivanandan’s thinking is its morality rather than its politics. ‘It is a faith that you have in human beings. I love human beings. I hate the power they have. But they are necessary for me. All the contradictions, the hate, the love, the quarrels, the coming of wisdom, the losing of wisdom – all that comes in the process of growing. That is organic. We don’t need great philosophers to tell us all this. It’s there in what a village boy who became a postmaster had to tell me.’

Arun Kundnani is author of The End of Tolerance, Racism in 21st-century Britain and editor of Race and Class

Catching History By The Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation is published by Pluto

But the carnival had loftier ambitions. It aimed to hurt the British National Party (BNP) in May’s local elections, and to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the legendary Rock Against Racism (RAR) concert of 1978. In the former objective, it would appear it failed. The BNP vote went up slightly in London on 1 May and the party won a seat for the first time on the London Assembly – though organisers claimed that without the carnival it would have done even better. As for the latter, the anniversary focused attention on the changing relationship between music and politics.

Whereas April’s event had the feel of a celebration of diversity, 30 years earlier RAR’s ‘Carnival Against the Nazis’ had been more of a musical street fight, confronting the National Front (NF) on its own stomping ground. In the mid 1970s the fascists were making their presence felt. Not only did the NF secure 5 per cent of the vote in elections to the Greater London Council in 1977, but fascism was penetrating the youth culture through some sections of the skinhead movement and using thuggery to intimidate blacks and Asians.

Owning the streets

‘They felt that they owned the streets,’ says filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, best known for directing Bend It Like Beckham. ‘They felt that they could come in and put up their posters and literature, and they were trying to claim different parts of the country as theirs. When I came to Victoria Park in 1978 I didn’t even tell my parents because they thought I was going to get killed by some Nazi – that’s how strong the sense of violence was.’

In this battle for Britain’s youth, it was not initially clear who had music on their side. In 1976 a drunken Eric Clapton had declared from a Birmingham stage that ‘Enoch was right’. Appalled, rock photographer Red Saunders and others sent a letter to the music press calling for a new campaign called Rock Against Racism to rid music of ‘racist poison’.

The ensuing movement was a grass- roots, largely working-class phenomenon. The 1978 carnival was only the biggest of a series of gigs, invariably locally-organised, in towns and cities across the country. Each show would feature black and white artists on the same bill – usually reggae and punk – and would be directly connected to the fight against the NF, whose initials were tagged forever as standing for ‘No Fun’ and ‘No Future’.

Red Saunders stresses that ‘Rock Against Racism wasn’t started by some political person who said this is a good political idea – we must combat racism with music. It was a group of passionate people who loved music and wanted music that hated racism. Self-activism is vital – it’s not about telling someone what to do, it’s about the passion.’ The impact that RAR had on the NF is debated. Supporters believe it stopped the Nazis in their tracks, as evidenced by a poor performance in the 1979 election. Others attribute that to the rise of Thatcherism, and assert that a concert in a park couldn’t have changed anything.

But in the minds of huge numbers of people it did. It demonstrated that there were tens of thousands of people willing to risk physical violence to express their disgust at the NF. It showed that the fascists were not cool, and, above all, that they were a minority.

It also had a profound effect on individuals such as Billy Bragg. At a benefit night for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight in March, Bragg told his personal story: ‘Until I went on that march I had never done anything political. Going into the park and seeing a hundred thousand kids like me, I realised that this was the issue my generation was going take a stand over – the issue of discrimination.’

Changing perceptions

‘It was the audience that changed my perception of the world,’ Bragg says.’So when I went into work on the Monday morning I knew I wasn’t in a minority. I knew what made me different from my middle-aged colleagues who were racist and homophobic.’

The band that drew Bragg to Victoria Park in 1978 was the Clash, and it was only fitting that bass player Paul Simonon should headline the Love Music Hate Racism carnival 30 years later with his current group, The Good, The Bad and The Queen. Backstage at the event, the authors of this article, who hadn’t been born when the Clash played three decades earlier, asked Simonon what it was like. ‘It was really good fun,’ he said with a cheeky smile. ‘You missed out.’

So what did he make of the re-run? ‘There’s no comparison because it’s a different time and place,’ he replied. ‘But it’s still an important issue and that’s why I’m here today as I was back then. Whether society has or hasn’t progressed, these issues still need to be brought up and that’s what’s important.’

Other veterans of 1978 were more willing to draw contrasts. Stood in the corner of a fairly grotty backstage tent, still looking cool after all those years in a beaten leather jacket, was Jimmy Pursey, formerly of Sham 69, who at the original carnival famously went on stage to sing ‘White Riot’ with the Clash. ‘Journalists are trying to spin it as if we’re having to come here 30 years later because racism is still as it was – but that’s not true,’ he told us. ‘Today is a celebration because we’re now an umbrella nation – we’ve got an English tongue but we’re all as one.’

Gurinder Chadha agreed. ‘This is more like a party. It’s more a case of people coming to see the music. Thirty years ago there was this real sense of politics, of people coming forward to vote for change with their feet.’

Indeed, the presence of breaking artists like Patrick Wolf (who seemed to have stolen the heart of every young person we spoke to) and big acts like Hard-Fi and Roll Deep ensured that teenagers greatly outnumbered the survivors of ’78 – the most encouraging aspect of the event. On stage there were no legendary Clash-like performances and the sound was often victim to the wind, but the music was good enough to make the day a success as a concert.

And it couldn’t be said that the political message was absent. Artists’ sets were interspersed with speeches from the likes of Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and Stop the War convenor Lindsey German. The crowd was regularly implored to put their middle finger up to fascism and chant ‘Fuck the BNP!’ There were stalls, placards, and enough leaflets to account for a medium-sized rainforest.

Despite this, the event didn’t feel like the front line of a battle. To an extent this is a testament to the success of the original carnival. Rock Against Racism put music firmly on the side of the anti-racists; it won the argument. Open racism is almost wholly absent in the music industry, and indeed in most of the creative industries today, and largely absent among music lovers. In the park Zac, aged 12, summed up what the rest of the kids were saying: ‘Racism is very uncool.’

The nature of the threat has changed too. The BNP are just as much of an electoral force as the National Front, but they are smarter than their forebears, in both senses of the word. The absence of the fear of violence naturally takes the edge off an event. As Jimmy Pursey put it, whereas the skinheads used to smash up Sham 69 shows, the Nazis are all in suits now, they’ve all become fucking estate agents’.

Much of the cultural and musical importance of 1978 came from a coincidence of timing – it happened right at the height of punk, one of the
most intense and explosive movements in popular music. The punks and the skinheads were drawn from the same pool of working-class youth – the conflict of ideologies that raged among them was direct and personal. Moreover, punk had an umbilical bond with reggae music, making anti-racism an obvious and necessary political cause to take up.

That these factors have no parallel today leads Paul Gilroy, the pioneering black cultural historian, to warn against ‘reaching to the shelf for the Rock Against Racism recipe, which we can repeat and it will all be alright’.

But does 1978 have to be unique? RAR was a great cultural success for the left, since unmatched. The idea of the politically motivated concert certainly survived, but was distorted into the bloated philanthropy of Live Aid, and then handed down to successively less interested generations, culminating in Live 8, which was ridiculed, and Live Earth, which was ignored. The sense of popular activism was lost along the way.

The key to RAR was that it was a grass-roots musical initiative, to which the left lent its organisational skills and expertise. Since that time, there seems to have been little attempt to search out and support more organic musical expressions of dissent and revolt. The left’s relationship to music has
been limited to having artists to round off demos or raise the quality of conference socials.

Froth on the top

‘Nowadays culture and music to the left in the UK is the froth on top, the added extra, the luxury. They need to change – music should be central,’ says Mark Perryman, who has helped put on various benefit gigs and other events. ‘We are the only country in Europe that doesn’t put on a yearly left carnival – the biggest music festivals in France and Italy are the left ones.’

The Left Field at Glastonbury is perhaps one exception. Its organiser Geoff Martin thinks ‘it’s been a massive failure of the trade unions not to seize the opportunities that culture and music provide. They need to be a lot funkier about it all so they can appeal more to all the young people – otherwise they are missing a whole generation.’

Martin is more optimistic about the future: ‘There are some signs that things are starting to change. The Left Field is wholly run by the trade union movement. So hopefully it will carry on from there.’

Ken Livingstone is a politician who long ago recognised the power of music and culture, funding countless events in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere while London mayor, particularly celebrating the festivals of London’s many ethnic groups. Speaking to us in Victoria Park a few days before his defeat in the mayoral election by Boris Johnson, he said: ‘These days the best way of reaching people is through the cultural things they get involved in because the mass political parties have largely withered away. It’s about the issues, whether it’s environmentalism or anti-racism. And if you put music on they’ll come.’

But some feel April’s event, like Live 8 and Live Earth, was not sufficiently slanted towards activism. As Nick Lowles from the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight put it, ‘They didn’t tell people what to do in the next four days. If they had told people to get out campaigning we could have had at least 5,000 people out on streets.’

‘I’m just not sure concerts are the most effective way of stopping the BNP,’ Lowles told us. ‘The event cost a huge amount of money and we have to ask was it the best use? In that same week the Daily Mirror ran an eight- page anti-BNP spread paid for by the trade unions. It cost half the amount of the carnival and will have a massive impact in comparison.’

Tell us what to do

In the park, 15-year-old Clementine told us: ‘The constant “Fuck the BNP!” is good but you need to give us more information – you need to back it up and tell us what to do.’

Grime artist Bashy, one of the prominent black performers on the bill, argued that Love Music Hate Racism has to expand to truly entrench its message. ‘This could realistically be a 24-hour event with artists from up and
down the country,’ he said. ‘Maybe one year it should be in Coventry, one year in Birmingham. Another year in Liverpool. Because people are experiencing racism up and down the country. It’d be known of, like the Notting Hill Carnival, so everyone would know Love Music Hate Racism.’

For Bashy, the important thing is the interaction of the crowd: ‘If everyone’s supporters can mix together they’ll understand that while all the artists on the stage come from different genres and different backgrounds, they’re together, so the audience can do the same thing.’

Other musicians playing at April’s concert had a more subtle take on how music can combat racism than that given by the politicos. Looking slightly
nervous before his headline performance with The Good, The Bad and The Queen, former Blur frontman Damon Albarn told us, ‘Music gives an example of how things can be done, when you get different cultures coming together as different musicians play together. That’s doing it by example, showing there’s no need to be divided by race when we can learn from each other, work together and be greater for it.’

Roll Deep, another of the big acts from the Victoria Park bill, shared the sentiment. ‘Being made up of over 15 nationalities among us, we’ve always backed Love Music Hate Racism and will continue to do so until racism and fascism is completely wiped out in our society.’

There is no doubting the power that music has to influence people. Hanging around backstage, Carl Barât, who alongside Pete Doherty was the driving force in the Libertines, cited feedback from fans as evidence. ‘Our involvement in this cause has definitely made the fans think about the issue,’ he asserted. ‘Knowledge comes from thinking. Racism comes from ignorance.’

And there lies the real impact of Love Music Hate Racism. In the short-term, it might not have hurt the BNP like Rock Against Racism hurt the National Front. But it communicated a message to thousands of teenagers, such as 17-year-old Safy, who said he liked the mix of politics and music ‘because people are more likely to listen to someone they admire … They should be doing this over loads of issues.’ And Eleen, 14, who assured us that ‘today has inspired me to do more stuff – there should definitely be more events like this! Free gigs are great!’

For more information go to www.lovemusichateracism.com

For more on this summer’s festivals around the country see page 56 of Red Pepper magazine

And then, almost without pausing for retrospection: ‘Oh God. Don’t quote that. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it?’

‘You tell him. Gloria,’ says the nervy, elderly man sitting next to her. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s what we all think.’

The scene is Gloria and Jim Sullivan’s smartly-furnished flat on the Exmouth estate in east London a few days after the Commission for Racial Equality announced that they were to take legal action against the Sullivans and 67 other tenants for signing a petition urging the Greater London Council not to move an Asian family into a vacant flat at 84 Clark Street. A dozen or so residents from the estate have gathered to explain their point of view and discuss what to do next.

The Sullivans live immediately above 84 Clark Street, and they say that the first they knew of an Asian family moving in was when they awoke to the sound of breaking glass early one morning last summer. The flat had been vandalised, pigs’ trotters inscribed with the initials ‘NF’ (National Front) had been nailed to the door, and the walls and windows were daubed with racist slogans.

‘People were frightened,’ says Jim Sullivan, who is secretary of the local tenants’ association, and an articulate and intelligent man. ‘The tenants didn’t want innocent people to be affected by this sort of aggravation and violence overspilling onto them. Some people had already had bricks thrown at their windows and that sort of thing.’ He decided to organise a ‘Petition Against Moving Asian Families Onto Clark Street’. With the help of his wife and Nick Griffiths, another tenant, he collected 69 signatures from about 48 flats-a small, if significant, minority of people on the 1,000-flat estate.

Meanwhile, Toahid Ali, the latest of several Asian tenants to be offered 84 Clark Street, had turned down the offer. When he had gone to look at the flat, he had been met by a man who told him, ‘Fuck off-we don’t want Pakis here.’ Since he was being rehoused from his previous home because of racial harassment, he decided not to run the risk of further trouble at his new one.

A week later the flat was accepted by a Vietnamese family-’Lovely people, you couldn’t say a word against them,’ according to Jim Sullivan-and the matter might have rested there had it not been for the GLC passing the petition on to the Commission for Racial Equality. Faced with an appalling incidence of racial harassment and violence-a report at the end of last year detailed over 250 cases in Tower Hamlets-as well as the existence of virtual ‘no-go’ estates in the East End where there were no Asian tenants, the GLC felt it had to do something. It asked the commission to investigate.

Last October, four months after the petition had been circulated, commission officials began visiting the signatories. Two and a half months after that, the tenants were told-by a TV reporter-that the commission had decided to take legal action against them under section 31(1) of the Race Relations Act 1976, for ‘attempting to induce the GLC to discriminate on racial grounds against Mr Ali by refusing his application for the tenancy of the property’.

Jim Sullivan immediately called a public meeting, attended by 150 tenants from the estate, who agreed unanimously to fight the case and pass the petition round again as an act of defiance. It now has several hundred signatures, including those of some black tenants, who have added their names because, as one of them put it, ‘If they lose this case, it affects the right of any of us to sign a petition about anything.’

Bill Smith, a white tenant who claims to have fought Mosley’s blackshirts in the 1930s, said that he signed it ‘not because I agree with it-I don’t-but because they’re trying to take away a basic right. I don’t think people should be dictated to over signing a petition, even if they’re wrong.’ This is a view which is largely shared-to the horror of many of its supporters-by the National Council for Civil Liberties, whose general secretary, Larry Gostin, has described the prosecutions as ‘a violation of freedom of speech. If there is no specific threat-if it is simply the act of making a petition-I cannot see that it is right to take legal action.’

The preliminary hearing of the case was at Westminster County Court yesterday. As the case develops, it seems certain that the ‘free speech’ issue will eclipse the question of racial prejudice, harassment and violence, and the importance of developing a firm and effective policy against it. Already, battle lines are being drawn up on the basis of whether one is for or against ‘free speech for racists’, an artificial divide which fails to get to grips with how to tackle the actual roots of racism rather than just its verbal expression.

The Commission for Racial Equality recognise the dilemma. ‘The prosecutions won’t eradicate racism,’ their spokesman told me. ‘But they are important, not just because of this case, but because of what is happening all over London, where a minority of white racists are preventing mainly Asian families from living on some estates. It is essential that we take this action in order to deter others.’

The problem for the commission is that the Exmouth Estate tenants present particular difficulties for an exemplary, deterrent action of this kind. They are not active or organised racists. The National Front and similar groups had no presence on the estate until after the media publicity surrounding the prosecutions, when they leafleted every flat in the area. Any racist violence and vandalism which had occurred was almost certainly the work of outsiders who didn’t know the estate, because the flats of white tenants were often attacked by mistake. And the small number of black and Asian families on the estate appear to agree that there was very little racial hostility towards them. According to the Asian proprietor of one of the local shops in Brayford Square, ‘The only trouble I ever had here was from young boys who come from a different part of London.’

The white tenants themselves are at pains to deny racism, and the majority of the original signatories claim that the petition itself was not racist. ‘It wasn’t racial,’ says one tenant. ‘There’s never been any trouble on this estate until all the publicity over this. We’ve got coloured families living here, and three of the shops are run by Asians, and they never had any trouble. All nationalities have signed that petition, so how can they say it was racial?’

‘We’re not barristers or solicitors,’ says another man, who is genuinely afraid that he might be evicted for having signed. ‘So we never thought we’d get into bother over the wording. To tell the truth, I never even read it properly. I just signed it because I was worried about the violence and everything.’

Many of the signatories are now clinging to the principle of ‘free speech’ as if it were a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Unable to justify the anti-Asian nature of the petition, they have claimed a defence in the right to have their say. Some will undoubtedly take up the offer of Sir Ashley Bramall, chairman of Tower Hamlets housing management committee, who has suggested that the action will be dropped against tenants who sign an undertaking not to oppose the allocation of flats of Asians. He would do well, however, to make the offer direct to each individual signatory, since the spokesmen for the tenants are determined to fight on: ‘They have put our backs up now, so we’ll go all the way to prison if we have to.’

The dozen or so tenants in the forefront are no more than mouthpieces for the fears and frustrations of countless white working class people, not only on the Exmouth Estate, but in many other areas of cities. Their prejudices have not been, and are not being challenged. Anti-racist initiatives have failed even to consider how this could be done.

‘You can’t even ask for black coffee these days,’ says one elderly tenant at the meeting in Gloria Sullivan’s living room, to murmurs of approval. A decent, and otherwise tolerant man (he later told me that a violent and intolerably anti-social neighbour needed help, not eviction), he put into words a widespread feeling that whites were now the victims of prejudice as much as blacks. ‘There’s a block of flats in Hackney,’ he goes on, ‘where the blacks have been given £150 compensation because of the bad conditions, but the whites haven’t had anything.’

Then, in quick succession, the stories, myths and half-truths come flooding out. The dam had burst. I am told about the fight between Indians in Beaumont Square, when a white family had called the police and then been arrested themselves for a breach of the peace. I hear about the woman who was surrounded by Asian families, who all had sewing machines going 24 hours a day. When she called the council, they asked her what nationality she was, and when she said ‘English’ they hung up. There was the case of the white child who choked to death after being refused treatment by an Asian doctor. There was the woman who was persecuted by Asians because she was married to a black man. And there was the council house being used as a mosque, from which the council had rehoused ‘half a dozen different families’.

Then there was the tale about how every Asian family had to be given houses with two toilets and bathrooms ‘because Muslims can’t use the same facilities’, and the one about the estate where all the blacks were getting central heating ‘because they come from hot countries’, but not the whites. ‘What about all the old people who’ve lived here all their lives, and who’re dying of hypothermia? Why can’t they have central heating?’ demands one woman.

I ask for addresses, for names, dates and details, but when pressed on the points they raise, without exception they admit they heard it from someone or read it somewhere. How could they be sure it was true? ‘Well the council have never denied it, have they?’ is the most popular response.

It would be easy to caricature the Exmouth estate tenants as ignorant bigots-’the media always make out that East Enders are stupid and illiterate, says Nick Griffiths-but that would be too trite and simple an image. That they are bigoted and in some ways ignorant is undeniable, but no more so than that they are friendly, generous, considerate, helpful and warm-hearted in other ways. It is this apparent paradox which makes working class racism so disturbing and difficult to deal with, and which also renders the ill-considered anti-racist response so ineffective.

That response-summed up by the simple slogan that racism should be ‘smashed’-sees society in stereotypes. It makes no distinction between the evil of racism in its belligerent and organised forms, and the confused and widely varied bigotries of individuals. In attempting to suppress every expression of prejudice, rather than tackling it head on, either by discussion and argument, or by doing something about the conditions in which it breeds, anti-racists are actually reinforcing racism in a very real sense. The only people who are fighting the battle of ideas on the Exmouth Estate are the racist organisations who have moved into the area in force to try to win recruits. The left thinks you can fight racism by fighting racists, so they are losing the actual argument by default.

The courts will decide whether the Commission for Racial Equality interpreted the law correctly in taking action against the petition. But legal action cannot change minds or alter ideas, so unless anti-racists are willing to impose anti-racism by a massive use of the police and courts (perhaps using some of the methods employed during the miner’s strike?), it is necessary to consider the tiresome business of persuasion. Neither the commission, nor the GLC, not anti-racist groups or socialist organisations, not Labour Party members, councillors or MPs, not church leaders, Liberals or tolerant Tories, have been down to the Exmouth Estate to canvass opinion or put their views.

‘No one cares about us,’ says one man. ‘They never have, and they never will. They want our money, or they want our votes, but they don’t really want us. It makes you very bitter.’

Magnus Marsdal’s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries.

The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour’s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly.

And all this in a period of supposed economic success.

The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party’s rise and appeal.

Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain’s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change.

Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour’s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum.

In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ‘middle American radical’ to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in today’s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons.

Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals.

Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne’s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters’ concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP.

Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year’s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream.

The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement.

Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine