Well, they were warned over and over again but they didn’t listen. This morning, the mainstream political parties are shocked by the unpalatable fact that, after the elections to the European Parliament Britain now has two British National Party MEPs. And as usual, the rending of garments by MPs over this development has far more to do with attempting to demonstrate their own unimpeachable anti-racist virtue than honestly facing up to the real cause of this debacle – themselves.
All the public demonstrations of conspicuous nose-holding by MPs and the media, along with the repeated invocation of anti-voodoo phrases such as ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’, serve to obscure one or two salient matters. These terms are misleading. The philosophical antecedents of the BNP lie not on the right but on the left.
Labour MPs are shocked that it is their own voters who have turned to the BNP. They are shocked because it is a mantra of the left that it stands in heroic and historic opposition to fascism. This is untrue. Both fascism and communism have their roots in counter-Enlightenment, obscurantist thinking which replaced reason by emotion, Judeo-Christian ethics by paganism, and the rejection of the primacy of the individual in favour of collectively imposed authority. Read Ze’ev Sternhell’s classic work, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France to get the picture.
Not for nothing were the Nazis called ’national socialists’. In similar fashion, the BNP fuse ultra-nationalism and racism with economic ideas which would sit well on the left of the Labour party. It is more helpful, and more accurate, to regard the BNP as opportunists. In the tradition of all fascist and neo-fascist parties, they prey upon a decaying body politic by taking up genuine grievances which are of overwhelming concern to the public but which, for one reason or another, mainstream politics is ignoring. By doing so, they serve to camouflage their own anti-democratic and noxious ideology. Read more.