Writing in today’s Guardian about the weekend protests, my colleague Jackie Ashley makes a half-true argument.
‘Miliband [cannot] be blamed for the embarrassing juxtaposition of his words at the Hyde Park rally and the actions of a group of anarchists in Oxford Street as they attacked the police. The Labour leader is no more responsible for the “black bloc” than David Cameron is for the BNP. It is absurd to argue that the democratically elected leader of the main opposition party should shy away from a huge public event because a few violent troublemakers might turn up on the fringes of it.’
And of course she is right to draw a distinction between the hundreds of thousands of decent marchers and the small mob of thugs and nutjobs. What she is not facing up to is the tolerance on the centre-left for the totalitarian extreme, which does not exist on centre-right. Tory MPs do not share platforms with BNP supporters, but Labour MPs associate George Galloway, the SWP and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The distinction was made clearer to me on Saturday, when I walked with the main march. I was glad to meet railwaymen, cleaners, teachers and hospital workers – the kind of people who ensure that when you get up in the morning you have a reasonably civilised country to live in. There was no violence, and no trouble. Everyone was jolly, including the police officers watching the demonstration. The marchers were perked up because they had a good case to make against the coalition’s self-defeating austerity programme. By pummelling a weak economy to reduce the deficit, their argument ran, the coalition will further weaken the economy and further reduce the tax take it needs to pay down the deficit. Millions of people might have been willing to listen, but when they turned on the news on Saturday night, they saw anarchists trashing shops.
The TUC and Labour Party condemned the violence. But they had not warned in advance that yobs would not be welcome on the march because neither is ready for a full confrontation with the fanatics. On the march itself the TUC allowed the SWP to hand out banners and “brand” the demonstration as its own as it called in apparent seriousness for “a general strike now”.
The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics.
As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.
As for the anarchists, let us be honest and acknowledge political violence is not always futile. If there isn’t violence, the media will give only perfunctory coverage to a demonstration, something that ought to worry my colleagues more than it does. Today’s proponents of breaking the law and scaring shop girls can also say that riots and a mass refusal to pay destroyed the poll tax in Mrs Thatcher’s day. I am sure readers can throw the moral argument against political violence in a democracy in their faces, but for me the decisive point is that by the time of the protests against the poll tax exploded virtually everyone in Britain except Mrs Thatcher had accepted the case against it.
Only a minority accepts the case against today’s spending cuts. What the left needs is to win a democratic debate, but far too few people who excuse violence in a “good” cause realise it. Look at the reaction to this piece by Christopher Phelps in this morning’s Guardian. Writing from a left-wing perspective, he denounces the infantilism and selfishness of violent leftism.
‘The black bloc protester is far too busy with his wonderful self to notice the working classes. He feels brave. He sprays an A on the wall. He hurls paint balloons. He whacks the shields of policemen who earn less in a year than a banker does in a day. Then he goes home to watch himself on the telly, and scratches his head when the most of the press reduces the day to hooliganism.’
You can’t say that, cry commentators. The aggression was blown up by “the Tory media”. “The violence was instigated by police agent provocateurs”. “The government is perfectly prepared to use violence to preserve their position, why shouldn’t everyone else have the same right?” And so on.
The most deluded was the commentator who said, “They are breaking the law of course but that’s between them and the police.” No it is not, it is between them and the electorate, and if all the voters hear are the snarls of hooligans, they will shrug their shoulders and close their ears.
The far left is now the British right’s secret weapon. The Tory Party should consider funding its determined effort to destroy the causes it professes to support.
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