The re-emergence of fascism in Britain is highly inconvenient for our political parties, it is a distraction from the election campaigns they are all so overly keen to begin. They deal with the BNP by ignoring it, by banning MEPs from parliament to make sure no one has to pass Nick Griffin in a corridor. They pretend the BNP is a strange anomaly, too small to be dangerous with ‘only’ a million voters, and they claim to be baffled as to how such support could emerge. The events of this week left two large clues.
The first is the fascist march being called in Wiltshire. No one describes Islam4UK’s proposed anti-war protest in Wootton Bassett as a fascist march — but as Melanie Phillips argued here recently, it is. It’s the reverse side of the fascist coin. The BNP should no longer be regarded so much as a racist party: it never succeeded much in winning anti-black votes. Its new support is now coming from the reaction to Islamofascism: those openly declaring war against the British way of life and using the freedom they enjoy here to stage marches in protest at it.
The six million who gawped at Mr Griffin on Question Time three months ago were looking at the wrong person. The real recruiting sergeants for the BNP are the likes of the loathsome Anjem Choudary, the self-styled ‘preacher’ who knows he needs just enough fellow travellers for a photoshoot and his ‘protest’ will be national news — it already is. As Rod Liddle observes on page 17, the instant reaction to his plan was ‘angry white boys cruising the high street’ of Wootton Bassett, spoiling for a fight. Just as the early Nazis needed the communists in Weimar Germany, the BNP now need the Islamofascists. They are component parts of the same poison.
So what’s the antidote? It is easy to condemn the march, but it’s even easier for politicians to ignore it. Islamofascism is now put in the same bracket as immigration: issues that unnerve target voters. It is a sad fact of British elections that the event is decided by about 100,000 swing voters in swing seats. The election campaign which ‘started’ this week showed the same safety-first formula: all parties battling for the 1 per cent which their computers tell them hold the key to power. Those in Labour or Tory safe seats do not matter. The angry white boys visiting Wootton Bassett, and their parents, are deemed to be electorally irrelevant.
This week it was a churchman, Lord Carey, who spoke up. The former Archbishop of Canterbury declared himself concerned about Britain’s population reaching 70 million and — more controversially still — demanded that immigrants respect Britain’s Christian heritage. A Tory would be cast into political Siberia for such a remark — and castigated by gleeful Labour MPs. The signatories to Frank Field’s attempt at a ‘cross party’ campaign on immigration are mostly peers. Immigration is a national debate with which Westminster no longer engages.
It was not always thus. The last time the poison of neo-fascism threatened to enter the British political bloodstream was the late 1970s. Then, Thatcher killed the National Front stone dead by saying she was worried about being ‘swamped’ by immigration. She showed she was listening and the National Front lost every one of their deposits in the 1979 election. The pundits were lined up to talk about the revival of the National Front on election night, but they were not needed.
It is likely that these pundits will be doing brisk trade on election night 2010. Islamofascism and immigration have combined to make a perfect campaign issue for the BNP — and they are being handed this territory on a plate by political parties who only intend to speak to swing voters. As a result, we have — appallingly — entered a golden era for British fascism. The BNP now has more supporters than Mosley’s Blackshirts could ever have dreamed of. And the more Westminster ignores the problem, the stronger the BNP will become.
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