I've heard some pathetic electoral pitches in my time, but this is bordering on self-slander. Lord Maurice Glasman, the pathfinder for a newer, Bluer Labour, argues that a successful Labourism of the future must be one that incorporates supporters of the English Defence League. Yes, apparently, the Labour Party, the historic party of the organised working class, frequent party of government, creator of the welfare state, and the outright poll leader du jour, needs the ordure, the fascist, semi-fascist and pre-fascist residues, the most outright reactionary, thuggish and ignorant shit in the country. Without appeasing the scum, it seems, Labour will never be a winner. Well, why does he stop there? There's barely a week that passes without a number of assaults on Muslims, often Muslim women wearing the hijab, or attacks on mosques, or vandalism on shops and houses presumed to be owned by Muslims. Surely it can't be beyond the capacity of Labour canvassers to find the perpetrators and explicitly bid for their support. In fact, if Labour are actually this desperate, perhaps they should consider an entryist move on the BNP, with the aim of subtly persuading Fuhrer Griffin or his successor to adopt some mutualist thinking on welfare and service provision.

Of course, Glasman does not mean to target the EDL and its thousands of supporters with this intervention. He means to mobilise the ideologeme of 'the white working class' as a sort of puppet boxer with which to belabour the left in the party. As he complains: "working-class men can't really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist". As you will see if you peruse that link, Glasman uses 'working class' to describe any silly idea that he likes the sound of, particularly if - as will usually be the case - it is a right-wing idea. Don Paskini rightly points out that this latest is a libel on the working class, the vast majority of whom detest the EDL. But that's almost to miss the point. Of course Glasman is mobilising a (deeply patronising) image of "working class men" to hammer the anti-racists and feminists in the Labour Party. But V N Volosinov argued that the word is the most sensitive index of social change, and we should be very attentive to the changes that such terminological nuances advert to. There's something very important going on when the Labour Right, which worked so hard to end the class war, are anxious to be seen and heard evoking class.

Recently, there was a very useful analysis of the BNP and the 'white working class' by James Rhodes in the Sociology journal. It took issue with the idea, circulated by politicians and journalists alike, that the BNP's support comes from the most deprived among whites. In this respect, he points out that while the BNP have made real inroads into working class areas, there is no natural affinity between the BNP and white workers, and nor is it the poorest they appeal to. The two class fractions most likely to be represented among BNP supporters are 'skilled workers', and the lower middle class. The journalistic accounts are led astray by the 'ecological fallacy' - that is, if BNP voters can be found in a known industrial heartland, then they must be the traditional supporters of Labourism. In fact, Rhodes points out, the BNP support is typically found in the poshest areas of these towns and cities, a fact that has a huge impact on far right politics. BNP supporters and members tend to articulate their sense of class location indirectly, by reference to locality. Their scale is extremely small, as they tend to focus on this street, that area, etc. They are "rooted" and small town, rather than metropolitan; parochial rather than urbane. So, interviews with fascist voters and activists disclose that struggles over resources and entitlements are refracted through particular geographical references - ie, that street is filled with poor people who behave like animals, and the council throws all the money at them; while this street is respectable and well-maintained but gets nothing. Through such spatial distinctions, they carve out a moral and cultural economy, based on authenticity and respectability.

Authenticity merely consists in 'being from here', not merely being British and white, but being of this particular small community. Try leafleting in a BNP target area and one of the challenges that fascist sympathisers are likely to throw at you (assuming they aren't numerous enough to kick your head in) is that you're not from the area. Respectability consists of two intersecting aspects: employment, in which one can be said to be contributing something to the pot deserving of entitlement to services and funding; and conformity to certain social mores, in which one can be said to be integrated. The fascists and their supporters view the poorest of the working class with utter horror and disdain, as being almost as bad as immigrants. For them, 'welfare dependency' is an utter scandal, allowing people to be lazy and parasitic without ever contributing to society. They do not favour more money being spent on poorer areas, even if they do happen to be 'white', and in general don't support big state expenditure. They believe that only a sturdy police intervention can stop poor whites "from behaving how they've always behaved" and compel them to integrate and contribute, while "Asians" and "Muslims" can never be integrated as they aren't authentically "from here".

Of course, those BNP supporters who are themselves dependent on benefits must have their own way of asserting their respectability, and thus entitlement, within the context of fascist ideology. And they stake their claim principally on the fact of their being British and white: "locals first" as they are wont to say. But this merely defers an antagonism within the fascist constituencies - between, if you like, the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian elements - over entitlement to resources. And moreover, it's an antagonism where the latter are at a decided disadvantage, since fascist ideology, as is made abundantly plain in the newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of fascists, does hold the unemployed, the poor and the disabled in particularly low regard. Indeed, far from channelling the latent fears and resentments of the 'white working class', it's clear that the far right trade on a language very different from that of class, and mobilise an unstable alliance of localised constituencies often on the basis of hostility to much of the working class. Recall that Nick Griffin dubbed the people of the East End "stupid" and "decadent". This is because they comprise just those sectors of the working class - who are representative of the majority - who are either poor, 'unskilled', black, gay, leftist, culturally liberal, or in some other way not the right side of 'whiteness', of 'Britishness'. One thing James Rhodes' article doesn't discuss is the fascists' relationship to trade unionism. Perhaps this is because it's too obvious, but it's worth just saying that the BNP's long history of hostility to working class militancy has included their participation in major scabbing operations during the Miners' Strike, during which epic battle they called for the army to be deployed against striking workers.

If it is striking just how closely the apparition of 'working class' authenticity invoked by the Labour Right resembles the notion of 'white' respectability circulated by fascists, this is because there are elements of the petty bourgeois weltanschauung which have resonate with other social experiences, and which the Thatcherites in both the Conservative and Labour parties worked so hard to univeralise. The fact that some in the Labour Right want to go farther in this direction, trying to construct an electoral bloc by pandering to the most backward elements in society, who would never vote Labour anyway, is not the issue here. Rather, it is the fact that they have felt the need to do so using the language of class in a racialised way. They could just stick with standard Poujadist talk about 'ordinary decent people', 'the little man in the street' and so on, but they feel compelled to phrase it in 'class' terms that the far right are actually less comfortable with using, even if 'class' is heavily racialised.

It could be argued that this is a hegemonic operation within Labourism. The evisceration of several of Labour's working class 'heartlands' throughout the 2000s as a result of New Labour's commitment to warmongering, privatization and aggressive social authoritarianism has cost the party 5 million mainly working class votes. The pseudo-explanation, the way this can be incorporated without anything too significant having to change, is that the 'white working class' became fed up with immigration and in a world of increasing insecurity, become ever more committed to the security blankets of nation and ethnic identity, which politicians did not sufficiently articulate. This manouevering has been going on since Blair went and it became clear that Brown would not stay on for long. As the bye-election losses piled up, the Right leaked to the papers that Harriet Harman was responsible, the weasely line being that "we've got a problem with white working class males, and Harriet Harman wants to pass a Bill to help the gays, blacks and women!" But the losses still came, even harder when Labour tacked to the right on immigration and criminal justice. Labour voters didn't respond well to this sort of campaigning and boycotted the election. But it didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter now that Blue Labour or whatever it is called tomorrow won't actually win back all of those lost voters - they already know this perfectly well. Revulsion against the Tories will, they are betting, throw an election victory their way soon. The 'Blue Labour' stuff will, if anything, lessen the scale of any comeback. But the narrative provides a seemingly compelling reason why the Left, who would naturally be expected to make some small advances in the case of a big social struggle against austerity, must be kept out of the way, disenfranchised and neutralised at all costs. This also explains the tendency among the Labour Right (and centre) to favour reforms which either demote the trade unions within Labour, or give votes to largely passive groups outwith the party. But the language of class also provides a raiment of insurgency to what is actually a continuity exercise, a matey populist facade for an elitist politics. By adding the word 'white', moreover, the 'working class' becomes de-odorised, neutralised, cleansed of menacing cadences of militancy and leftism. It becomes an object of pathos and melancholia, inherently reactionary, and typified by the middle aged white male emoting about family and country, and probably organising one of the mythical millions of street parties to erupt in spontaneous planned celebration over the royal wedding next week. This sort of 'working class' is tame, dull, conformist, and deferential, but also vicious, sadistic, and vindictive. It is in this, and so many other ways, the ideal alibi for the Blairites. The actual working class will be a more fissile, combustible and less manageable matter in the coming months and years.

Two things: the coalition's candidate was beaten by a decisive margin; and the BNP lost their deposit in a constituency where they made one of their first national breakthroughs almost a decade ago. Last night's win for Labour in Oldham East & Saddleworth will be seen as a blow mainly to the Liberals. To an extent, it is, inasmuch as this has been a Lib/Lab marginal since 1995, and the Liberals should probably have enjoyed a slight majority in the 2010 general election were it not for Phil Woolas' race-baiting. But the Liberal share of the vote was slightly higher than at the general election, at 31.9%. I would estimate that Elwyn Watkins got his core vote out - that being centrist middle class voters - while replacing lost votes on the left with gained votes from the right. Tactical voting by Tories, encouraged by the Conservative Party and The Times newspaper, ensured that this would happen. As a consequence, the Tory candidate lost 13.6% of the vote, and Labour gained 10.2%, putting its vote share slightly higher than in 1997. The momentum of opinion against austerity is doing Labour's job for them, rebuilding their voting base in record time. It's not just about austerity, of course, but the issue cuts across so many other pressing social dilemmas, as we'll see.

The lost Tory vote didn't just break away to the Liberals. Maybe a fraction went to Labour, but a seemingly marginal development worth noticing is that UKIP have seen their vote share rise gradually since 2001, from about 1% to 3.86% in May 2010 and have added almost 2 percent points since the general election, to push them to 5.8%. They keep their deposit for the first time in this seat. Partly, this will be because of the protracted decline of the BNP, to which we'll return in a moment. But I think it will be due also to dissatisfaction from the right with Cameron's leadership of the Tories. UKIP's problems in the middle of the decade, partly caused by the Kilroy-Silk's split which saw votes siphoned to his new (and now late) Veritas party, were probably an interruption in a secular trend. A section of the hard Thatcherite right is slowly seceding from the Conservative Party, staking out independent territory on Europe, the pound, immigration, and crime. Another way to put this is that the alliance between big business and the petit-bourgeoisie, on which crucial axis the Conservative Party rests, is in crisis.

The BNP has seen its vote share painstakingly eroded by anti-fascist work since 2001, when it made a shock breakthrough in Oldham by getting 11.3% of the vote. They gained 5.72% in May 2010, and 4.5% last night. Usually the far right would expect to see its vote share increase outside of a general election, as voters for the main parties decline to turn out. If you were so minded, you could amuse yourself by scanning the dejected reactions on fascist web forums. The interesting question is whether this signals a real, lasting resolution of the acute social problems that brought the BNP to prominence in Oldham in the first place.

This most centrally involved institutional racism in local government, which systematically declined to hire representative numbers of people from ethnic minorities, de facto segregation in housing [pdf] and education [pdf], and constant conflict between police and local Asian youths, underpinned by the collapse of local industries such as textiles. This toxic combination had fed into a series of political interventions by police and local media designed to scapegoat and demonise local Asians for the area's social problems. The result, which the Ritchie report [pdf] described at the time, had been a surge in racist abuse from white neighbours such that many Asian residents felt unable to leave their homes after dark. Some of this has abated. The acute crisis of 2001 has not returned, and patient community work has helped undermine fearmongering over local mosques, for example. But the chronic problems remain as they were. There was some investment in amenities, some government-sponsored cross-community work, but the main response from the authorities was to blame Asians for self-segregating. The local MP, Phil Woolas, claimed that the main problem was unacknowledged 'anti-white racism'. The government's Prevent strategy, moreover, has helped undermine those progressive initiatives launched under the rubric of 'community cohesion' by enforcing a disciplinarian agenda through 'community gatekeepers', and by singling out Muslims as the source of 'violent extremism' while ignoring the far right. The race-baiting by Phil Woolas before the 2010 general election, and more recently by Jack Straw, suggests that a section of the Labour Right still thinks that there is mileage in tapping resentment toward Asians, and Muslims in particular.

And here it becomes very dangerous. People like Woolas and Straw never believed that Labour should offer a real alternative to the Tories on cuts. That's why they think you have to play with racism. But if the Tories succeed in imposing the cuts without a serious fightback, then places like Oldham are fucked, and Labour will pay the price. Unemployment is rising across the borough, which contains the seats of Oldham East and Saddleworth, and Oldham West and Royton (Michael Meacher's constituency). However, it is not concentrated in Liberal redoubts like Saddleworth north and south, or the Tory areas like Chaddleton north, but chiefly in the central wards like Alexandra and Werneth. Youth unemployment is especially concentrated in Alexandra, the ward with the highest percentage of Asian constituents, some of which was added to the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency in 2010. It's true that over the last decade the Liberals have built up their support by wooing Labour voters in poorer wards like Coldhurst, St Marys and Waterhead. But the Liberal retreat from those areas will probably be accompanied by growth in Tory wards - bearing in mind that many of the current Liberal strongholds were won from Tory control back in the Nineties. Those wards will suffer from the cuts, but not as much as elsewhere. Labour's base in the organised working class, already suffering from the destruction of the manufacturing core, is about to suffer most terribly, as public sector employees are laid off. And what has been particularly worrying about the fascist vote has been the way in which it was able to build in the poorest working class areas like Alexandra because of racism and de facto segregation. Throw in soaring unemployment, and the further destruction of Labour's base, and you've got the potential for another conflagration, much more serious.

So, Labour's victory is a positive sign. It shows that the core working class constituencies in this area want to fight the cuts. There was realistically no other way, electorally, for them to express such a desire. The Greens were the only left-of-Labour alternative, and they have no tradition of significant support in Oldham East and Saddleworth. The decline in the BNP vote is good, because it throws the party into further disarray, and adds to the dissatisfaction with Nick Griffin's leadership. But all of this is contingent on whether the trade union movement in these areas is ready to put up a fight. Nothing short of a protracted social and industrial struggle is going to stop the destruction of communities like those in Oldham.

Having previously denounced BA stewards as agents of communism, the English Defence League is broadening its political remit to include counter-protests against students:

[I]n a speech to EDL supporters in Peterborough on 11 December, EDL leader “Tommy Robinson” – a former BNP member whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon – issued a threat to student demonstrators.

His speech alternated attempts to whip up anti-Muslim hatred with attacks on the thousands of school and college students who have protested against fees and education cuts over the past weeks. He threatened:

The next time the students want to protest in our capital, the English Defence League will be there.

In terms that will come as news to millions of working class school and university students, he claimed:

You had students living off their dads’ f***ing bank cards who have never lived a normal way in their life. They do not understand what it is to be a working class member of this community.

And in a single scattergun blast, he lashed out at students, Unite Against Fascism and “communist scum”. His speech followed streams of hate directed at students on the EDL’s forums.

The Tories, winning a plurality of the vote, have failed to get an overall majority. This is excellent news both for what it shows, and for what it means. It shows that people were more wary of the Tories and their aggressive agenda of cuts than they were of any of this crap about a hung parliament or irresponsible liberals. Lack of enthusiasm for Labour didn't translate into votes for Tories. The share of the vote for the Conservatives is just over a third of those who voted, or approximately a fifth of all eligible voters, and the number of seats won by the Tories is lower than in 1992, 1987, 1983, 1979, 1970, 1959 and 1955.

Not only did a wave of enthusiasm not bring Tory voters surging out to overthrow Labour in the marginals, but in some seats the dread of a Tory victory produced a strong swing back to Labour, mostly in areas where Labour already had a solid majority. It means that there will not be a Tory government with an emergency budget passed into law in the first six months of their rule. Of course, the alternative Lib-Lab coalition will certainly impose steep budget cuts, but there isn't a clear and authoritative mandate for it in the way that there would be had the Tories won an outright majority. Even if all parties are committed to cuts, this result places us in a better position to resist them.

Neither Labour nor the Lib Dems individually has any right to boast about these results. However, both parties can now form a coalition based on the clear anti-Tory majority that the results express. New Labour ministers and officials have been talking up this clear progressive majority all night. Indeed, the combined vote for Labour and the Lib Dems is easily more than 50%, which would give them a legitimate basis for such a coalition. If they're going to do this, however, then they will have no choice but to deliver electoral reform as a minimum in the next term. That means they will have to live with the possibility of smaller parties finding it easier to emerge and challenge their hegemony over all the left-of-centre votes. Also note that the basis on which such a coalition is being raised by Labour MPs is that it will avoid rapid and deep public spending cuts and thus protect the economy. This being the case, they will experience some severe difficulties when they try to push through the cuts.

Relatedly, the results for almost all left-of-Labour candidates were either disappointing or appalling. The best result of the night was Caroline Lucas' excellent victory in Brighton Pavilion, but there's not much to celebrate beyond that. Salma Yaqoob came a strong second in Birmingham Hall Green - but given Yaqoob's profile, and the backing of Lynne Jones among others, one might have expected her to do better. She has been squeezed by the rush back to Labour in working class heartlands. As yet, there is no word on Galloway's result, but right-wing Twitterers have been perhaps prematurely dancing on his electoral grave all night - ah but, as I write, a banner on BBC News says Labour has held Poplar and Limehouse... Beyond that - well, look at the results for TUSC and those Respect candidates not based in Birmingham or the East End. On the disappointing side are results like Sheridan's 3%, but most of the votes are at an appalling fraction of 1%. I suppose on the bright side, the Solidarity/TUSC candidate in Inverness soundly thrashed the 'Joy of Talk' candidate by gaining fifty percent more votes than him. Let no one say that I don't know how to accentuate the positive. You might think it's as well that the Left did not go into these elections grandstanding and talking up its chances, but the fact is that even where the Left had localised prospects the returns have been a disappointment.

The only realistic conclusion is that the window for left-of-Labour electoral challenges has been gradually shutting since 2005, and will not dramatically widen short of the emergence of a social movement on which to base it. These are objective limitations which can't be overcome with a command economy of movement-building in which the grassroots is badgered and cajoled into hyperactivism. What can be achieved in the immediate term is the working out an emergency coalition against the coming public sector cuts. And that is exactly what is needed as soon as possible.

The news about the fascist vote is on balance good. It could have been gruesome, but instead its merely ugly. As it turns out, it looks as if the BNP was easily defeated in Barking, despite Griffin gaining more than 6,000 votes. Griffin tried to say in the run-up to the result that he'd only really aimed to get second place. Actually, he was driven to third place. He's now reportedly blamed his misfortune on the "harrassment" of his bootboys by UAF activists. I'm happy to be among those noisome intruders that Griffin can blame for his defeat. The BNP was also driven into fourth place in target seats like Stoke Central and Stoke South. They did, of course, gain some strong votes even where they were clearly defeated. Overall, they gained about 2% of the vote nationally, a slight improvement. I'm not sure how to interpret this as yet, but with UKIP's vote at 3% (not much in the way of gains for them) that makes a 5% vote for right-of-Tory forces. It does possibly suggest that they were unable to capitalise on the really nasty atmosphere over immigration, which would mean that people were more inclined to vote on class issues than they were mobilised by racism.

Lastly, the turnout is being talked up, but at most it is projected to reach about 70%, less than in 1997 which was then the lowest turnout in the post-war period. The turnout has been driven up by the closeness of he contest, but it's still consistent with the longer term popular disengagement with electoral politics. The legitimacy of the state is entering into a long-term crisis, as its representative features look increasingly unconvincing as bases for popular participation. Whitehall is well aware of this, and that PR isn't going to fundamentally reverse this trend. For a full discussion of the reasons for this, see chapter one of The Meaning of David Cameron, perhaps shortly to be renamed, What Was the Point of David Cameron?

Today's Unite Against Fascism conference was excellent, strategically useful, analytically incisive, and just the right side of argumentative. It did admittedly have some most peculiar moments. For example, Margaret Hodge MP pleading for support and solidarity from a room full of anti-racists angry about her recent Daily Mail article. I have little time for Hodge, as previous posts on this blog make abundantly clear. However, there is no question that the main issue in Barking this coming election is to stop the fascists. The BNP have gained some of their strongest votes in Barking and Dagenham. In the 2009 European elections, during which the fasicsts gained almost a million votes, their highest number of first preference votes were attained in Barking and Dagenham, almost 20% of the total. Boundary changes and disaffection with Labour could be enough to give the BNP control of the council in the local elections and possibly even give Griffin a parliamentary seat. As Martin Smith pointed out, this is part of the BNP's explicit strategy, and we cannot afford to be as complacent as some anti-fascists were before the Euro elections. So, while I'm not going to go out asking people to vote for Labour, or advocate for Hodge, I am going to do what I can to make sure the BNP are driven out of that borough.

Another oddity was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown swerving suddenly from excellent points to, in my opinion, very poor ones. She fumed about condescending middle class liberals urging her to 'understand' racism and fascism, and somehow come to terms with and deem acceptable the fact that growing numbers of people would like to get rid of her. Quite right. But then, seemingly contradicting herself, she made some appalling arguments about Muslims not sorting out the "hotheads" within their own ranks, and stated that they shared some of the blame for the rise of the far right (thus rendering it more 'understandable', you see?). She rightly argued for unity among the oppressed, recalling the great anti-fascist mobilisations against the NF in the Seventies, but allowed this to segue into a rant against the term 'Islamophobia'. Still, she was not among those liberals vacantly defending the promotion of the BNP on Question Time or pretending that there was anything to 'debate' with fascists. She rightly pointed out that many on the right hate the BNP because of some idea of 'Britishness' they have, but then made the bizarre further inference that perhaps the right hated fascists even more because of their identification with Britain's role in WWII. Oh, I think not. I think all the evidence shows that it is right-wing voters who are most susceptible to the BNP's message. And I think Yasmin is torn between some very decent anti-racist politics, and the very dubious conclusions that her liberalism leads her toward.

Perhaps the most surreal moment of the whole event was near the end when someone tapped my shoulder to inform me that members of the English Defence League were outside. It transpired that 25 of the scum had gathered outside in the hope of kicking some heads in. They were massively outnumbered and eventually the police arrived and they didn't manage to batter anyone. So it was a quixotic bid on their part - but it does show how confident and arrogant some of these filth are becoming.

The conference also had some extraordinarily inspiring moments. I found Leroy Rosenior, the ex-footballer who runs Show Racism the Red Card, very personable and moving. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the NUS Black Students Officer, stood in for NUS president Wes Streeting and made a fantastic and incisive speech, tearing into mainstream politicians who made excuses for racism and conceded territory to the BNP. And one could not but admire Assed Baig who has just faced down an extremely nasty, vitriolic, racist campaign against him in Staffordshire University instigated by BNP activists. That campaign centred on an attempted vote of no confidence in him as Student Union president, and though the opposition attempted to pretend it was about something other than racism, it quickly degenerated into accusations that Baig was the first step toward Sharia law, etc.. In the last days of the campaign, racist graffiti and swastikas appeared on the university exterior, with "Fuck off N*****r", "No P*kis" and other similarly improving sentiments spraypainted on the walls and pavement. The opposition leader, contacted about this, claimed that the signs weren't swastikas, but actually Hindu love symbols. Baig won the vote, but it was clear that the atmosphere of intimidation and racism had been a horrible ordeal.

There are a few key points to come out of the conference. The BNP are organising electorally, and they are shipping in all their activists to areas of local strength, especially to Barking and Dagenham. Experience shows that the BNP are adept at toning down their message and softening their racism in pre-election periods. They use low-key forms of racism to mobilise the broadest possible layers of voters before the election, then afterward harden their position. With members in the European parliament, they now have a lot of money to invest in this propaganda facelift. And their activists are known to mobilise by the dozens, and do have a go at their opponents if they get the chance. So, it is necessary to outnumber the BNP's activists. It is necessary, through doorstepping and leafletting, to challenge their racist lies and also undermine their attempted dissimulation about who they really are and what they represent. They want to mainstream fascism, and take it upmarket, but they're never that far from their neo-Nazi roots, or their street-fighting milieu. And hammering that message home is a very effective first step in attacking and breaking up the BNP's voting base. It isn't enough, though, for reasons I will come to in a moment.

At the same time, the EDL are organising another challenge. The EDL works something like this: organised Nazis provide the funds and the ideological and organisational spine; right-wing football casuals and sadistic thugs provide the footsoldiers to attack and terrorise Muslims, Asian communities, and - as today's abortive siege demonstrates - antifascists. They are rehabilitating a tradition of racist street violence that hasn't been seen on any scale since the 1970s. As Ken Livingstone pointed out, they have repeatedly engaged in riots and organised racist violence that would result in screams of bloody murder if the culprits were Muslims - but they are largely ignored. And the same media which has been puffing the BNP has a way of dismissing opponents of these thugs, claiming that antifascists are 'just as bad' and that it would be best just to stay away. Events don't bear this out, as the EDL tend to be only more violent when they aren't out-numbered - a point that Dawn Butler MP underlined. At any rate, the old 'just as bad' chestnut won't be available now. Because as a result of today's conference, several Labour MPs including ministers, and a number of trade union leaders, have given their backing to the important anti-EDL mobilisation in Bolton on 20th March. Butler also committed to seeking to ban EDL events on account of their repeated and demonstrated propensity to end in waves of ultra-violence - and if she couldn't achieve that, she would support the largest possible mobilisations against the EDL. Not an insignificant statement, I thought, from a cabinet minister.

The size of the combined electoral challenge and street mobilisations amounts to the largest fascist threat that the UK has ever seen. In the short run, this will be met by mobilising the broadest possible coalition against the fascists on whatever terrain they organise. But it isn't enough. There is a broader climate of racism that New Labour has been encouraging since it took office in 1997, beginning with Jack Straw's attack on Roma gypsies. That slow drip of poison into the national political atmosphere, encouraged by the government and whipped into a frenzy by the press, has seen concerns over immigration and race shoot to the top of polls as an important concern of voters, whereas before it wasn't even an issue. The constant stream of invective against asylum seekers, Eastern European migrants, gypsies, and Muslims, has resulted in the kind of climate that fascism can grow in. And these different forms of racism are mutually reinforcing, not competing. A speaker from the Jewish anti-racism group, JCORE, pointed out that while antisemitism is not at the same level of intensity as Islamophobia, it is shown in research by Pew that those who one of the biggest predictors of anti-Muslim racism is anti-Jewish racism. Those who are most hostile to Muslims are also the most likely to be antisemitic. That's true right across the board. So, a sustained ideological attack on the kinds of officially mandated racism that are providing the fascists with their alibi is long overdue.

This climate of racism, though, catches on the way it does because at some level it helps explain people's experiences of the world. Far right voters are disproportionately lower middle class rather than poor, but that doesn't mean they are not frightened of poverty, unaffected by economic insecurity, and not stressed out by harder working conditions and a more competitive labour market. They interpret these problems in a racist fashion, by blaming immigrants for taking jobs and driving down wages, and by blaming Muslims and ethnic minorities for making Britain a less pleasant place to live. Their dream of petit-bourgeois respectability and upward class mobility is threatened by economic insecurity, and their ideological preconceptions makes racism an attractive response. Neoliberalism is thus the practise that produces conditions which make racism a more comprehensible point of view for many people. It is also the stultifying neoliberal consensus that turns people off politics, causes them to stop voting, and gives fascist votes increased weight as a result. So, it is necessary - as one speaker said - to fight fascism with the sword as well as the shield. Yes, fend off the immediate challenge, but also provide a hopeful alternative that can provide a real answer to the failures of the system.

Rod Liddle has been churning out sub-BNP racist provocations for a while now. The latest, taking a horribly violent criminal plot as its cue, issues the following judgment on 'multiculturalism':

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

Defending his comments, he offered the argument that he wasn't talking about race but about 'multiculturalism'. He went on to explain:

My argument is much as it has always been; that the creed of multiculturalism is largely to blame, the notion that cultures, no matter how antithetical to the norm, or anti-social, should be allowed to develop unhindered, without criticism.

There is no good reason to take this argument at face value. For a start, Liddle may be fantastically ignorant and complacent on many levels, but I suspect he is aware that his claims are straightforwardly statistically false. The point of ranting in such an off-hand racist fashion isn't to be precise, it is to 1) get Liddle some more notoriety, 2) hurt the targets of such abuse, and 3) get people talking about race in a particular way that benefits the racists. I also doubt that Liddle is unaware that 'race' and 'culture' are not neatly separable in his tirades. Indeed, that is the whole point. Here I disagree with Sunny - Liddle is unlikely to be confused. Rather, he knows exactly what he is doing. The attack on 'multiculturalism' is the right's main way of rehabilitating certain racist ideas. He would also be aware that white people, who are not subject to the same collective insults, are disproportionately represented in certain types of criminality and anti-social behaviour. (Cf. Bonnie Greer's retort that "the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, war-mongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear".)

The occasion for the rant is crime, but that is not the issue at stake. If it were, then all sorts of unwelcome complexities would arise. If you really wanted to discuss the origins of criminal behaviour, you wouldn't start by talking about either 'race' or 'culture'. For one, few people who use such terms can specify what they mean by them beyond some vague indices or anecdotes. What are the precise dimensions of a 'culture' that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as 'culture of dependency', 'culture of blame', 'culture of violence', etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or 'culture', rapists, robbers and murderers.

I note that the Spectator's editor, Fraser Nelson, has defended Rod Liddle's 'right to offend'. What he is talking about is the right incite racial hatred, which you certainly don't have and which is a monstrous right to claim. Anti-racist legislation has been conceived and passed precisely to thwart any such 'right'. It is because of this that the far right have had to be extremely careful about how they couch their propaganda in public, as noted by 5CC. But if Liddle can purvey such racially defamatory claims without consequence, then why would the fascists hold back? Especially if all they have to say in their defence is "I'm talking about culture, stupid"?

I consider this a litmus test. It is not a test of anything about the BBC, mind you. I just like to know exactly how pissed off I can still get without beheading someone. Everything about it is stupid and insulting. The headline says: "BNP members challenged on beliefs". What actually follows is an inane confab of daft questions and non-sequiturs by way of reply between said BNP members, including the explicitly pro-Nazi Mark Collett, and a BBC interviewer. Possibly, the BNP members in question found the experience "challenging", in much the same way that Paul Daniels finds it a "challenge" not to be a self-satisfied, greasy little shit with far too much money which should be taxed, taxed, taxed until he drops dead from a heart attack at the injustice of it all. But not a single false or ridiculous claim is actually rebutted, questioned, or put to the test. So, they're asked about British football player Ashley Cole, and they're all like "If he wants to come to this country and he wants to live by our laws, pay into society, that's fine." And the interviewer, who gives the impression that she would rather be talking to a couple of labradors on Blue Peter, doesn't challenge this. There is not even the usual token gesture toward the specious gospel of 'balance' that the BBC usually evulugates. Even Roy Greenslade, who believes that the BNP should be allowed on to Question Time, is furious about the whole incident.

When the BBC was questioned about this by writer Mark Charan Newton, the editor of Newsbeat replied with what l33t-speakers refer to as copypasta. He said that the BNP had been given airtime because "we’re an impartial newsgathering organisation". In fact, as Love Music Hate Racism supporters have pointed out, the BBC have often refused to broadcast LMHR carnivals because they're 'too political'. This is the BBC's instinctive hostility to the left showing: giving air time to anti-racists is political; air time for fascists is 'free speech'. In effect, the BBC's spiel repeated the Fox News slogan: "we report, you decide". But someone has to choose what to report on, and what the issues are that 'we' must decide on. There are so many things to talk about that the decision to canvas the opinion of BNP 'youth' can only be an editorial decision that says that the BNP are interesting, and worthy of attention.

Predictably, therefore, the editor of Newsbeat goes on to say: "Over time it’s evident from following our listeners that the party touches a nerve of support or interest. The large pile of texts on my desk raise issues around immigration, political correctness and an apparent frustration with mainstream politics that means the BNP, or at least some of their policies, appeals to some people." What he means to say is that he suddenly got all this attention from a fervid minority of viewers about the BNP and he - if I may be so coy about it - shot his wad. He spraypainted his lower deck. He disburdened himself of a surplus of wank gravy. I'm sure you get my meaning (write to me if I remain too obtuse on this point). The BNP is, apparently, ratings fodder because there are probably a few million sad little bigots who think they've got the right idea about immigrants and gays. The editor is dutifully pointing this out while indicating that he doesn't really care about obligations to the BNP's likely victims, to the imperative of 'public trust' that the BBC often goes on about when justifying broadcasting decisions, or indeed anything else that might throw a politically-correct wrench in their works.

Enoch Powell is the subject of reactionary encomium wherever the issues of race, integration and post-colonial Britain arise. They say that he wasn't a racist, just a decent English patriot who was saddened by the dilution of national identity. They say that he was right. They say that the current multicultural situation is intolerable and perverse, and that this was foreseen by Powell. 'They' talk an incredible amount of rubbish.

What sort of Britishness, what sort of nationhood, did Enoch Powell defend? Before coming to his infamous Birmingham address from 20th April 1968, I want to mention a few things about Powell's formation as a politician. He was the off-spring of petit-bourgeois Black Country denizens and, as a child of the lower middle class, he was also a career-minded imperialist. He had risen through the ranks of the armed forces without seeing combat, and aspired to the highest position in the empire available. He wanted to be the Viceroy of India, the local proxy of the British crown and as close to royalty as someone of his class and rank could ever aspire to. He wanted to be a king. Powell, a classicist, was also a devotee of Britain's desert travellers, such as Wilfrid Thesiger, Richard Francis Burton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Charles Montagu Doughty. He admired their unworldliness, their readiness to escape from modernity, their self-imposed exile from life. He experienced the deserts himself as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Algiers and Cairo during World War II, though his experience was not particularly heroic. He couldn't boil water, or handle a simple tin of sausages, and he once burned his moustache when he tried to get a fire going for some cooking. Still, he thought he was the right stuff to rule over a few hundred million 'coolies'.

He was also of that shade of imperialist opinion that detested the rising influence of the United States, believing America to be hostile to the British empire. And he hated Chamberlain not because of any instinctive anti-fascism but for selling Britain out. Because of his disgust over Munich, he even voted Labour in 1945, though he joined the Conservative Party. His regal dreams, as it turned out, were shattered by Indian independence, but he remained committed to the same monarchical and racial principles. In fact, upon being elected as an MP in 1950, he drew up a plan to reconquer India, which even Churchill thought was insane. And he went on to espouse the most right-wing 'free market' economics in a period when it was extremely unpopular.

There is a peculiarity in British imperial practise which is important to take note of, however. Although Powell later made his name by attacking immigrants from the Commonwealth, the traditional stance of empire was that all citizens loyal to the British monarch could have free entry to Britain. This stance was not fundamentally adulterated in the immediate period following World War II. So, for example, in 1948, one year after Indian independence was formally conceded and in the same year that the vicious suppression of the Malayan rebellion began, the Labour government introduced the Nationality Act. The Act upheld the practice of allowing free entry to the UK of all citizens of 'dependent' Commonwealth countries, affirming continuity in the face of certain post-war changes. The Act was more symbolic in this respect than it was substantial, since it did not alter the principle of free entry, supported by both Labour and the Tories. It was later falsely cited by Powellites as the basis for 'uncontrolled' immigration. What it really did was define the basis upon which immigration would be controlled, since the apparatus of exclusion was maintained for citizens of 'foreign powers' and so on.

What changed after 1945 was not the law so much as the problems facing the British state, and British capital. These included how to keep the empire, or keep as much of it as possible; how to handle the arrival of the American behemoth; how to restore the health of capitalism, and divert the growing radicalism of the working class; how, in effect, to remain a competitive centre of capital accumulation with what had been astonishing global dominion. Much capital had been destroyed by the war, and the labour force had been depleted. There was money ready to enter circulation as capital, of course, but in a dirt poor society where consumption was rationed, how was it possible to realise any surplus? With a tight labout market and a militant working class, how much surplus would it be possible to extract in the first place? The social democratic policies that capitalists often objected to were functional in this respect, since socialised housing and health significantly reduced the cost of labour. Nationalisations in vulnerable and unprofitable parts of the economy helped support more dynamic parts of the economy. And if much of the colonial apparatus was to be lost to independence struggles, thus shutting off valuable sources of hyper-exploitation, the Commonwealth could still help solve the labour supply problem. So, in 1948, the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury with 500 Jamaican passengers, all of them British subjects and all of them responding to a newspaper advertisement requesting labourers to come and work in the UK. The public sector began to recruit extensively from Jamaica and Barbados, raising an extra labour army of about 170,000 people before the first restrictions were introduced in 1962.

Did Powell have a problem with this? If he did, he was careful to conceal it. He had spoken out against immigration controls in 1956 and, as the Tory health minister, he had continued to draft Carribean labour according to the system's needs. In 1964, he still said that he could not support "making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin". But things were happening that would soon make racist demagoguery an excellent career move. There had already been racist riots in parts of Britain throughout the 1950s, and there were plenty of shops and landlords who would have no truck with black Britons. In 1962, the Tory government had decided to impose the first controls on Commonwealth immigration, with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. The labour supply problem had been dealt with, so the British state no longer had an incentive to defend immigration. The Act said that no Commonwealth citizen could migrate to the UK without an employment voucher issued by the government. By implication, though they were subjects of the British crown and citizens, black workers were being treated as a problem and a threat to be carefully managed. After Powell lost the Tory leadership election in 1965, he settled into the shadow cabinet and, after a few years, emerged in a new guise. He first debuted this new get-up in an article for the Daily Telegraph in 1967, entitled 'Facing up to Britain's Race Problem', in which he described the presence of Commonwealth immigrants as an "invasion" a "rising flood" that was seeing white people "driven from their homes and property" as house prices dropped. He went on to test the waters again at a speech in Walsall in 1968, where he denounced Sikhs for striking over the right to wear a turban in the workplace. I'll come back to this example in a minute. The notoriety that he received for this stance must have inflamed his ambition. He could become popular by vocalising the racist sentiments that he had denounced only a few years before.

So, he began his speech in Birmingham in April 1968 by asserting that the mark of a good statesman was a willingness to face up to dangers. The main danger, as he saw it, was described by a "quite ordinary working man" that he had encountered, who told him he would leave Britain if he had the money because he feared that "In this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man". As if he was confirming the diagnosis of this "ordinary working man", Powell went on to say warn that in twenty years time there would be three and a half million Commonwealth migrants in England. He said that by 1985, the decendants of immigrants would be in a majority, and that by allowing the inflow of "raw material" for the future "immigrant-descended population", Britain was "heaping up its own funeral pyre". He quoted correspondence from a constituent, who complained about a neighbour, an elderly white woman, being harrassed by "grinning picanninies" as she went to the shops. The correspondent said they could not speak English, but did know how to shout "racialist" at her. And, therefore, if she was thus accused, might she not end up in prison under the terms of the Race Relations Act? Powell made no attempt to refute this obvious drivel, but instead used it to bolster his claim that the presence of black citizens was a national crisis, an imminent threat to white Britons, whose freedom to live and speak within their 'own' country was being repressed. He predicted "civil war" between white and black Britons, and urged repatriation ("voluntary", of course) as the urgent solution. In so doing, he knew full well that he was encouraging the most poisonous elements in British society. He may have hoped to place himself well for a future leadership challenge, but the main effect was to strengthen the appeal of the far right National Front (NF), which grew in leaps and bounds for a decade afterwards.

Subsequent governments chose to pander to the racism that he had encouraged. The Heath government introduced the 1971 Immigration Act, and the rate of migration slowed to near zero.
Labour politicians began to attack migrants, as when Bob Mellish MP stood in the commons in 1976 and said of Malawi Asians, "Enough is enough". He was followed by Powell, of course, who repeated the same demand. The NF gained more than 5% of the vote in the Greater London Council elections the following year. The Labour government responded by increasing deportations, while immigration officials imposed "virginity tests" on Asian women. If the NF was eventually defeated by a broad antifascist coalition, though, the Tory party adopted precisely the kind of new Right policies that Powell had long advocated, and its right flank represented by people like Norman Tebbitt defended his ideas, as indeed they still do. Pursuing a particular class project, known today as neoliberalism, the Tory right also articulated in different ways the reactionary discourses of nationality and race that Powell, a would-be Viceroy and failed imperial traveller, had propounded.

It is worth noting a few things in conclusion. Powellism's defenders have always said that his followers were largely not racists. The journalist Diana Spearman analysed his post-bag in 1968 and decided that only a minority could be classified as racist, with the majority of his support attributed to fears for British 'culture' and 'traditions'. It was pointed out by anti-racists at the time that this involved precisely the typical racist gesture of constructing a non-white minority as a threat and a legitimate object of abuse and repression. This was the ideological basis of Powellism. Its staple conviction was that more black people meant less harmonious race relations, and that relatively few black people meant peace. That such culturalist arguments are still used as a justification for racism today suggests that the debate has not advanced that far. Another familiar argument, made by the dockers who protested on Powell's behalf after he was dismissed from the shadow cabinet, was that they were only protesting about 'free speech'. An Englishman, they claimed, had no right to say what he felt in his own country. And one other echo of the present was when Powell denounced what he called "communalism" during his speech in Walsall in February 1968, and then again in Birmingham that April. He was referring to the desire of Sikhs to preserve customs that he referred to as "inappropriate to Britain", namely the right to wear their turban in work. This was what he called the "canker" of "communalism". In other words, "communalism" was a code for what would now be called multiculturalism. The current obsession with questions of 'integration', the pseudo-problems of 'tolerance' and its limits, and the ends of multiculturalism, have roots in the seedy and sad career of John Enoch Powell.