My First Encounter with Racism.

I must have been about five or six at the time. I was a late start at primary school as my mum had dawdled over whether or not to send me at all (she contemplated homeschooling). My first real friend came from a similar family background as I did. We were both children of unemployed family units, I came from a single-parent family, whereas he had seen his parents split early on and his mother later remarried. Neither his father nor his stepfather worked (as far as I knew), just as my mum survived on benefits and credit cards. She attended college while I was little and went on to study at university and she looked for work wherever she could. The media campaign against single-mums and their children had been under way for many years by this time.

We had a lot in common as shy sons of the under-class so maligned by middle-class journalists. Then one day we were in the playground and he turned to me and said "These Asians are going to take over". It perplexed me. I didn't know what he meant. I had never heard anything like this before, or at least I hadn't noticed it, certainly not at home. He was convinced that there were so many Asians in Britain that they were going to "take over". This was long before 'Islamization' became the new buzzword of the Far-Right. Over the next few years my friend and I played video games, collected Pokemon cards, and stuck together in tough times. Still, it bothered me when he complained that Sikhs are allowed to carry knives and other such petty concerns. He often said the Asians (when he used technical language) should've been "wiped out".

My mother was blunt when I asked her what to think about my dear friend's comments. She told me it was racism. Pure and simple. No doubt the press had a big role in shaping my friend's perceptions. His family swallowed a lot of it on face value. He was on board with the 'War on Terror' and was destraught over Kevin Bigley's death because his mother was. "We're helping them!" he said. He was signed up to all the rightward trends. When UKIP was on the rise in the early part of the last decade my friend's family took to putting up UKIP campaign materials in their front room window. It was common-sense for him that we should leave the EU before we're swamped with Poles. England was a beleagured nation in his mind, dislocated, broken, and infected with undesirables.

The strength of the nationalist narrative is in its appeal to real grievances in the North and the Midlands. The national industries are gone, the old lifelines of working-class people have been decimated, and everywhere jobs are even more scarce. These were the blank slate years of the Nineties. Blairism was on the rise as John Major's 'Back to Basics' disappeared down a whirlpool of sleaze and hypocrisy. Thatcherism had wiped out the labour movement and fed public assets to the private sector. The most convenient way to explain away the problems of society was not to analyse its systemic contradictions (who has the time for this?) but to externalise them. The EU is running our country. The foreigners took the jobs and the benefits and even taking over our football teams.

Of course, the media has done a wonderful job of demonising asylum seekers and the benefits system and the EU. Not to mention the way they have set out to undermine the term 'racist' and its tone of condemnation. My friend insisted he wasn't 'racist', all the while insisting that the blacks all look the same, the Asians are taking over and should be exterminated, everyone who isn't 'white' should be deported and the government should stand up for the 'white' English. He later moved on to voting BNP and had little idea that the Party represents everything the British fought in Nazi Germany. He was more concerned by the losses of the England football team than by D-Day. He insisted that the people who died on the shores of Normandy did not die for him or his country. Not that he was pro-Hitler. I don't think he was aware of all the implications of what he thought.

That's ideology for you. It's not what you think, it's what you do. In the world he lives in there are only racial formations and he has to take the side of his own kind. Class is abstracted away, only ancestry and skin-colour matter. It breaks my heart that there are still working-class people who think like this. It merely enforces their predicament and closes down any possibility beyond the existing order. It keeps the working-class in its place. As Noel Ignatiev put it "We cannot say it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else."

James O'Brien kicking Farage's ass.

People like to say Nigel Farage is a hypocrite as leader of UKIP, calling for limits to immigration, all the while he has a German wife, and bilingual German-British children. Well, if you want to maintain advantages for Western European economies over their Eastern European counterparts (at the expense of the working-class everywhere) then it's perfectly consistent. Romania was practically destroyed by Ceausescu's austerity (which has continued to this day) and now people like Farage want to put up a wall to stop them from settling here in search of work. Farage supports the conditions which destroyed the life chances of those workers in Romania, just as he supports Thatcherite policies in this country.

Dreams of a Black Christmas.

The American Right have long been engaged in the fight to defend Christmas from the imaginary threat posed to it by secular progressives. The tenth box on your advent calendar marks the day of the Slate article by Aisha Harris on the assumed white-skin of Father Christmas. The following week was filled with the usual hysterical commentary from Fox News in its bid to deflect the ‘liberal agenda’ to destroy Christmas and drown puppies at birth. This is a part of the kulturkampf waged by conservatives since the end of the Cold War and anti-Communism no longer provided the impetus of social hypochondria. The snow had not yet settled in the wake of the spat when the anti-racist campaigner Tim Wise offered some insight:

Now don’t get me wrong, if there were a Santa Claus, there is very little doubt that he would have to be white. After all, no black man could manage to work only one day out of the year and not be called lazy; and surely no black man could get away with breaking into millions of homes, even if he was bearing presents. Some cop or neighborhood watch captain would surely have taken him down long ago, convinced that the red suit he was wearing signified gang colors. So, and let me be the first to admit it: in a world where Santa actually existed, along with unicorns, pixie dust and the Lorax, Megyn Kelly would have a damned good point. Note, this is how one can make a joke about Santa being white, without reinforcing white racial normalcy: but of course no FOX personality would choose to make the joke this way, because such a joke would require, first, an acknowledgment of the reality of racial profiling and anti-black racism, neither of which conservatives can afford to countenance. This is why conservative race humor isn’t funny, just racist; please take note of it. Thank you.

The liberal pretentions of colour-blindness forgo all challenges to the normative claims of the white male power-structure in the US and elsewhere. The racial consciousness of white people remains intact with all of its trappings of ressentiment and anxiety about what the future may hold. The barriers are up against any critical reflections on what white normalcy amounts to in seasonal symbolism. The paucity of the liberal framework leaves open the possibility of coercion clouded by consent and by sameness. As if coincidentally Black America just happens to be poorer and more prone to be incarcerated than White America. The assumed white-skin of the meritorious, intelligent, beautiful and articulate individual so prevalent in contemporary society is not to be disassociated from these patterns. The disparities of class and race are these patterns, and they are anything but natural. The campaign to keep Christmas white fits with the anxiety washing over the Republican Party since they lost the 2012 election.

The entitlement to govern for white people has been challenged by the election and re-election of Barack Obama. And a lot of white people have a problem with this, they feel they're losing their country. There’s some truth in it as anyone can see from the birth-rate of Hispanic-Americans which has outpaced European-Americans. As Mike Davis has suggested, 2012 may have been the last white election. The decline of the angry white male phenomenon may well be underway, the only hope of the GOP is to back-off on immigration and pursue the policies which would appeal to Hispanic-Americans. But the anxiety over this loss is not to be indulged in. It demonstrates that white privilege is real and that it has been a major force in American life for much more than the last decade. The historic construction of a white racial identity has been a means for the class tensions inherent to capitalism to be managed and controlled.

It’s apt then that the reactionary behind the ‘War on Christmas’ phenomenon was the racist columnist Peter Brimelow. Max Blumenthal found Brimelow was first unsettled by receiving ‘Happy Holidays’ greetings from retailers in place of the traditional ‘Merry Christmas’. Around the same time Peter Brimelow had churned out his book Alien Nation (1995) bewailing mass-immigration as undermining the ethno-cultural core of White America. He claimed Clinton’s victory in 1992 was the result of a Black, Hispanic, Jewish and minority white coalition of voters. He suggested that the expansion of this coalition (especially the non-white segments of it) could’ve created the social basis for Jesse Jackson to become President. Brimelow would go on to be increasingly marginalised for his advocacy of a racially-conscious body politic. But the Christmas campaign would be taken up by Fox News in the early years of this century.

In the wilderness Brimelow found new allies in race-baiters of all kinds (neo-eugenicists, white nationalists, cultural conservatives, even eco-racists and racist feminists) and with them he established VDARE.com. It would become the leading anti-immigrant web journal, its name a reference to the first English child born in the New World. By 2010 Brimelow was much less careful in his words in describing the Obama administration as a ‘minority occupation government’ given its lack of ‘deep ethnic roots’. He claimed the immigration policies of the US are aimed at population displacement in the pursuit of radical economic and social change. This fits with the Buchanan theory of immigration as an objective of the cultural Marxist plot to vanquish white Christian male society. In concluding that it would be natural for whites to pursue their racial interests he compared white nationalism (although he didn’t use the term) with Zionism and Black nationalism to claim the same legitimacy for its aims.

VDARE continued the War for Christmas and, as Blumenthal has noted, began to be more specific about who was responsible for the attacks on Christian society. Of course, it turned out to be the age-old enemy of Christendom - namely, the Jews - as VDARE readers would find from reading the obscene scribbles of Kevin MacDonald and Steve Sailer. When Blumenthal pushed Brimelow on this matter he found the aging English reactionary ambivalent and insistent that “It’s an argument”. The need for a racial explanation of social ills is necessitated by rightist criticism given its priority in externalising all failures of the system to disruptions of its mechanisms. The assumptions of white success run with this to emphasise what is at stake, whereas the normalcy of being white has to be emphasised against those who are looking to excavate the disavowed record of racial oppression. Any troublesome talk of racism can be attacked as the liberal agenda going after everything white people hold dear.

The Refuge and its Scoundrels.

When Dr Johnson famously remarked that patriotism is the 'refuge of the scoundrel' he was actually referring to the Patriotic Party. Johnson was a Tory and wouldn't have written-off the love of one's country, and to some extent, he was right to do so. For patriotism can come in handy, in the war against Fascism it was the Churchillian vision of a determined island nation that held the people mesmerised. It's also worth noting that the great anti-colonial struggles of the last century involved revolutionary nationalism, especially in Vietnam and Cuba. The calls for Irish independence and reunification came primarily from nationalists. Of course, there is the darker side of nationalism, the jingoist harbinger of irredentism and nativism. And it's worth noting that the dark spirit of nationalism is much more common than the progressive and revolutionary possibilities of nationalism. Today we can see the reactionnaire appeals of nationalism against the European Union, while there are active pushes towards independence in Catalonia and Scotland where greater moves to regional autonomy have hardly failed.

It makes sense that the ultra-nationalist defenders of secession are crawling out of the woodwork in Europe at this time. Though this isn't simply the case where independence is concerned. If the referendum had secured Catalan independence recently it seems likely that the new nation would've been quickly subjected to a series of austerity measures. Because once a country of that size has broken-off it would need a new orbit and the European Union offers the strongest alternative. There are progressive arguments in favour of Catalan and Scottish independence. Yet it seems highly unlikely that a fledgling Celtic republic would escape the clutches of neoliberal globalisation either. There's some truth in Portillo's words that the country might easily be transformed into a land of low taxes and a shrunken state sector. In other words, Scotland could easily become a breeding ground for an even more merciless variation on the free-market ideal. At this point we need more unity, not less. This was most potently demonstrated by the demise of Yugoslavia - one of the great tragedies of the last century.

Yugoslavia was a federal socialist system of devolved republics and autonomous regions. It was free of Soviet domination and maintained a multi-ethnic society where Christianity and Islam were practiced side-by-side. All of it was held together under Marshall Tito who inculcated notions of 'brotherhood and unity' into the society as he fought to stamp out the remnants of nationalism in the masses. The state was maintained by a market socialist economy, which featured decentralised cooperatives and worker self-management as well as  a state planning apparatus. It combined the state as a primary mechanism for the organisation of the society and economy, while markets and cooperatives offered secondary mechanisms. The people enjoyed a guaranteed right to a job with a month's paid vacation, as well as free universal health-care and education as part of a comprehensive range of state services. There was never a Soviet-style collectivisation of Yugoslav society, for that may have torn apart the entire project of a country for Southern Slavs.

For a time Yugoslavia prospered with an average rate of growth at 6% and remained a leading model of independent development. The literacy rate reached 90% and life expectancy rose to 72 years. To expand the productive base and increase consumer goods the Yugoslav government borrowed from Western governments throughout the 1960s and 70s. Given that Yugoslavia had achieved development along independent lines (from Russia and not just the US) its federalism came under attack in the 1980s. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia became a concerted US policy as the National Endowment for Democracy began to focus on Yugoslavia as to hasten its breakdown and implement a series of neoliberal reforms. The IMF then began to force an austerity programme on Belgrade as a condition for payments on the country's debt. The austerity measures did not just mean a reduced public expenditure, but huge job losses and wage-cuts for the working. Eventually it would amount to the abolition of workers' self-management in the Balkans.


In spite of the decline of economic conditions inside the country Yugoslavia remained the only socialist republic after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. The people didn't rise up to overthrow the Communist government despite widespread discontent and rising nationalist sentiment. By now the dream of a Yugoslavia free of the old ethnic strife was dead in the water, with the rise of nationalist demagogue Slobodan Milošević. The Serbian nationalists wanted to hollow out Yugoslavia to establish a Greater Serbia. But the other nationalist movements wanted to break-off from Yugoslavia completely. To hasten the burst of secessionism the US began to yank the chain. In 1990 the Bush administration saw to it that Congress cut-off aid to all Yugoslav republics unless they declared independence within six months. The US demanded elections in all republics and went on to stipulate that every election must meet standards set by the US State Department. Later Italy would try to bribe Montenegro with aid to leave Yugoslavia and join them in the new Europe.

Within two years the US delivered another blow to Yugoslavia in the form of international sanctions to put a halt to all trade to and from the country. The economy quickly dived further into the abyss, unemployment spiralled to 70% while the health-care system collapsed and inflation exploded. Michael Parenti sees this as part of an agenda to turn the Balkans into a Third World developing region and to reverse the achievements of the Communist era. It would be a fractured region of republics incapable of independent development. The economy would be shattered, its natural resources stripped open to exploitation by multinational corporations. The people of Yugoslavia would provide a skilled workforce vulnerable to suppressed wages, as well as a reserve army of labour to be deployed to sink the wages of workers in Western Europe. The designs of neoliberalism to break-up Yugoslavia - only for its people to be rinsed by the forces of globalisation - converged with the aims of nationalists.

A frank word about Immigration.

It is often the case that the cuts to public services are justified by the claim that the service is abused by immigrants. The claim most often made is that it is just the benefits are the reason that the ‘foreigners’ come here, they just want to leach off of the tax-payer and so on. It then follows that there should be cuts to benefits to deter immigrants, either to drive them into work or to stop the flow of immigrants totally. Benefit cuts will supposedly deter immigrants from settling here and pull the rug from under the feet of people already settled in the country, removing the safety net for the working-class as a whole. In the minds of many the ‘foreigner’ has two hands too many in the pot and this widespread perception (itself a product of a media campaign) the immigrant is left a vulnerable target. It doesn’t matter that out of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who settled in Britain since 2004, only a few thousand have become benefit claimants. Similarly it has to be noted that only 2% of housing has gone to immigrants over the same time period.

The neoliberal model can push open borders on the grounds of free movement of labour and anti-racist individualism. The system requires an endless flow of desperate workers which can be exploited readily. Immigrants serve as a reserve army of labour which undermines the wages of ‘native’ workers. This holds down wages to ensure high profits for capitalists. In turn creates a division between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ workers which can be used to pit the working-class against itself. The ethnic tensions are a result of economic relations, out of this comes a nativist populism which can be used to attack the standard of living for both ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ workers. This is just another version of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, except it is ethnically charged to provoke nationalist sentiments among the self-identified ‘deserving’. This is to put aside the racism which emanates from the old colonial role of European nations, with Britain this takes the form of anti-black and anti-Asian sentiments typically. But let's focus on the economic foundation for a moment.

The system produces reserve armies of labour in the form of dole wastelands of unemployment and through the import of cheap ‘foreign’ labour. The contraction and expansion of the reserve armies of labour can undermine the wages of workers, even workers in trade unions. The need for a continuous flow of labour collides with the interests of the labour movement which in turn resorts to pitting relatively privileged workers against the unprotected worker. In short it’s a false hope that the limiting of immigration could reinstate the privileges of ‘native’ workers many of which have been decimated over the last 30 years. We should be careful not to sneer at working-class ‘bigotry’. The widespread support for an end to immigration entirely from the working-class will be pandered to when the economic system has gorged itself on cheap labour and can do without another injection for a while. The move by trade unions to protect the interests of the ‘native’ working-class is not entirely “irrational” and “racist”. But it is short-sighted.

It’s when the discourse descends into cleverly glossed language about the problems created by ‘cultural differences’ – e.g. that the Jews bring crime and disease as The Daily Mail once claimed – then it has sunk to xenophobic chauvinism. The same can be said of the calls for British withdrawal from the European Union and the whole debate over the EU in the UK. Withdrawal would only open up Britain to even more rapacious and destructive market forces. If it’s not Brussels it will be Washington! Economic integration actually may offer a solution. The answer could be multinational unions formed to transcend borders to protect the rights, freedoms and standard of living for ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worker alike. This may be the only way to forge bonds of solidarity in the face of such division. We have to fight against the proto-fascist tendencies and nativist movements which seek to pit the working-class against itself. It can’t simply be that the best way to defend the working-class is to defend the free movement of labour under neoliberalism.

It’s not to say that the free movement of people is wrong in itself, rather the particular mode of immigration under conditions of exploitation has a significant downside. It is worth noting that the individual migrant would still be restrained by conditions of subjection, so it could hardly be described as ‘free’ in that sense. We would only describe the working-class as free with reference to negative liberty, the freedom from various forms of constraint. It’s clear that the main reason so many Africans try to get across to Spain or Italy on rafts is that the state of affairs in Africa has been horrendous for a very long time. Only to be captured by the Spanish police or navy and sometimes even killed by Italian fishermen. Similarly we find that the people fleeing genocide in Sudan to Israel have been met with appalling racism, there were race riots in Tel Aviv a couple of months ago and the Likudnik Miri Regev said that the blacks are a “cancer” on the Jewish state.

The Politically Incorrect.

We used to live in a society where you could enjoy the sight of white actors "blacked up" and take in the verbal diarrhea of a meat-head like Bernard Manning. The jokes of the day were at the expense of ethnic minorities, the disabled, gays and women. These were the days before political correctness, which as Stewart Lee says, has been little more than a clumsily institutionalised form of politeness. Today we are a lot more civilised than we were once and political correctness has been conducive to that process. There could never be a political campaign with the slogan "If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Liberal or Labour." Unfortunately, we're in a period of transition in this sense and every so often we have to listen to some idiot like David Starkey about how Enoch Powell was right. There is plenty of ink for criticism of political correctness just as there is for multiculturalism, let alone of immigrants and asylum seekers. But there is an irony here.

The Right routinely attacks political correctness out of a dedication to freedom, which the Left apparently lacks. In this view political correctness is nothing less than an assault on free-speech combined with mollycoddling of the undeserving. You can't fly the English flag because it might offend nor can you shout the n-word - it's political correctness gone mad! And yet we find that the Right has sort new ways to safeguard its agenda with political correctness. The English Defence League has set up divisions of gay, Asian and Jewish members, which it will refer back to as evidence of its modern pluralist stance on race. You'll hear plenty of talk about multi-racialism as opposed to multiculturalism. Sameness with a centre, rather than sameness without one. This fails to notice that there is only one race, a suspicious mistake. The EDL goes as far as to arrange LGBT protests, quietly, and wave Israeli flags at their demonstrations. The organisation is predominantly white but it is open to minorities that can be brought together by a hatred of Muslims.

The supposed devotion to the defence of free-speech on the radical Right conveniently destroys the distinction between private space and public sphere. This is easy to do in a society where we lack a real public sphere today. We lack any meaningful political engagement beyond voting every few years and maybe our involvement in unions at work. So we look to circumvent the blockages to the smooth-running of our busy lives. There is no real time nor need for politeness in a society where the strong are meant to rise and the weak fall. The aims of the radical Right are permissive in that they want to do away with political correctness in order to free us from being polite to our co-workers. Well, it's probably to the archetypal foreigner we've never met that we would reserve our true rudeness to be fair. There are plenty of polite racists in Britain, we should have no illusions about that. And this is the brutal irony, the only means for the radical Right to succeed, in its regeneration of British nationhood, are politically correct.

Now there is the British Freedom Party with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as its Deputy Leader under the much more respectable Paul Weston as Leader. It was founded with the aspiration of being a part of the International Freedom Alliance with Geert Wilders as its head. The Party seeks to protect freedom and democracy from Muslims and the European Union. It was formed as it broke away from the BNP, the group had given up on ethno-nationalism and decided that multi-racialism is here to stay. The real battleground is cultural. The leadership is ex-UKIP and EDL, the body of the organisation is ex-BNP. The gloss is modern and much more sophisticated than the BNP, the Party borrows its logo from the Obama campaign. You can spot black and Asian models in the photos on their website. And yet British Freedom pledges to create a US-style First Amendment to safeguard free-speech, no doubt with the PC brigadiers on the hit-list. Its opposition to immigration is specified as non-Western, e.g. strictly Muslim.

This push towards modernisation came with Nick Griffin in his bid to transform the British National Party into a party of new nationalism. Griffin was keen for the party to shift focus onto Islam with the advantage being that Islam is not a race and then it becomes a matter of culture. The EDL is a major outgrowth of this approach, which has taken on a life of its own. The EDL and the BNP have discovered animal rights when it became a convenient way to call for the banning of halal meat. The grounds being that the animal is subject to barbaric suffering in the method of slaughter, as it isn't stunned before it is killed. The gutter press has joined them in their bid to ban halal and kosher meat, just to make sure they can't be accused of Islamophobia. Of course, what a lot of people don't know is that around 90% of halal meat in Britain is slaughtered with the use of the stun. This level of politics has taken on a sadistic form in France where Bloc Identaire set up soup kitchens where only pork is served in order to exclude Muslims and Jews.

Rest assured that British Freedom is tiny, but it has a pact with the EDL, the BNP has imploded and it seems this new group has better funding. This is another instance where the ultra-political fervour of the radical Right converges with the anti-political purism of libertarianism. It taps into the work ethic and moral outlook of the working-class while it displaces the class struggle as a fight between natives and foreigners. The state as just a mantlepiece of failed experiments, which we would do better to strip down rather than empower it any further. Taxation is just a robbery, a redistribution from the hard-working to the work-shy. This mindset divides the poor between deserving and undeserving, but can always finds fault with the claim of a deserving poor. The European continent is a sinister harbinger of everything from multiculturalism to soft-on-crime justice. This is a freedom-loving nationalism for today's world, deliberately churned out to feed the masses who are desperate for a Hitler without the swastika.

The ultra-Politics of Powell.

Delusions of Nationhood.

The economist Friedrich von Hayek was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and so was Enoch Powell at the same time. Powell would later garner a reputation as a 'maverick' in the Conservative Party. He posed as a libertarian critic of the welfare state, immigration and European integration. Even though Powell voted for Clement Attlee in 1945 out of disgust over the way that the war ended and stood in opposition to immigration controls in the 1950s. As Health Secretary under Macmillan, Powell personally oversaw the employment of the Commonwealth immigrants at the NHS which was understaffed at the time. He was opposed to attempts to restrict employment of immigrants in the public sector on the basis that it was wrong to treat an individual differently on the basis of their origins. Powell was a libertarian and a staunch nationalist who believed in the Empire, which he saw collapse in his own lifetime and he yearned for it to be restored. As MP Powell drew up a plan to reconquer India in 1950, which Churchill dismissed as "madness". He was opposed to US influence, Irish reunification, Communism and European integration out of this belief in the British Empire.

Milton Friedman, a fellow member of the Mont Pelerin Society, praised Enoch Powell as a principled man. Powell stood by monetarism throughout the predominance of Keynesian theory and the widespread practice of social democratic policies throughout the Western world. The sumptuous distance from power that Powell enjoyed later functioned as a plateau from which a shot could be fired at the Establishment in standard populist manner. Of course, the distance served the ultra-right as a comfortable place for indulgence away from any chance of serious reflection on policy and theory. The point of excessive rhetoric for Hayek was to bolster support for the old system reconstituted behind the mythic guise of 'free-market'. The state-planners of social democratic capitalism would be placed by a managerial state-capitalist nexus, whereby the 'competitive order' is maintained. Powellism is no different, it was the standard Tory combination of classical liberalism and cultural conservatism. It parades before the rabble in the proto-populist garb of parochial nostalgia for the imperial glory and unfettered capitalism of the Victorian era.

Enoch Powell became a strident opponent of immigration after Ted Heath became Conservative leader in 1965, with Powell coming third behind him and joined the Shadow Cabinet as Secretary of Defence. Around this time Powell became increasingly critical of immigration and came out in opposition to Sikh men wearing turbans at work. It may have been a bid to position himself for the leadership role in the long-term. It couldn't have been pure opportunism on his part given that it was a position he maintained for the rest of his life. He saw himself as a prophet and it came through in his language, it was the words of Virgil he invoked. But it is clear that the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was timed to put Ted Heath on the spot and shape immigration policy dramatically. He was silent in opposition to the Race Relations act when it was discussed by the Shadow Cabinet just 10 days before he made his notorious speech. If Ted Heath failed to undertake tough policy-decisions on immigration it could have meant another Labour victory in 1970, after which Powell could have challenged Heath and become party leader.

Tried and Tested.

Once in power Ted Heath abruptly castrated Powell as a potential rival with the 1971 Immigration act, which reduced immigration to zero in the early 70s. Heath rejected the suggestion, as Powell had, that the state could manage the economy. The Conservative government embarked on a new approach to the economy, which hoped that the unhindered market would reconstruct British industry and society. Powell had long been a proponent of such an approach and now there was the chance to see it realised. But the Heath government abandoned the approach abruptly as unemployment started to rise and industry was left devastated. The new strategy was a "dash for growth" with the liberalisation of credit and a higher level of public spending. It was for a moment that the British economy boomed before the phenomenon of stagflation emerged as inflation and unemployment to rise simultaneously. The Keynesian orthodoxy was left perplexed and the monetarists found the chance they had been looking for.

Even though Heath had abandoned the market as the instrument to organise society and, much to the chagrin of Powell, saw Britain join the European Economic Community, the Conservative government helped set the conditions for Thatcher - which was heavily influenced by Powellite thinking. The Heath administration had removed exchange controls and opened up the UK economy to the international financial markets, money could now be moved in and out of the country on a whim. The threat to democracy of deregulated finance proved correct as we have witnessed a political stasis in the West since the global economy underwent the first stages of financialisation. It was the stagflation which opened up the space into which monetarism could enter as an alternative to Keynesianism. The failure to manage the economy gave credence to the position that the state could not manage the economy and should not be expected to. The way that the labour movement defeated the Conservative government demonstrated that the working-class had to be broken.

Powell was the consummate precursor to Thatcherism, in many respects, and had good reason to take delight in the collapse of the Heath government. Of course, Powell had a lot in common with Heath and a lot more than he would have admitted. The immigration policy of Heath was crafted to neuter him and the economic doctrine could only be salvaged for Powell as it was aborted. Under successive Labour governments there was an increase in deportations and the introduction of virginity tests on Asian women coming to live with their husbands in Britain. Again, Powell could languish at a distance from power and comfortably refuse any critical self-reflection at all. The Heath administration was not 'pure' in its approach to economic affairs and it sold out to the Europeans at the first chance. Powell could reassure himself that the ideas in his mind had yet to be realised. Then came the rise of Thatcherism and this time it would be different as Thatcher made clear when she said "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to."

No more U-Turns?

This time the government did not back down to the trade unions and instead systematically crushed every union it provoked into confrontation. In many respects Thatcherism was Powellism adjusted to the processes of globalisation and financialisation. The austerity measures of the early 1980s led to violent riots across the country in some of the most deprived and vulnerable communities. The ideological justification for the cuts came out of neoliberal doctrines which Enoch Powell supported and propagated throughout his career. The process by which the state was "rolled back" left the population devastated. It required the shock of the Falklands war to bolster patriotic support for the government. But it also required a means to explain away the social problems that the process generated. This is where Enoch Powell is on the side of the Establishment. The riots just supported his thesis that there would soon be violence and destruction on a huge scale if immigration were not reversed. Conveniently Powell could spout this line and not confront the consequences of the economic policies which he supported.

At the same time, Powell could hide behind the fact that the policies did not go far enough and the social democratic settlement was not obliterated totally. The doors were periodically opened to permit a spurt of immigration in order to boost the supply of labour. The so-called "special relationship" between the US and the UK continued as the US permitted the British retaliation to the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. This was a war fought in America's backyard against an action undertaken by a dictatorship that Washington had supported. The days when the British rebelled against American foreign policy were long gone. Integration with Europe continued steadily as it had since the 1950s, with Thatcher pushing through the single European act - perhaps one of the most integrationist measures. Thatcher was also a member of the Heath Cabinet which took Britain into the European Economic Community in 1973 and campaigned for a Yes vote in the 1975 referendum. Margaret Thatcher was no bastion of 'national sovereignty' rather she never deviated from the traditional Conservative position on European integration which we might describe today in the vein of UKIP as Europhilic as opposed to Eurosceptical.

The Euro was a right-wing project from the very beginning as the European Central Bank has no qualms about the level of unemployment. Yet it is often portrayed as a leftist project by the ilk of Powell for the reason it is a state-system and we are reminded that the state fails to do good even on the rare occasions that it means to. The convenient blind-spot is to the neoliberal role of the state as a managerial system of a 'competitive order' in Hayekian theory. The right-wing opposition to social democratic capitalism was just an opposition to the particular form of the state-corporate nexus. Instead of state-planners looking to provide services and a social safety-net to the poor and most vulnerable, people like Powell were looking for a bureaucracy which would do more for business than society. As convenient as it may be for reactionaries like Powell to dismiss the Left for having ideas, it has to be said that the return to the glory of Victorian Britannia really is utopian. The only acceptable state project is on the side of 'national sovereignty' which has no place for the poor except as a dis-empowered rabble to be exploited.

Holism, White Whines & Multiculturalism.

 The White Whine.

In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered the notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech in which he speculated that "in 15 to 20 years time the black man would have the whip hand over the white man." The speech is often invoked by the radical Right as prophetic of the "failures" of multiculturalism, with it's liberal ideas of tolerance, diversity and equality. So whenever there is a suicide-bombing we are reminded that "Enoch was right" supposedly. Enoch Powell was the first to remind us he was right in 1981 when he saw the riots of Brixton and Toxteth. Coincidentally these riots were the result of the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, which Powell had supported and actually promoted for years. So the calls for voluntary repatriation from Powell provided a cover for the consequences of monetarism, when mass-privatisation and deregulation lead to the devastation of the working-classes there is a need for a scapegoat. For Powell it was clear that the scapegoat had to be black.

Today it is typical to hear about the "multicultural experiment" that began in the 1960s or vaguely after WW2 with a massive influx of immigrants from the West Indies and later India. Actually the tradition of the British Empire was to allow all people loyal to the British monarchy into the country and it was only when the Attlee administration introduced the Nationality Act that this practice became formal. Enoch Powell believed that his speech might put Ted Heath on the spot, a situation from which he might then capitalise on. If the Conservatives failed to defeat Labour in 1970 Powell could have challenged Heath's leadership and then lead the Party on a populist ticket against Wilson in '74. Instead, Ted Heath marginalised Powell and won the General Election. Ted Heath pushed through the Immigration act of 1971, which restricted immigration even further than the Commonwealth Immigrants act of 1962 - which had restricted immigration to people who had been allocated work vouchers - and immigration was almost put to a complete stop.

It is often forgot that Enoch Powell was a monetarist and a proponent of small government, which has made him influential amongst Thatcherites. So he was no fan of Europe, budget deficits and immigration, but Powell was a fan of the privatisation of public services. Powell was born into the lower middle-class, he joined the army and aspired to become the Viceroy of India without serving on the battlefield. After Indian independence Powell drew up a plan to reconquer India. Powell was also a classicist and served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Northern Africa in the Second World War, it was not a heroic service though it was marked by an amusing incident in which he burned his moustache when trying to get a fire going. Though Powell did think he was the right kind of man to rule over millions of black people. He hated Neville Chamberlain for selling Britain out, not for appeasing Hitler specifically, and was always deeply troubled by the decline of Britain as an imperial power. In a nutshell, the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was a white whine and nothing more.

On a regular basis we still hear the white whinging today about immigration, even as we are entering a pensions crisis which may be avoided through immigration. The presupposition of such whinging is that the liberal doctrine of multiculturalism has been imposed by the state through mass-immigration for decades which has undermined British values and led to division in society. Immigration has not been left to flow without a stop for decades, it has been opened up and closed before being opened up a little bit and closed once more. The class divisions in British society are far bigger than 'cultural' divisions created by immigration. As for British values, there were never any to begin with and that is because there has never been a British nation. The notion of multiculturalism has never been a consistent part of policy. But it has merely been talked about an awful lot whilst partially initiated only as far as the tendency of the market is towards pluralism and relativism.

A Community of Communities.

The liberal conception of multiculturalism is insufficient, putting aside cultural relativism as it's disturbing manifestation in South Africa is too often overlooked. Officially apartheid was initiated to separate the multitude of tribes and ethnic groups into Bantustans in order to prevent such groups from "drowning" in white culture. The racist hegemonic nature of multiculturalism was not obfuscated in South Africa, rather it was taken to its most logical conclusion and the African National Congress were labelled "terrorists" by the regime. The cynical liberal wisdom was supplanted with white nationalism and we can see this in Holism as propagated by Jan Smuts. Holism held that the world is composed of wholes, each of which constitute a grand system that can sustain and stabilise itself. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole.

At the time Holism provided a justification for British imperialism and racial segregation. The Empire was the self-organised system; the wholes were the lands colonised along the way. To guarantee the order of such a system it was imperative that the wholes be kept in place. The essence of Smuts' argument was that the blacks have to be kept in their place otherwise the natural order will be disturbed beyond repair, from whence the idea of the Bantustan comes. The liberal vision of multiculturalism offers us a conception of society as a community of communities, each with a distinct identity and set of moral values which is appropriate to that community. Then we find ourselves witnesses to the condemnation of homosexuality in one community and the election of politicians by another community to defend gay rights. In the Netherlands we have seen the gay community rally behind the nationalists against the Muslim community in this way.


Typically there is no mention of the white community in all of this, but that is not because multiculturalism is racist to white people as the reactionaries claim. The notable similarities between liberal multiculturalism and Apartheid proves such a claim absurd. The presupposition of multiculturalism is that the white community is hegemonic, it is the dominant community into which all other communities can be meshed neatly. In multiculturalism it is the neutral framework which protects each culture so that it can thrive in its appropriate way. The Harm Principle is invoked as a way of setting limits to such 'thriving', but even the limits of the Harm Principle are not clear enough and we find ourselves demanding the average Muslim to become a white middle-class liberal. Because liberalism works best when everyone is a fucking liberal! The forces of the market lean towards pluralism, but these same forces require a reaction against such pluralism in order to defend the market as Enoch Powell demonstrated.

There is a genuine need for a common project which is universal in nature, international in scope and radically egalitarian all at once. In Tahrir Square there was a common struggle against Mubarak which united Muslims and Christians. There have also been instances in which Muslim women in traditional dress and lesbian Jews have been brought together in protest against the Israeli government. These are just glimpses of what is possible at a societal level of solidarity. The liberal form of multiculturalism offers a decaffeinated Other, a Muslim community without a Muslim community. The nationalists drive this to it's logical conclusion and call for bans on the veil, halal meat and so on in defence of freedom. To put it bluntly the dichotomy of the debate is shaped by the contradictions of the economic system and the way fascists respond to such contradictions from a managerial perspective. We need to make radical changes if we want to construct the universalist alternative to multiculturalism and fascism.

Angry White Men of the World, Unite!

 

The English Defence League has taken a time out from the campaign of race-baiting against less than 2 million Muslims in Britain, but particularly targeting Asian Muslims, to react to the student demonstrations in their own special way. The leader of the movement is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who goes by the name of "Tommy Robinson", who attacked the students in a speech this week. The former BNP member and football hooligan accused the students of "living off their dad's fucking bank cards" and not knowing what it means to be working-class. During the speech Mr Yaxley-Lennon issued a threat "The next time the students want to protest in our capital, the English Defence League will be there." This is a part of the EDL new approach of ruining left-wing meetings and denouncing trade unions as "communist", the movement is now engaged in the kind of red-baiting that still goes on across the pond.

The EDL seems to adhere to a vicious brand of evolutionary economics, whereby the strong rise and the weak fall, which is a departure from the traditional third-way economics of distributism. This is in line with the "permissive" aspects of post-modern nationalism, which is why they will claim to be defenders of freedom of speech against political-correctness. The kind of individualism the EDL favours is no doubt subordinate to nationhood. It may be a defence of free-speech but it's really about defending "English values", as if freedom was exclusively British. This extreme economic shift began with the BNP supporting the cuts and putting forward proposal of £200 billion in public spending cuts over a year, which would have decimated the welfare state and devastated the working-class. Though as this new strategy has accelerated the decline of the Party, the BNP have resorted to a vague list of cuts it advocates.

Not only would it appear that the EDL are now running with the stance that the BNP abandoned, but the growth of the League is now partly the cause of the decline of the BNP. The electoralist approach of Nick Griffin is perceived as a failure on the far-right and the EDL is a regression to the street level thuggery. As the EDL were originally just another force to collude with, the League have seized onto the "common cause" of stamping out the British Muslim community. From this there is a kind of unity among neo-Nazis and angry white men in general, but now the EDL is seeking to harden it's right-wing base in it's opposition to student demonstrations and trade unions. At the same time, the EDL has sought to allign itself with the Islamophobic wing of the Tea Party. The new line of the League on cuts might strengthen the link to the Tea Party and the American chickenhawks  who have been on board for taking on Islamism for a long time.

In Fascist ideology the class struggle is typically displaced, the EDL are no different in this sense. The idea of an English working-class is posited against an exploitative left-wing elite who have capitulated to radical Islamists. Notice that neo-fascists have yet to replace European Jewry as a scapegoat which appeals to the upper-classes just as much as it does to the working-classes. To the rich the Jew was a communist and to the poor the Jew was a banker, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis externalised the tension between classes onto a "common enemy" and we all know what happened thereafter. Instead the EDL have to stick to the same line as the BNP have been, that "Islamization" is being imposed as part of a conspiracy between a left-wing media and a liberal elite.


The "intellectual" leadership of the EDL is most certainly National Socialist in character, just as the leadership of the BNP has been since it's emergence in 1982, complete with the same old genocidal intentions. The foot soldiers are typically the standard football thug with just enough brain cells to hate everything foreign. But the base of the BNP and the EDL are not consciously fascist, which is the reason for the carefully maintained veneer of railing against a culture and not a race. Cultural chauvinism is something picked up from the New Right, which focuses on the incompatibility of the culture of a "race" and thereby targets the minority indirectly. Just as old-fashioned racism is making a return, race-related harassment and violence has increased in recent times from 13,000 in 1997 to 53,000 in 2005. 35,000 of which consistuted assault. Now we can see Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Hill defend the use of slurs such as "Paki" and "nigger".


The base of the EDL is no different than any other far-right group, it consists mostly of working-class men who have been dispossessed over the last 30 years and have legitimate grievances. The working-class has been neglected and it's grievances have been ignored by the establishment. Unemployment and stagnant wages being a serious concern. The line of the reactionary press is that the markets are efficient and produce enough jobs for all people. From this view the only explanation for unemployment is that the jobless are lazy scum or that their jobs have been "stolen" by foreigners. It's assumed that the system is perfect and has only been disrupted by "meddlesome entities" (e.g. foreigners and scroungers). When actually the case is that the markets are inefficient and don't provide jobs for all. Enter the EDL, who take advantage of a source of untapped rage and acknowledge the grievances by offering ways of restoring order - e.g. cutting off all benefits and putting a stop to Muslim immigration.

The malicious defence of authority and the erosion of welfare liberalism for the sake of "social order" is partly about solidifying a ultra-rightist base, it appeals to the bourgeois sectors of society. Equally it is about the long-term future of the EDL, whether or not it is intended to be. The end of the welfare state does have the potential to enlarge and intensify support for far-right groups, as would a double-dip recession. As it would ensure the kind of conditions that produce and sustain groups like the EDL, e.g. high unemployment, stagnant wages and greater inequality. Though it is possible that this manoeuvre will drive away working-class support for the League, as opposition to the cuts could increase rapidly as demonstrated by the student protests. Hopefully the EDL will find itself outnumbered by going down this route.

Tea, Cake and Lunacy.

Easy Answers.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent recession, the working-classes of Britain and America are still in a crisis of unemployment and stagnant wages supplemented with credit cards and loans. Most notably the Tea Party movement in the US and the English Defence League in Britain which are now forging an alliance in the name of defending Anglo-American values from Islamism. Though the Tea Party and the English Defence League have little in common, except when it comes down to foreign policy, border security, immigration, political-correctness and multiculturalism. Take economics, where the Tea Parties are free-market fundamentalists, the EDL are lacking any official position on economic policy. Just going by the chants of "British jobs for British workers!" it's likely that the EDL do not share the Tea Party's love of privatisation and deregulation.

Interestingly the membership of both groups at first appears quite different, a rabble of gun-toting survivalists and Christian extremists on one side; a mass of football hooligans and neo-fascists on the other. But both movements are of the working-class which has become superfluous in an economy based on finance and banking. Entire industries like manufacturing and mining have gone into decline, which has devastated whole communities. These communities have been reduced to "pockets of deprivation" where the unemployed fester and pensioners rot. People trapped in such "pockets" look for an answer and, naturally, the mass-media has an answer: it's not the economy, it's immigrants, it's single mums etc. The assumption being that the economic system would work perfectly if it were not for some "meddlesome entity" like immigrants, gays etc. When in fact there are systemic problems within the economy, which have nothing to do with any of these groups.


The rage of the working-class is real and based on legitimate grievances going back to the 1970s, when the assault was first made on the welfare state. The reactionary press has focused on directing all of this anger against the government, whether it be the welfare state or immigration policy. The aim being to distract from real sources of problems in our society. The MP expenses scandal was used by the press to direct anger away from the £7 billion that bankers are receiving in bonuses. In fact if the expenses system was scrapped it would likely leave politicians more likely to jump into the pockets of lobbyists. Though serious reforms to the expenses system are needed such reforms are irrelevant, compared to the kind of changes we need to made in banking. It was the financial sector that have dispossessed people of housing, work and even pensions in some cases.



The media loves to direct rage from the grass-roots against government and unions because the state is potentially democratic and the labour movement is democratic. Businesses on the other hand are pure tyranny, there are no elections and the decisions come from the top if you're disobedient you could lose your job. Other favourite scapegoats include single-parent families, anti-social youths, foreigners, ethnic and religious minorities. But never a bank or a corporation, except in cases where it's against one person like Fred Goodwin or Dick Fuld. The media is a lot like a conveyor-belt on which moral panics are fed to the public, keeping a lot of us in a perpetual state of fear and anger. This is so successful because the readership are constantly working to sustain themselves. So they do not have the time to carry out a research project to filter through all of the nonsense, so lots of people just assume it's true what they read in the press.

Know-Nothing Solidarity.

The scapegoats, that were conjured up by the media, for the EDL and the Tea Parties are Muslims and Mexicans. The EDL claims that the government has pandered to Muslims, giving them special treatment and in doing so is trampling on English culture. The Tea Parties believe that Mexican illegal immigrants are responsible for crime, job losses, wage cuts and the decline of health-care. Similar claims are also made by the press in Britain. But this is no different than the "Know-Nothing" movement of the 19th Century who thought that the influx of German and Irish immigrants would turn the US into a "Catholic country". It was even feared that the Pope was trying to destroy American democracy. Of course none of this happened, but the fears were a result of real grievances such as poverty and unemployment. This was the reason that shops would hang signs in windows stating "No dogs, no Irish." Then towards the end of the 19th Century the Chinese became the new scapegoat and  a racial exclusion act was passed in 1892, banning the Chinese from migrating to the US.

Xenophobia, specifically with the Muslim community as a scapegoat, is the primary characteristic of the EDL. The Tea Party, on the other hand, opts for a strain of nationalist populism branded as a fusion of rugged individuality and Puritan family values, all protected by a strong defence and a militarised border. The EDL lacks a platform so the "bridge" between the Tea Parties and the EDL is Pamela Geller, the leader of 'Stop the Islamization of America' - an organisation modelled on 'Stop the Islamification of Europe'. Geller gained salience in the Tea Party after leading the march against the "Ground Zero Mosque". Though it should be noted that this so-called "mosque" is actually an Islamic Cultural Centre open to all. It will have a restaurant and a basketball court as well as prayer rooms for Muslims, Jews and Christians. Not only is it not a mosque it's not even at Ground Zero, it's two blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.

This standard of nonsense is what has accelerated the Tea Party's rise to prominence and influence in America, but also what feeds the racism of the EDL. Some commentators have speculated that the Tea Party could emerge as a third-party in the future. The Tea Parties are becoming a political force in America, due to the financial backing by billionaires like the Koch brothers. Similarly the EDL is being funded by sympathetic elements of the business community in the UK. However, the EDL is lacking the level of support from the media to achieve the prominence that the Tea Party movement has gained. It could be that the alliance forged between the EDL and the Tea Parties is nothing more than short-sighted opportunism. It is unlikely that the relationship between the two movements could be sustained into the long-term future. Especially as the Tea Party may have weakened itself by associating with a movement of football thugs and neo-Nazis.

Historically there have been two faces of anti-capitalism to emerge during recessions, fascism and socialism. The fascists saw liberalism as bougeois a system as communism was a proletarian movement. Instead fascists situated themselves in the "centre" and sought to transcend class boundaries, whilst upholding an authoritarian hierarchy, for the sake of national solidarity. Socialism, on the other hand, seeks the emancipation of the working-class through the end of capitalism. The emergence of extreme right-wing groups like the EDL should be understood in this historical context. Whereas the ideologues of the Tea Party are out to reaffirm capitalism as it was before the crisis, not as the utopian free-market idealised by many of it's activists. The connection between the two groups could be exploited by the Democrats, which is why the Tea Party will probably dump the EDL. We should be relieved as nothing could from an alliance founded under the slogan "Angry White Men of the World, Unite!"