Tuesday, June 09, 2009

15%

A pretty impressive Labour performance in the EU elections. As Ross put it :

You have to admire Labour's strategic genius, they knew that there would be a shift in public opinion to minor parties, and so they have become a minor party in order to capitalise on this.
It looks as though the PLP is going to hold on tight to Nurse, although what they fear finding that's worse then 15% is hard to imagine.

The rebels admitted that they had faced opposition to their revolt from MPs who saw no alternative leader coming forward, and fears that a new leader would have to stage an early election, at which Labour would be crushed.
It looks as if, as so often, H.P Lovecraft had the words for it :

"There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom."


And while the anti-BNP effort got higher, it turns out not to have been quite enough. The BNP now have their noses in the mighty Euro-trough. Mr Griffin and a chap called Andrew Brons were elected. If I were trying to scrap the 'Nazi' tag I'm not sure I'd want to run a candidate who apparently actually was a menber of a National Socialist group, even if it was a long time ago. And apparently the chap's only been a party member for four years. Perhaps Mr Griffin feels that a fellow-zealot is more likely to devote the hefty salary and expenses to the Cause rather than personal enrichment.

For commentators like Laban, who consider mass immigration with no attempt at integration to be an exceptionally dangerous development, one which is likely to transform the uniquely civilised and peaceful political culture of the last 300-odd years into something like Fiji at best, Bosnia at worst, what we're seeing is an inevitable consequence thereof :

" ... as long as the demographics all point one way, as long as continuing immigration (and continuing emigration of natives) continue to change the cultural landscape, above all as long as our white, wealthy liberal elite refuse to even think about, let alone face honestly, some of the less palatable issues raised by a multicultural society (being themselves insulated from these issues by their wealth) - then we will see politics in the UK, and particularly in England - split upon racial lines. That is what has happened everywhere else in the world where a nation has major ethnic divisions - and while I love the English, I can't see them being immune - they're not THAT special."
But, you may say, the BNP didn't actually get many more votes this time round than they did in 2004 ? Where's this inevitable split in politics ?

Well, the BNP wasn't the only 'stop immigration now' party contesting the elections. According to Harry's Place :

The parties that focused highly on immigration - UKIP, BNP, English Democrats, United Kingdom First - received a combined 3,795,632 votes.

When that many choose to vote for anti-immigration parties, it should be clear that immigration is an issue that needs addressing.
As someone who thinks mass immigration is dangerous but doesn't hate Jews or love Odin, it's good news that other parties are carrying the torch. The three main parties are all pro-immigration - Labour because they love the taxes and the client voters, Tories because they love the cheap labour, Lib Dims for a mixture of the two. The Greens would open the borders altogether if their activists had their way - a great many of the permanent student or idiot self-hating left have moved there from the Labour party.

UKIP have been given an easy ride in the media, as the safety-valve option approved by our rulers. Their large number of MEPs last time out have been pretty invisible, save Mr Farage's savaging of GB a few months back, and I had been wondering if their voters last time round would split between the BNP on one side and Cameron's revived Tories on the other. But the expenses scandal cut down on the number of defectors to the Tories, and the unprecedented anti-BNP campaign, while not sufficient to prevent them winning seats, coupled with the undoubted damage which will have been done when their entire membership's names, addresses and contact details were put on the web, kept the defector rate low. Oh, and they magically found an ex-Tory sugar daddy to fund them, just before the elections.

You'd almost think there'd been a tacit agreement to cut UKIP some slack. They have plenty of unreconstructed old-style Tory characters with decidedly un-PC views on the Brits and immigration (not to mention cleaning behind the fridge), there have been cases of financial impropriety and expenses fraud. Yet no one in the big three parties or the media has turned their guns on them. Only Caroline Lucas of the pro-immigration Green Party switched on the abuse on 28th May's Question Time, with thinly-veiled insinuations of racism directed at Farage. Hasn't she read the script ? Even the SWP have :

UKIP candidates came to join the protesters, (against the BNP's Nick Griffin- LT) and were met with fierce accusations of racism from several anti fascists. A SWP member and UNISON steward intervened, arguing that it was not the time to be exposing UKIP.
There can be no doubt that if the BNP didn't exist, all the fire now directed at them woul be incoming on UKIP. The pro-immigration Left hate anti-immigration Tories just as much as they hate the BNP. But for the duration, the lefties have buried the hatreds and donned the "butchers apron" with everyone else. The Labour, Tory and BNP leaflets through my door all featured the Union Flag. We've seen the bizarre sight of far-left bloggers linking to the Tories - who they'd usually be accusing of being racists - or citing Churchill as the sort of decent chap who'd never vote BNP rather than his usual depiction as a racist who told the troops to shoot miners.

Instead, the BNP are a diversion and shield - perhaps even a necessary one - to the non-BNP parties wishing to stop mass immigration. Like Sinn Fein's twin-track strategy of the Armalite and the ballot box, the stoppers have the jackboot on one foot and the comfy tartan slipper on the other.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think one problem that pro-immigration types have is that they can only approach the issue in one way. They only have one argument. One priority outweighs all other considerations: not being seen as a racist.

Thats the only thing thats important to them. There is nothing that cannot be sacrificed to that end. Education, democracy, the rule of law, social cohesion etc etc

JuliaM said...

"Yet no one in the big three parties or the media has turned their guns on them."

Step forward, Sheila Gunn....

Shlomo said...

Excellent post, Laban.

If only the assorted right-of-centre (at least on non-economic issues) columnists and bloggers of this world could unite and inaugurate a brave new party where freedom of speech and anti-authoritarianism comprised the constitution.

PS. what happened to the Libertarians?

PPS. I will keep raising the issue amongst the 'progressives' at Harry's and elsewhere, not least of all because I think the shallow hypocrisy is damaging the left: organisations constituted along race and skin colour lines such as the NBPA are wrong.

All the best to you...

moriarty said...

I think that one reason that UKIP would be given an easy ride by the left at the moment is that they're generally seen as in competition for the tory vote, so are useful for labour. Which is really why labour hate the BNP so much I suspect, because they are seen to take 'labour's' votes.

There was a discussion on R4 last night about the popularity of the BNP, after deciding that it was because the main parties were 'out of touch' from many voters and ignoring voter concern about mass immigration, the conclusion seemed to be that what was really needed was to 'educate' voters into seeing why immigration was really a Good Thing. More of the same attitude that has hasn't worked for them already in other words.

Thud said...

I like the Odin comment...good stuff.

dearieme said...

Near enough, everyone is a racist in some defensible meaning of that term. It's just that nearly everyone denies it in speech - but not, of course, in action.

What should be opposed is racist misbehaviour - because it is misbehaviour. The idea that someone who remarks, say, that the Dutch are taller than the Japanese (and that the cause is doubtless in part genetic) is therefore morally equivalent to a foam-flecked mass murderer like Hitler is just repulsively stupid and evil.

Stan said...

"The Greens would open the borders altogether if their activists had their way - a great many of the permanent student or idiot self-hating left have moved there from the Labour party."

It's remarkable that such an extreme party gets so much sympathy. We talk about the BNP being racist, but how much more racist can you be than to vote for a party that hates the human race! If the Greens ever get their way then what few of us remain on this earth will be living in mud huts and subsisting on a diet of dirt and grass.

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting, would it not, if the BNP were to set up an even nastier, scarier party to run interference for them. They could call it the BĂȘte Noire Party (although I can see immediate problems with this).

Come to think of it, I seem to recall some kind of schism in the BNP a few months back...

Mark said...

The 'easy ride' UKIP were apparently given stopped abruptly when the polls were closed, if the sneering by Times leader writer Oliver Kamm is anything to go by-

http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/06/the-price-of-failure.html

They are now apparently 'scarcely more reputable' than the BNP !

Anonymous said...

IIRC the BNP is the result of a schism a while back where the obsessive, irreconcilable anti-semites whose worldview revolved wholly around the Great Jewish Conspiracy went to (or stayed with) the National Front and stayed on the margin, whilst those who were variously either prepared to drop the open Jewish obsession (and other generally Brit-voter-repelling relics of German national socialism) for pragmatic reasons or never possessed said obsession in the first place went on to become the modern BNP.

Rob said...

Oliver Kamm is a clever chap who has the flaw often associated with clever people - he thinks everyone else is stupid. To group UKIP and the BNP together with barely the most lethargic of caveats is just short-sighted arrogance from a person who is already comfortably wedged into the cosy consensus of the political class.

Anonymous said...

Our elites ARE attempting to integrate the newcomers. That does not make things ok. It makes things worse.

Why should we natives have the integration of foreigners forced upon us? Why should we not be allowed freedom of association? Why should be not be allowed to preserve ourselves - I'm talking about our physical being, not abstractions such as 'values' and 'culture - in our own homeland.

Is this blog ever going to move out of its conservative rut and reach the understanding that 'integration' is something we natives should be OPPOSING.

Homophobic Horse said...

Integration is a weasel word. It means living in Britain and working within it's legal confines. I.e. not openly demanding a sharia state (even if you live in one informally anyway).

Homophobic Horse said...

Japan will avoid our terrible future.

WHY IS THIS?

It's immigration policy is conscious of the ontological category of ethnicity. Japan can accurately frame it's interests accordingly.

The immigration apologists in the west are--to the very last man--cranks and bigots of the worst kind.

Call me Infidel said...

Whenever I hear the word 'progressive politics' I reach for my revolver.

A great post Laban and some good comments. We are reaching the tipping point in the UK where unrest caused by mass immigration is no longer something the MPs and the media can no longer disguise. I doubt we have seen the last of the BNP and the big three will surrender more ground to the extremist unless they face up to the issue.

moriarty said...

Our elites ARE attempting to integrate the newcomers...

I think that it is more true to say that they are ignoring the immigrants and trying to intigrate *us*.

Anonymous said...

It is surprising who Griffin helps lift to prominence within the world of the BNP.

Mark Collett, Lee Barnes and now Andrew Brons. The latter getting a shade under 10% of the vote in Yorkshire and Humberside, but who wouldn't have been a candidate without Griffin's approval.

All of them would have felt very at home in the Strasserite wing of the Nazi Party. The key to getting ahead in Griffin's BNP is therefore to hold such views, but be able to keep a lid on them in public.

BNP-Curious said...

Anonymous 9:15 AM

"Mark Collett, Lee Barnes and now Andrew Brons...All of them would have felt very at home in the Strasserite wing of the Nazi Party."

Interesting.

A quick google and a bit of reading tells me that the Strasser brothers were eventually opposed to Hitler. One of them being murdered in the night of the long knives (the end of the Strasserite wing of the Nazis?)and the other being forced into exile.

So, it seems that when the antifash bang on about Hitler, regarding the BNP they are being very wide of the mark and the evils that the Nazis are associated with happened after the Strasserite wing was purged.

Its all quite intriguing.

Anonymous said...

Guess it's like Stalin having Trotsky murdered.

Trotskyites used to moan about how horrible Stalin was, but would they have been any different if they'd got their licks in first? Still would have amounted to a dicatorship with 'class enemies' being worked to death in gulags.

Doubtless the same holds true with the Strasserites.

Homophobic Horse said...

Though Griffin seems to have the knack for scoring hits against the Liberal establishment, and he grasps the issues facing Britain, I don't he is the right person to deal with them. I don't think the BNP possess the heroic qualities required.

BNP-Curious said...

Anonymous 1:19 PM

Nice analogy with Stalin and Trotsky.

Still, if the BNP were running Britain it doesn't necessarily follow that certain people will end up on cattle trucks to death camps in darkest Powys. I think Laban himself has made this point.

I imagine that it actually wouldn't be very interesting at all. If it did get interesting I'm sure we'd end up being the next Serbia with the USA dropping bombs on us from a great height for being wronguns.

Some questions:

1, How do you know they are Strasserites?

2, What would a Strasserite Government look like in terms of policy?

Anonymous said...

I remember reading publications like 'Nationalism Today' and 'New Nation' in the early and mid-1980s.

The Strasser brothers were mentioned and quoted approvingly, and it seemed to be part and parcel of the 'political soldier' outlook which was then prevalent among the Young Turks of the NF, Griffin among them.

This was contrasted with the more stuffy style of John Tyndall.

What a BNP government would be like is a purely hypothetical question, as the odds of that happening are completely miniscule. They seem a rather cult-like organisation. I understand that there are voting and non-voting members, and the voting members have to undergo 'political education' which is overseen by Arthur Kemp, whose book 'March of the Titans' can be read online. It has a chapter in which the inconvenient episode of Nazi Germany is addressed in a slimy and disingenuous way.

I'm rather more worried about the prospect of another Labour government, to be honest.