GB News, according to one Labour politicians, has two political biases – right and far right. It has acted as a kind of broadcasting retirement home for Tory politicos, like Jacob Rees-Mogg. At one point there were six of the blaggards on the channel, all while it was assuring Ofcom that it really wasn’t, politically biased. Pull the other one, as they say. A few days ago they went far right when their man, and I use the word loosely, Dan Wooton, interviewed Nick Tenconi.
Who he?, as Private Eye would put it.
Nick Tenconi is the current head of UKIP. He was one of the patriots who went on the Unite the Kingdom March to be harangued by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. I think that many of those who went were simply ordinary, genuinely patriotic Brits worried about immigration and feeling that Britain and her civilisation is under attack. But not necessarily racists or Fascists. The former head of the Council for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, was there, and talked about his impressions of it on Sky News. He just said they were the kind of people you’d meet in country pubs and in the queue for the gents at football matches. And there were several Black marchers. I have seen videos in which Black patriots have said that they emigrated to England because it was English, and they didn’t want the White English to become a minority. One of the Black women, actually I think she was mixed race, said that her grandfather came here from South Africa. Nobody helped him, but he rose by his own efforts and she was grateful for the opportunities Britain had given her family. So are a lot of people of colour, who are getting sick of the grievance politics of the Labour party. At the last election 1 million of them went off and voted Tory. There ‘s a similar ‘Blaxodus’ going on in America, with prosperous, self-reliant Blacks leaving the Democrats, who they fear are using welfare policies to keep them ‘on the reservation’ as a subservient client group. These are the same fears of many of the people of colour who defected to the Tories. They are afraid that Labour’s affirmative action policies not only ignore how some of them are doing well, much better than the White population in some demographics, but will be used to keep them down.
But in Tenconi’s case, I think you can call him ‘fascistic’, if not actually fascist.
I’ve an interest in Fascism, and considerable sympathy for the corporate state, in which parliament is set up as a chamber of corporations, each corporation including the mangers’ organisations and trade unions for various of sectors of industry, and which claimed to allow the ‘producers’ to manage the economy. In actuality, it acted as a rubber stamp for whatever il Duce wanted to do at the time. But I do feel we need and industrial chamber to represent working people, who have been excluded from proper representation by the political parties whose MPs are overwhelmingly millionaires, company directors and senior management. As I’ve made clear on this blog, I despise the totalitarianism, the police state, the brutality, the lawlessness, the racism and anti-Semitism,, the militarism and imperialism of Fascism everything that made real Fascism the violent, repulsive dictatorship it was.
Tenconi doesn’t wear a black shirt, but he certainly hated the same things they hated. He announced that they were against Islamism, communism, socialism and liberalism. Behind every liberal there was a socialist, behind every socialist there was a communist, and the commies were doing deals with the Islamists. He was also against the Far Right, which meant the ethnonationalists and the BNP. If you leave out Islam, and substitute ‘Jews’, this is basically the same as the Fascists and Nazis. They also hated liberalism and democracy, as well as socialism and communism. However, Italian Fascism before it fell in with Hitler and his grotesques, wasn’t racist. It was militantly nationalist, but many members were Jews because it respected them as fellow Italians in contrast to the previous states that had been swallowed up and incorporated into the new Italy by Garibaldi and Cavour. As regards Islam, several people on the Fascist right, including one of Duce’s mistresses, were strongly impressed by Sufism. I think the mistress even converted.
Now I agree that Islamism is a threat, though not Muslims, and that the people screaming hatred for ‘man-made law’ and demanding sharia rule ought to be treated as fascists because of the anti-democratic, religious supremacist nature of their beliefs. They should be treated exactly the same as Christian clerical fascists. Whom Tenconi comes very close to when he started going on about how he wanted a band of ‘Christian knights to defend Christianity’.
This last reminded me very strongly of an interview with the head of the BNP from the 70s, who said that they were looking for ‘robust young men who would defend the country from communism’.
And, er, where are these communists? They aren’t a mass party, and haven’t ever been one. The best they did at a general election was in the 1970s, perhaps 75 or 77, when things really were falling about and so the final fall of capitalism could look credible. But that was the best they did. I think the British Communist party collapsed with the general collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 80s. The Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party has survived, now rebranded as the Socialist Party, and are still holding public meetings and marching on protests. But they are a small group, and although I think they may well have been the largest of the Marxist grouplets, they’re nowhere near a mainstream party or a threat to democracy. Where Marxism is a problem, it’s in the universities and the education system with genuinely far-left lecturers and teachers promoting Critical Race Theory, racial awareness directed at teaching Whites they are unfairly privileged and should feel guilty about their ancestors’ treatment of Black and certain forms of extremist feminism which have the same attitude towards White men. Although it also needs to be said that the feminist lecturers who taught me at UWE were very clear on separating feminism from misandry. I certainly cannot accuse them of promoting hatred of men, or treating me and the other guys differently from the women.
As for socialists, we need socialism more than ever. It is a great pity that Corbin’s YourParty is now imploding. We need charismatic politicians to stand up for the welfare state, the NHS, proper nationalised industries and trade unions that genuinely represent working men and women, not Starmerist neoliberalism. Britain and England have a very strong, native tradition of working class radical activism, including the Levellers and Diggers of the British Civil War, Tom Paine and the Corresponding Societies who supported the French Revolution, the Utopian Socialist Robert Owen, the Chartists, the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party as well as Hyndeman’s Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Not to mention the Victorian critic, John Ruskin et al. Many of the members of the British Labour party were strongly Christian. Years ago a book appeared about what the working class had read throughout history. In the 1920s the favourite reading of Welsh Labour members, no doubt reflecting their Methodist, chapel background, was the Bible. This has been considerably weakened through secularisation and the social liberalism that came in with the ’60s, but it’s still there. CND was led by a Roman Catholic monsignor, Bruce Kent, before he left the Church, or was defrocked, and people I know who attended the peace marches told me it included Franciscan friars. That was forty years ago, but I think the tradition still persists.
And there is a real difference between a traditional Old Labour socialist, who wants a mixed economy but also believes in democracy, loathes any kind of dictatorship and believes powerfully in free speech. The sort of people who gave Khrushchev such a rough ride over the maltreatment of democratic socialists in the USSR when he came to England that he got on better with the Tories. Yes, he said ‘If I was British, I would have been a Conservative.’
Socialism, anti-British? I think not!
I don’t believe that the people who marched for Unite the Kingdom were Fascists. Real Fascism has never been popular in the UK. Researchers into groups like the BNP, NF and other thugs have reported that these groups have a very high membership turnover, and their actual core membership is tiny, perhaps only 200 or so. I think most of their members joined simply because they want an end to immigration and ethnic minorities out. This is deeply unpleasant, but they weren’t interested in overthrowing the state and establishing a racist, Aryan dictatorship. Nor in having their ears bent by Nick Griffin, John Tyndale or whoever about nationalist ideology. But rightists like Tenconi, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and the others really don’t represent the working class.
If they get their way, they will privatise the NHS, destroy whatever’s left of the welfare state, and still retain neoliberalism, even as they rail against the ‘globalists’. They will also make our own corrupt political system even worse as dark money and undisclosed corporate donations talk, and bullsh*t walks.
For these reasons, if for no other, they must be stopped.
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