Academic Study of the English Defence League and Its Supporters

I also found this book on the English Defence League on Google Books.

The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics, Simon Winlow and Steve Hall (Policy Press: 2016).

‘The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women cannot connect their declining fortunes and growing frustrations to their true cause. Instead, immigrants are scapegoated and groups like the English Defence League (EDL) emerge. This book is the first to offer an accessible and uncompromising look at the EDL. It aims to alter thinking about working-class politics and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the de-industrialised and decaying towns and cities of England. The rise of the right among the working class, the authors claim, is inextricably connected to the withdrawal of the political left from traditional working-class communities, and the left’s refusal to advance the economic interests of those who have suffered most from neoliberal economic restructuring. Incisive, contentious and boundary-breaking, it uses the voices of men and women who now support far-right political groups to address the total failure of mainstream parliamentary politics and the rising tide of frustration, resentment and anger.’

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Rise_of_the_Right.html?id=wQh3DQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

This is pretty much the same constituency that voted for UKIP – working class Whites who feel that they have been left behind and are no longer represented by the mainstream parties. And it has been demonstrated that the extreme right can be successfully combated with proper, socialist policies that bring the working class together. When Blairite Margaret Hodge was an MP, she did so little campaigning against them, that when the BNP got seven members elected to Tower Hamlets council their gruppenfuhrer, Derek Beacon, sent her a bouquet of flowers. But this was later reversed with a change of MP, I believe, who did campaign for improving working class conditions and Beacon and squadrists were all voted out.

There’s a warning there for Keir Starmer. If he continues Blair’s policies of concentrating on Tory swing voters at the expense of the working class, while pursuing the identity of politics of race, he will alienate members of the White working class. I don’t know if the EDL are still going. I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while, but certainly Reclaim, Reform and David Kurten’s Heritage party are eager for recruits.

If we want to stop the far right, we need proper socialist, working class politics that unites Blacks, Whites and Asians together.

Simon Webb Has Written a Book on British Concentration Camps

Readers of this blog will be well aware that I have extremely mixed views about Simon Webb and History Debunked. I don’t share his High Toryism, heading into the ideological territory of parties like Reform, Reclaim or Patriotic Alternative, for example. I particularly reject his views that the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is biologically determined, and that there is a further biological difference in IQ between Whites and Asians. Some of what he’s written about African history is just plain wrong, such as the statement that before the White man arrived, Black Africa was stuck in the Bronze Age. Not true – the Bantu cultures spread throughout Africa were very firmly Iron Age, as were the Kordofanian and Nilotic peoples and those of Ethiopia. His videos about the decline of South Africa after the end of apartheid and Zimbabwe after it passed to Black majority rule and the horrific dictatorship of Mugabe seem to be based on a nostalgia for White colonial rule.

But sometimes he also says something interesting and important. Looking through his website, there’s a piece on the non-fiction books he has written. Three are mentioned – one on the Suffragette Bombers, subtitled ‘Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists’, another on 1919; Britain’s Year of Revolution, which probably explains why he disputes the memorialization of Philip Wootton in Liverpool as an innocent victim of lynching, rather than a violent thug. But it’s the third that interests me here. This is British Concentration Camps: A Brief History from 1900-1975, published by Pen & Sword like his other books. He describes this book thus:

‘For many of us, the very expression ‘Concentration Camp’ is inextricably linked to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. The idea of British concentration camps is a strange and unsettling one. It was however the British, rather than the Germans, who were the chief driving force behind the development and use of concentration camps in the Twentieth Century. The operation by the British army of concentration camps during the Boer War led to the deaths of tens of thousands of children from starvation and disease. More recently, slave-labourers confined in a nationwide network of camps played an integral role in Britain’s post-war prosperity. In 1947, a quarter of the country’s agricultural workforce were prisoners in labour camps. Not only did the British government run their own concentration camps, they willingly acquiesced in the setting up of such establishments in the United Kingdom by other countries. During and after the Second World War, the Polish government-in-exile maintained a number of camps in Scotland where Jews, communists and homosexuals were imprisoned and sometimes killed. This book tells the terrible story of Britain’s involvement in the use of concentration camps, which did not finally end until the last political prisoners being held behind barbed wire in the United Kingdom were released in 1975. From England to Cyprus, Scotland to Malaya, Kenya to Northern Ireland; British Concentration Camps; A Brief History from 1900 to 1975 details some of the most shocking and least known events in British history.’

This looks like solid scholarship, and one those of us on the left can get behind. One of the female commenters on this blog years ago, a very staunch socialist, sent me information about the forced labour camps set up by the Labour party in the 1930s supposedly to train unemployed workers into the habit of working again. This was relevant because it was based on the same squalid attitude as Blair’s ‘welfare to work’ policy, in which the unemployed were only to be given their dole if they did unpaid work for various companies, including charities like Tomorrow’s People, and the big supermarkets. The declassification of government documents a few years ago following a court case brought by the victims of the brutal methods Britain used to suppress the Mao Mao in Kenya has resulted in another book about the concentration camps set up by Britain there, Africa’s Secret Gulags. Some of this book sounds very similar to John Newsinger’s book about the horrors committed under British imperialism, The Blood Never Dried. Newsinger is very much a man of the left, but his book also describes the atrocities committed by Britain when attempting to quell the independence forces of Britain’s former colonies. I did not know, however, about the concentration camps set up north of the border by the Polish government in exile to persecute its political enemies, including the same people targeted by the Nazis, Jews and gays.

The book and his research on this shocking topic clearly impressed others on the left. In the journalism section on his website there’s an article he wrote about it for Jacobin, a left-wing journal. He’s also written a fourth book, on the Barbary pirates, but this isn’t mentioned on his website.

In writing the book on British concentration camps, Webb’s clearly done something that can be supported by the left in bringing to light the way the British state and its allies have used forced labour and similar camps to exert its control in the home country and across its colonies. Brutal methods that should concern anyone who believes in democracy, human rights and humane government.

See: https://www.simon-webb.com/non-fiction-books.html

Their Race Is Irrelevant: All the Tory Leadership Candidate Are Rich, Public School and Anti-Working Class

Following Johnson’s un-resignation, in which he resigned but decided to hang on as caretake prime minister until his fellow robber barons and profiteers elect a new leader, a number of leading Tories have thrown their hats into the ring in the hope of being his successor. Very many of them aren’t White – Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch and so. The titles of various YouTube videos have proclaimed that this is the most diverse Tory leadership election every. Simon Webb of History Debunked has taken a more racially pessimistic view. He posted a video stating that inexorably power is moving away from the White British. Webb’s views of these events, and his general opposition to multiculturalism and non-White immigration, seems to come partly from the prediction that by the middle of this century, Whites will be a minority in Britain. Such demographic predictions of Whites becoming minorities in their own countries is an integral part of the Great Replacement conspiracy cooked up in 2012 by a French rightist. It has, however, a long prehistory before that in the conspiracy theory of the British and American Nazi fringe that the Jews are behind non-White immigration, which they’re using to destroy the White race. This is just bilge, but the demographic prediction of Blacks and non-Whites becoming the majority in Britain came not from any bug-eyed Nazi, but were, to my recollection, published in the Observer in 2002. Webb clearly sees the ethnic minority Tory candidates in this light, as the beginning of Black rule as the White British dwindle into minority status.

Except that, colour excepted, all of the Black and Asian Tory leadership candidates are bog-standard and typical of their elite class and party. They are all, or nearly all, public school boys and girls, who believe in free trade, privatisation, destroying the welfare state, privatising the NHS, smashing the unions and generally making life miserable for working people in the name of generating big profits for their class. And despite their colour, they are all anti-immigration. Priti Patel is notorious for the harshness of her immigration policies. He parents were Ugandan Asians, who were expelled by the country’s then brutal, racist dictator, Idi Amin. It’s been said that if this happened today, then Patel would have had them rounded up for deportation. Kemi Badenoch is a Black woman, who has sparred with Diane Abbott and other Black Labour politicos about how racist this country is or is not. But she has declared herself to be a supporter of small government. Which means more privatisation, including NHS privatisation, and more cuts to the welfare state. Rishi Sunak is being hailed by the right-wing press as the supporter of free trade which Britain needs. So, more deregulation and privatisation of the type that wrecked the economy in the first place. And it has struck me that if Sunak was White, he’d be typical of the general appearance of some of the ex-public schoolboys that now haunt the corridors of power. The Triggernometry vloggers said it all in a recent text message that asked if it would really be a win for diversity if all the Tory candidates were rich and public school, so long as they were people of colour.

I suspect that we may well have the first Black or Asian Prime Minister under the Tories, but this won’t do anything for the mass of Blacks and Asians in Britain, in the same way that Thatcher was our first female prime minister, who did precious little for ordinary women. Whatever their ethnicity, none of the Tory candidates have any interest in working exclusively or even partly for their racial group’s benefit, unlike Labour politicians like Abbott and Lammy. And this will probably mean that they’ll find it easier to be accepted. They have exactly the same worldview as the White Tory politicos and supporters. Abbott and Lammy, on the other hand, would put many White voters off because of their focus on working for the Black community. I don’t doubt that many White voters would fear that they really want to flood the country with non-White immigrants and harshly discriminate against Whites under the guise of combating racism.

However positively the number of Black and Asian Tory leadership candidates are viewed, I do wonder how this is going to affect right-wing groups like the New Culture Forum. This group shares the same racial views as Simon Webb, and indeed they even had him interviewed in one of their videos. But one of the Tories’ strategies to attack Labour has been to claim that the Labour party is deliberately ignoring and even discriminating against the White working class. In one video they interviewed Michael Collins, the author of the Demonization of the White Working Class and a more recent video from the Forum has stated this more broadly. It begins with a clip of one Labour politician at one conference stating that he’s upset that there are too many White people in the hall and speaking. But this strategy of playing on the feelings of some Whites that they’re being ignored and vilified by a Labour party determined to promote immigrants and ethnic minorities are their expense is going to be complicated if there’s a Black or Asian Tory prime minister doing precisely the same thing. One possible outcome of this is that politics moves even further to the right as the same White demographic that supported UKIP leaves the Tories to support the fringe populist parties Reclaim or Reform.

Whatever the intentions of the Tory party and the cultural homogeneity of its leaders as the typical rich children of privilege, we could see a rise in racism as some Whites see the cuts and privatisations not in class terms, but racial.

This can be fought by the Labour party going back to stressing its working class origins and policies, for all working people, whether White, Black, or Brown.

But it ain’t going to happen under Starmer.