Backlash to Judges’ Brexit Ruling Reveals Right-Wing Racism and Authoritarianism

Last week the Guyanese-born investment banker, Gina Miller, succeeded in her legal action to force the government to open up the decision on the start of the Brexit process to the rest of parliament. Three judges ruled in her favour, and the result has been a tide of right-wing hatred and vilification directed against the lady herself and the judges, who made the ruling. And Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, has come out of the woodwork once more promising to lead a march against the decision.

Mike in his article on the original decision reports personal threats Miller received, including rape, and comments that she should ‘f*** off’ back to her own country, and people telling her that Brits were sick of foreigners telling them what to do. She has also been denounced as a traitor to democracy.

Miller herself hit back at her critics and those, who insulted and threatened her. Mike quotes the press report on this incident, in which she told the International Business Times

“Yes there has been a deluge of hatred and anger but this is because people were lied to in respect to the EU referendum, and because (of) irresponsible figures like Farage and tabloid media who lack any understanding of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law that is the bedrock of our civil society”.

See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/11/04/sad-state-of-britain-someone-stands-up-for-democracy-so-she-gets-racist-abuse/

The reaction of part of the Tory right, and the Daily Mail and Express has been hysterical. On the Beeb’s Question Time, Sajid Javid, who Private Eye suggested looks like The Claw, one of the villains from one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet SF series, went over the top, exclaiming that the ruling was an attempt ‘to thwart the will of the British people’.

The Express, never known for anything like statesmanlike restraint and diplomacy, declared that “Today this country faces a crisis as grave as anything since the dark days when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches.”

See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/11/04/irrational-responses-to-brexit-high-court-ruling/

Not to be outdone in the ultra-patriotism stakes, the Daily Mail put photos of the three judges on its front page along with the screaming headline ‘Enemies of the People’. As Mike, Tom Pride and many others have pointed out, the Heil is never very far from Nazism, and this was another instance where the rag’s headline almost exactly reproduced the propaganda and stance of the Nazi party. The cartoonist Gary Barker put up the image of the Heil’s front page, along with a similar page from one the Nazis’ newspapers, denouncing a line of judges as ‘Volksverrater’. Barker translates this as ‘Enemies of the People: Get Out of the Way of the German People’s Will’. This isn’t quite right. A more literal translation would be ‘Betrayers of the People’ or ‘Race Traitors’ – the German word volk has an ethnic connotation, which the word ‘people’ doesn’t have. The sentence underneath reads something like ‘shoved out of the German racial community’. That’s roughly what the German Volksgemeinschaft means, rather than ‘common people’s will’. Volksgemeinschaft was obviously one of the key planks of Nazi domestic ideology. I don’t know where Barker got the page from, but it looks very much like the Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer. On its own, Sturmer just means an impetuous fellow. The Nazi newspaper of the same name is infamous as the vehicle through which the Nazis, under the rag’s editor, Julius Streicher, demonised the Jews. Back in the 1980s the goose-steppers in the BNP or NF decided to launch their own version, The Stormer, which was similarly intended to spread hate against Jews and non-Whites. Mike in the title of his article on this appalling headline asks if it is proof that the UK is shifting towards Nazism. I’d say that it was. English doesn’t quite have a word for ‘racial community’ like the Nazis’ Volksgemeinschaft, but the ideology is certainly there on the Tory xenophobic right. Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Devon, who’d like to privatise the NHS, has raved in his column on the Telegraph blogs about ‘the Anglosphere’, meaning the English-speaking world, and there certainly is a tendency in the American Libertarian Right to view this in racial terms. White Anglo-Saxons are inclined towards free trade and small government, according to them, while the Irish and Continental peoples are genetically determined to be the enemies of freedom favouring Socialism and big government. This is despite the fact that Adam Smith based his views on free trade as the foundation of the ‘Wealth of Nations’ on those of the French physiocrats. And the hostility of the Heil and Express to non-White immigration is notorious.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/11/06/is-this-proof-that-uk-politics-is-shifting-towards-nazism/

As for the Fuhrage’s declared intention to lead a mass demonstration of 100,000 outside the high court to protest against the judges’ ruling, Mike states in the title of his piece on it that ‘someone should tell Nigel Farage this is the UK, not Nuremberg’.

A mass rally to oppose democracy? Someone should tell Nigel Farage this is the UK, not Nuremberg

Mike has defended the democratic basis of the judges’ decision, pointing out that far from being traitors to democracy, the judges have upheld it. Their decision does not affect the Brexit decision, which has been settled by the referendum. It does, however, prevent Theresa May and her cabinet from deciding how it is to be implemented solely by herself, and then presenting it to the rest of us as a fait accompli. This, Mike quite rightly points out, would be despotic. He rebuts the Javid’s stupid comment by making the point that the judges merely upheld the sovereignty of parliament, which is enshrined by law. He shows how ridiculous it is to compare their lordships’ decision with the threat of Nazi invasion, as well as the homophobia in the Express’s article, which attacked one of the judges for being ‘openly gay’. As if the man’s sexuality had anything to do with the judicial soundness of his decision. And he rightly quotes the Angry Yorkshireman on the ridiculous bigotry and hypocrisy of the Heil’s attitude, who wrote:

“Thus anyone who doesn’t agree that Theresa May should be allowed to behave like a dictator by bypassing democratic accountability and making up the law as she goes along is an ‘enemy of the people’ (as decided by a bunch of right-wing hacks working for a billionaire sociopath who lives in Monaco to avoid paying British taxes!).”

The ranting of the Tory ‘Leave’ campaign on this shows the fundamental racism and authoritarianism which runs all the way through them. The Tory right are deeply undemocratic. They would far prefer that the issues were settled by a small coteries of elite, moneyed individuals in their favour. Parliament is grossly unrepresentative of the economic background of British society. Most MPs are millionaires, as Mike has shown again and again in the meme showing this fact. Even so, they represent a wider and more diverse circle than May and her cabinet. As for Gina Miller not being ‘British’, Guyana is a former British colony, and before Thatcher altered the immigration law in the 1970s, citizenship of a British colony or member of the commonwealth automatically granted the right to immigrate to this country and be considered a British citizen. This principle was held by an older generation of imperialists, including Winston Churchill. By their standards, she’s as British as the rest of us. You could even argue that as someone born in Guyana, she also has a perfectly reasonable right to bring her court action. One of the arguments of the ‘Leave’ campaign has been that if Britain leaves the EU, we will have greater freedom to develop trade links with our Commonwealth partners. As a lady born in one of those former colonies, she therefore has every right to make sure she and the other prospective trading partners are properly represented in these decisions.

The Tory attitude also contradicts one of the fundamental principles of democratic freedom articulate by John Stuart Mill. Mill was concerned that the views of the minority should always be protected and represented, even to the extent of being over-represented. He stated that if everyone in the country held the same political opinion, with the exception of one man, that one man should still be allowed to hold and express his views without suppression. But the Tories behind all this hysterical ranting clearly don’t believe that the views of the general public should be represented in the ability of parliament to vote and decide on this issue, rather than just May and her privileged cronies.

It’s also highly hypocritical. Remember when the Tories were complaining at how ‘presidential’ Tony Blair was, and how he was sidelining parliament? They were right – Blair was presidential. But this shows that their objections to a presidential style of British politics, in which power is concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister in a manner more suitable to the American political system, was purely tactical. Once presidential power is in the hands of a Tory PM, all objections mysteriously disappear, and it is the defenders of the sovereignty of the British people and parliament, who are vilified as ‘enemies of the people.’ Perhaps, like the judges denounced by the Nazis, they’d like to see them shoved out of a British volksgemeinschaft.

This has to be stopped. Mike is quite right to recommend that people stop buying these dreadful right-wing rags, and vote out the Tories. They’re the real enemies of democracy and popular sovereignty here. Not the EU, and not the judges.

TV Documentary from 1999 on Contemporary British Fascism

This is more Fascism – British this time – for those that can stomach. And some of it is hard to take. This is a British documentary, The Lost Race, broadcast in 1999, that charts the career of the various Fascist parties and movements in Britain from c. 1979 to the end of millennium. It follows the NF, BNP and other Fascist splinter groups, like the Third Position after Margaret Thatcher’s election victory of 1979 took the wind out of their sails by taking many nationalist votes from the NF. Faced with defeat after it was almost on the verge of becoming a mainstream party, the National Front split, the British National Party emerged as the dominant party of the Far Right, and British Fascism in general began a process of self-examination and exploration trying to find ways to recover their position.

The documentary covers some of the bizarre intellectual movements within the BNP at this time. This includes Nick Griffin’s attempt to turn his stormtroopers into ‘political soldiers’ following the ideas of the Italian Fascist and occultist aristo, Giulio Evola and the Italian Fascist, Roberto Fiore. This involved trying to cultivate a mystical, spiritual dimension to the Fascist revolt, and the ideas of the late Libyan dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. I think Nick Griffin travelled at least once to Libya, and he tried to get the other goose-steppers to study Gaddafi’s notoriously muddled and incoherent ‘Green Book’. One of the former Fascists interview, now standing as a ‘National Liberal’ local councillor in one of the London boroughs, describes how he got a copy for the local council. It’s on their shelves, but no-one’s read it. Also highly influential in this stage of the BNP’s development were the ideas of the Romanian Fascist, Corneliu Codreanu, who tried to form a mystical nationalism based on a synthesis of love of the land with Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This also failed to ignite any interest. It’s hard to see how Griffin expected it to be otherwise. Codreanu’s Iron Guard was a failure, even in Romania. From what I understand, in the 1930s they tried to overthrow the Romanian government in a coup. King Carol formed a government of his own from the traditional Rightist groups, which then counterattacked and massacred the Fascists, including Codreanu. His ideas were also unlikely to have any resonance for contemporary Brits, considering the very different intellectual climate in western Europe. The early Russian intellectuals, for example, used to contrast the mystical mindset of their own country with western rationalism and its obsession with the law and legal niceties, in contrast with their own preferences for utopianism and solving social problems through a complete restructuring of that society.

As for the International Third Position, this can be summed up as plain, old fashioned segregation. In their case, Blacks and Asians were to be allowed to remain in Britain, but would be kept separate from Whites through a system of apartheid. This also eventually died the death, as the traditional stance of the BNP and Nazi groups always was for an end to non-White immigration and the deportation of Blacks and Asians back to their countries of origin.

One of the Fascist groups also made an abortive, and borderline fraudulent attempt, to set up a Whites-only Nazi commune on a farm in France. The documentary makers themselves go there, and visit the site in the company of one of the local dignitaries. They find the site abandoned and dilapidated. Its British owners only stayed there once, and were looking to sell the place. Despite this, they were still appealing for money for the project in the various extreme Right-wing journals.

This made sense of some of the things I’d heard about the extreme Right at the time. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his book on contemporary Nazi occultism, The Black Sun, discusses some of the links between Libya and European Neo-Nazis, who adopted a pro-Islam view linked with their anti-Semitism. Larry O’Hara, who did a doctorate, I believe, on the contemporary British Far Right, mentions the Third Positionists several times in some of the articles he wrote for Lobster in the 1990s. He also briefly mentioned the attempt in France to found a Nazi commune in his own conspiracy journal, Notes from the Borderland.

The BNP/NF also tried to gain support by copying the Liberals, and concentrating on ‘parish pump’ politics, local issues at council level. It’s about this new electoral strategy that they talk to the ‘National Liberal’ town councillor in London.

The documentary also discusses the extreme violence of the Far Right, and the rise of Combat 18, an extremely violent, expressly Nazi organisation that specialised in attacking left-wingers and anti-fascists. It was founded in 1979 by the American Klansman and Nazi, Harold Covington, whose members shot day five civil rights protestors.

What I, and no doubt many others, found particularly repulsive was the way the NF/ BNP tried to recruit and indoctrinate schoolchildren. The various Nazi periodicals encouraged pupils to inform on staff, who were supposed to be promoting ‘Communist’ ideas. These were then beaten up by the storm troopers. The programme includes an interview with a teacher, who was attacked by two men in school, after one of his pupils wrote such a snitch letter to one of the Nazi rags. The man was beaten because he had taught Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. From that, you could be forgiven for thinking he was indeed a Marxist. Except he wasn’t. The documentary makers ask him this straight out, and he gives them a flat denial. The school’s course at the time involved teaching them about the Soviet Union for a term, which involved obviously studying the ideological foundations of the state in Communism. The next term, however, they were due to study America, and the term after that Europe. So no, the teacher was definitely not a Communist. And even if he was, it would have been a matter for official censure and discipline if he was trying to indoctrinate his young charges, and definitely not ground for a savage physical attack.

The Nazis also launched their own ‘comic’ intended to draw children into their vile world of racial nationalism. There’s a clip of one of them hanging around outside a school’s gates, selling copies of The Stormer to the children leaving school. The Stormer took its name from Der Stuermer, one of Goebbel’s vile propaganda rags. The documentary briefly shows a page from the ‘comic’, with strips like ‘Ali the Paki’ clearly intended to promote hatred towards Blacks and Asians through playing up racial stereotypes. I’ve got a feeling that The Stormer was banned, and the Nazis producing and distributing it sent to jail for incitement to racial hatred following police raids on their homes. Good. The footage of the Nazi shouting to all the schoolchildren to get their copies of it, only 10p is genuinely repulsive and creepy. It has the same kind of overtones as paedophiles hanging around school gates, trying to get their claws into young, vulnerable children in their turn. It’s one that makes you want to take a bath after you’ve seen it.

The documentary, however, states that these attempts by the NF and BNP to revive their flagging membership and electoral support ultimately died, as in those 20 years Britain became used to and more comfortable with being a multicultural and multi-ethnic country. There’s an interesting section where the presenter asks John Tyndall, the leader of the NF, if he would deport, say, someone who was half-black, or a quarter. Tyndall gets very tetchy indeed, and gives an evasive answer about how these issues would be dealt with on a case by case basis.

This was at the time a little too optimistic, as in the early years of this century the BNP seemed to be in the ascendant. Fortunately, that passed when just about everyone turned on Griffin and the BNP. These groups are still around, but they’re smaller than they used to be, though still as nasty, and now openly anti-Semitic, whereas before they kept that hidden.

Here’s the video.