openDemocracy: Don't throw the word 'fascism' around with abandon

But today the word is being used expansively in ways that very inaccurately and unhelpfully conflate everything from neo-Nazis and white supremacists to people who voted leave in the 2016 referendum. When being interviewed about President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the U.K., Rupa Huq MP referenced the Leave vote in warning of us being on a slippery slope towards fascism.[...]

George Orwell in the early 1940’s said “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. How true. The discourse around Brexit has become so polarised, so toxic, that the word is being thrown around with abandon by senior politicians as a means of shutting down debate and extolling one’s own virtuosity.

This is dangerous. We know from the ensuing research that the most significant issue driving the 2016 referendum result was concern over immigration. Inevitably, this has come to frame much of why people voted to leave the EU. In the simplified world of social media Brexit = Racism. And yet, this has been a missed opportunity to have a proper discussion about immigration which has largely been ignored by political parties of all persuasions over the last three years. These are issues that we should feel a lot more comfortable talking about. If we do not retain them within mainstream discourse, then we surrender them to the extremes. [...]

To add insult to injury, to be a member of the forgotten tribe is also to be branded a “fascist” when the debate becomes uncomfortable. And there has been a definite shift on social media from the use of the phrase “I’m not racist but...” to “If that makes me racist, then I’m a racist”. Just look at the sense of threat in response to recently reported incidents of an army veteran and Brexit Party supporter having a milkshake thrown over him, a male being called “Nazi Scum” and again having a milkshake thrown over him at a Trump rally, and an elderly male Trump supporter being pushed over at a demonstration. What this tells people is that you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you’re fair game. We should all be concerned by the escalating levels of violence. Britain feels like a febrile environment at the moment, like a tinder-box of rage that will only take a nudge for us to see wide scale public disorder implications.

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Today in Focus: How Ukip embraced the far right

With Brexit talks stalled and some of its supporters pushing a betrayal narrative, the Guardian’s Peter Walker charts how Ukip has begun rising in the polls again. But how did the party come to fully embrace the far right in Britain? And do its supporters know how extreme it has become? Plus: Helen Pidd on what young voters in Bolsover make of the Brexit deal paralysis.

When the UK Independence party was first formed in 1993, its aim was to mobilise a relatively small group of voters whose main focus was getting Britain out of the European Union. In 2016, the party achieved what its leaders had always dreamed of: a referendum victory for leaving the EU. Since then, however, Ukip has gone through a succession of hapless leaders after the post-referendum departure of Nigel Farage. Now led by Gerard Batten, the party has begun explicitly appealing to far-right figures, such as Tommy Robinson, for advice and support.

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Aeon: The English question (09 August, 2016)

In many ways England has hidden in plain sight; its identity disguised by being part of larger political entities that it dominated. England swallowed its neighbours on the British Isles and Ireland three centuries ago, then spread out across the globe as the British Empire. Out of this expansion emerged a shared British identity; it borrowed mostly from Englishness but also provided a capaciousness under which being Welsh, and even Scottish or sometimes Irish, could fit. [...]

The reemergence of English nationalism from Britishness has been a long time coming. As recently as 1997, a British Social Attitudes survey found that 55 per cent of English voters called themselves British, while just 33 per cent said they were English. But as colonies freed themselves and as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales increasingly controlled their own futures, the English started to believe that Britain was holding them back too. By 2012, the 22-point gap in the BSA study had vanished: now 43 per cent of voters identified as English, the same number who identified as B­­­ritish.[...]

The English – especially those who voted Conservative – noticed that England, per head of population, got less money from the Treasury than the other British nations. The central British government had ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but none for England. Scotland, where state expenditure per head is £1,600 higher than in England, has free NHS prescriptions. Scotland also has free – and excellent – university education. In England, students must pay. [...]

Sifting through the imagery driving this form of English nationalism, the vision of England that emerges is an old and familiar one. It is white, it is church-going in a ‘tea with the vicar’ kind of way and it celebrates World War Two’s victories as if they happened yesterday. It distrusts the foreign and the urban: it prefers villages and a never-changing countryside. It was best summed up by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1993 when he spoke of warm beer and cricket matches. It is a powerful vision and one not limited only to the right. The idea of England as a pastoral idyll, harking back to a pre-industrial age where everyone was content and at peace in nature, is a common one in culture, literature and politics. [...]

It is a fair point. For, if the progressive wing of English nationalism is to win out from the ruins of Brexit, then it will have to succeed at something British nationalism failed to do: knit a wide disparity of people together by persuading them of their mutual class interest in social justice. British nationalism did not succeed at this; its failure to convince a Glaswegian docker and a Birmingham factory worker that they have more in common than either has with a wealthy banker from Edinburgh or London partly explains the current fragmentation of British identity (and the British state). As the empire’s glow faded, a true class-based politics failed to emerge that could have provided a viable push for a British party of the left that fought for social justice across the whole United Kingdom. But Labour never operated in tribal Northern Ireland, it has been virtually wiped out by the SNP in Scotland, and in Wales must continually fend off the leftward jabs of Plaid Cymru.

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UnHerd: How rival extremisms are firing up Britain

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.[...]

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general. [...]

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.  [...]

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

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