The Atlantic: Why Doesn’t Steve Bannon Matter in Europe?

Yet after all that time, Bannon has little to show for his efforts. Though many far-right parties have made significant gains, further establishing themselves as permanent fixtures on the European political stage, the far-right surge that was expected didn’t come to pass. (This was reaffirmed in subsequent elections across the Continent, where although some parties underperformed, they at least demonstrated their relatively high electoral floor.) [...]

But perhaps the greatest inhibitor of Bannon’s success in Europe has been the very far-right parties he has professed to support. Though the former Donald Trump strategist has appeared alongside some of Europe’s most high-profile far-right leaders—from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally in France, to Matteo Salvini, the head of the League and Italy’s erstwhile interior minister—few have agreed to unite under his nationalist banner. The Sweden Democrats expressed “no interest” in Bannon’s project. Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party, called the effort “poorly organized.” The Alternative for Germany said the interests of Europe’s anti-establishment parties are too “divergent” to be united. [...]

But it’s not just Bannon’s Americanness that makes some European nationalist parties resistant to working with him. Their reluctance also stems from what is perceived as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these parties work. Though many of Europe’s far-right movements are united in their shared views on immigration, the economy, and the role and future of the European Union, these beliefs don’t always manifest themselves in the same political goals. Despite hopes that they would be a dominant force in the European Parliament after elections this May, right-wing populist parties instead had to settle for forming the fifth-largest grouping in the legislature—their national priorities took precedence over any broader project. (The current far-right grouping, led by Salvini, failed, for example, to persuade Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz to join it.) [...]

“The mere fact that you are writing an article about him, I think, is part of his personal strategy,” Eric Maurice, the director of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation, a European think tank, told me, “of trying to look like someone who is everywhere, pulling the strings, working on a master plan to put the far right … in power.”

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UnHerd: How the Left lost Wales

While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties. [...]

It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales. [...]

Labour’s Welsh decline cannot entirely be pinned on Corbyn. Support here has been ebbing for some time and during the New Labour years the party’s share of the vote fell faster in Wales than in either England or Scotland. In fact Labour’s historical dominance of Welsh politics is arguably a factor in its declining fortunes. As Dan Evans wrote in a perceptive piece for Jacobin, one-partyism has encouraged complacency and nepotism in many traditional strongholds. Here “people advance and achieve positions of power not through their political competence or vision, but through party loyalty”. [...]

Labour has also been losing the battle of values, which in part explains the shift to the Conservatives. The coastal regions have long flirted with the Tories, but the Valleys – the traditional bastions of socialist politics – are also home to a small-c conservatism that sits uneasily with some of the liberal shibboleths that dominate contemporary Left-wing thought. Moreover, this anti-Conservative sentiment found in South Wales is partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, herself a liberal free marketeer rather than a traditional conservative.

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ChickenWire: BREXIT: Remainers vs Brexit Party - Who's Bigger?

Brexit: Remainers vs Brexit Party - Who's Bigger? Who is bigger in the EU elections 2019 in the UK was it the Brexit party, UKIP and other leave parties or was it the combination of the remain parties such as the liberal democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Well it depends how you tally up the vote if you add up the nationalist parties or not and if you add up Labour and the Tories. In this video I explore in detail and analyse the full results for the UK in the EU election 2019. It looks like Nigel Farag's Brexit party came out on top but does that mean more people support remain or a second referendum or leaving without a deal or leaving with a deal? I also take a look back at Theresa May's performance and give statistical advice on where I think the parties should go.

The Guardian - Politics Weekly: New politics and the far right

With the traditional two-party system in deadlock over Brexit, new political forces are emerging to challenge the status quo.

The first battleground looks likely to be the European elections next month, where the Independent Group and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party will be slugging it out alongside the usual suspects.

How will the newcomers fare?

Joining Rowena Mason to discuss these issues are Ellie Mae O’Hagan from the Guardian, Katy Balls from the Spectator, and Matthew Goodwin, co-author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

Also this week: with David Lammy comparing the European Research Group to the Nazis, we take a look at how politics shifted to the right.

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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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The Guardian: Tommy Robinson and the far right’s new playbook

Yaxley-Lennon frequently complains he is being smeared as a racist and a Nazi; he insists that he doesn’t care about skin colour and that his objection is to Islamist political ideology rather than people. What this misses is that far-right politics almost always involves singling out particular groups on the grounds of their alleged culture and behaviour, as with the way far-right groups have in the past used the “black muggers” panic of the 1970s, or Jewish ritual slaughter. And the way Yaxley-Lennon characterises Muslims is to present them as an alien presence in British society working to harm the majority. In Enemy of the State, previously majority-white areas of Luton are described as having suffered “ethnic cleansing” via Muslim immigration. “We are sleepwalking our way towards a Muslim takeover of the country,” he writes elsewhere, and describes the niqab as “an up-yours that shows exactly how the hardline, majority Muslim community regards the rest of us”. He is also sceptical of Muslims in public life. “You cannot buy loyalty,” he writes. “You buy a measure of allegiance for a while.” [...]

Yaxley-Lennon, meanwhile, is frequently treated as “authentic” by parts of the British media that do not know how to deal with class. A public conversation that often treats being working-class as a kind of ethnic identity only shared by reactionary white people in forgotten suburbs – when, in fact, working-class Britain is the most diverse and numerous section of society – undermines efforts to credibly challenge him. And a journalism profession that contains few people of working-class backgrounds makes it all the more difficult. Take Yaxley-Lennon’s appearance in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2011: Paxman’s patrician contempt only bolstered Yaxley-Lennon’s projected image of the little guy versus the liberal elite. By contrast, one of the rare occasions he was convincingly challenged on television was in a debate in 2013 on BBC3 with the rapper, author and activist Akala, who was able to paint a very different picture of working-class Britain. It’s telling that Yaxley-Lennon only gives this 2013 encounter half a sentence in his autobiography, while dwelling at length on his other media appearances.

Why are these changes happening now? One reason is that political ideologies that were once dominant are struggling to make their worldview seem like the obvious one. Put crudely, this is the fallout from several decades when neoliberal globalisation was seen, to varying degrees, as the only game in town. The financial crash and its aftermath rendered that view untenable, but so far no alternative vision has won out. [...]

Yaxley-Lennon is a potential asset to the new, international far-right activism. He has a brand name and a powerful myth that is menacing enough to keep him in the news, and has mobilised support in a number of countries. Conservatives in the US can use his story to boost the “Europe has fallen” narrative promoted in order to justify Trump’s own anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, while Bannon has already acknowledged his potential to catalyse campaigns across Europe. In the UK, he could become part of a broad rightwing coalition that seeks to mobilise popular anger as Brexit unfolds. The Ukip leader, Batten, has publicly supported Yaxley-Lennon. On 24 October, after Yaxley-Lennon’s most recent court hearing, Batten accompanied him to the House of Lords for a lunch with the Ukip peer Lord Pearson – and is now proposing he be allowed to join the party, in defiance of a long-standing ban on former BNP members. A recent long-term study by Hope Not Hate suggests the places most susceptible to far-right narratives are white-majority communities away from big cities, which have been hit particularly hard by austerity policies and longer-term industrial decline. Another danger is that smaller, violent neo-Nazi groups still exist – as does antisemitic conspiracy theory – and this increased activity in general gives them more space in which to operate.

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The Conversation: ‘Far right’ groups may be diverse – but here’s what they all have in common

However, the term “far right” tends to subsume a broad range of parties and groups that differ significantly in agenda and policy – especially economic and welfare policies – as well as the extent to which they support and employ violence. This category includes both parties that have moderated their agendas, distancing themselves from fascism in order to appeal to broader electorates; and vigilante street groups and extreme parties which employ violence, such as the Greek Golden Dawn (GD), the English Defence League (EDL), Britain First and the Italian Casa Pound. [...]

The “far right” umbrella includes parties and groups that share an important commonality: they all justify a broad range of policy positions on socioeconomic issues on the basis of nationalism. The point here is not simply that they are all, to a degree, nationalist; but rather, that they use nationalism to justify their positions on all socioeconomic issues.

The term “right-wing populism”, however, is less appropriate. Populism is an even broader umbrella that often includes disparate parties and groups. To narrow down this category, we often tend to conflate populism and nationalism, identifying a party as populist, not on the basis of its populist attributes – what party doesn’t claim to speak on behalf of the people in a democracy? – but on the basis of its nationalist attributes. But despite the similarities between “populism” and “nationalism” – both emphasise conflict lines, focus on the collective, and put forward a vision of an ideal society – the two are conceptually different. While the former pits the people against the elites, the latter pits the in-group against the out-group.

And so herein lies the problem. If nationalism is always a feature of the far right, as most researchers agree, what is the added value of the term “populism”? To put it another way, what is the difference between a radical right-wing party and a populist radical right-wing party? While populism may or may not be an attribute of some far right parties, it is not their defining feature. Rather, nationalism is.

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The Guardian: Brexiters seek campaign memorabilia for 'museum of sovereignty'

 The brainchild of a small number of people closely connected to Ukip and the wider leave campaign, it has been launched with a website containing details of places where people can donate items, anything from drafts of major speeches to campaign memorabilia and photographs.

While a location for the planned museum is yet to be determined, the organisers stress the project is as much about gathering an archive of material connected to a pivotal moment in the UK’s postwar history that might otherwise be lost. [...]

The hope, he said, would be to collate an academic trove of artefacts, papers and books chronicling not just Brexit, but also the decades of often fringe Eurosceptic activism that preceded it – the bulk of it not preserved in digital form – going back to 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community. [...]

Farage will also be asked for a donation, Towler said. “I know Nigel is a supporter of the project. I haven’t got anything specific from him yet. Maybe an ashtray and an empty pint glass.”

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Al Jazeera: May faces down Putin – but he has the upper hand

On March 11, the Sunday Times newspaper published a front-page story on how the Conservative Party had accepted millions from Kremlin-linked political donors - over 3 million British pounds ($4.2m) from suspect Russian figures channelled to the Conservatives since they took office in 2010. Ministers were increasingly concerned about the effect this would have on May's policies. [...]

Buzzfeed published late last year, that 14 British and Russian citizens had been potentially assassinated in Britain since 2006. As of the past 10 days, that figure has nearly risen to 16. All the fourteen cases identified by Buzzfeed have now been re-opened. [...]

Following an investigation I and a colleague published for openDemocracy, the Electoral Commission is now investigating whether a key financier behind UKIP, a shady entrepreneur called Arron Banks, was the "true source" of money given towards the Brexit referendum, or he was only "acting as an agent". [...]

Then you have the left-wing Labour Party - whose chief party strategist has historically argued in favour of Putin's annexation of Crimea. In October 2014, Milne was invited to the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai Discussion Club, including being invited to chair the session where Putin was interviewed. [...]

Secondly, after Cyprus, Britain, combined with the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands (all under ultimate British jurisdiction), provides the second-largest amount of foreign direct investment in Russia, even after sanctions hit in 2014. Without even a portion of this money - impaired by real sanctions, the Putin regime could collapse.

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The Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage

It may have cost Farage his political raison d’être, too. A survey by YouGov in June found that the popularity of vocal Brexiteers like Farage has plummeted in the year since the referendum, with 78 percent of respondents saying they dislike or really dislike Farage (58 and 83 percent of those surveyed said the same of Conservative Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, respectively). Bannon, meanwhile, has fared no better. A YouGov/HuffPost survey found that only 13 percent of Trump voters still regard Bannon favorably after his public spat with the president this month, with approximately two-thirds of the president’s supporters turning on him.

For all the ideological similarities between Bannon and Farage, there are also important differences. For one thing, they didn’t find their start in the same way. Farage, despite his own railing against the British establishment, has spent much of his life in politics; Bannon, conversely, is more of a political novice, having spent the majority of his career working in finance and Hollywood. And while both share similar views on nationalism and immigration, only Bannon has succeeded in propelling those views to the U.S.’s highest office; Brexit, meanwhile, has become the responsibility of the U.K.’s ruling Conservative party, not Farage or UKIP.

It’s their ideological similarities, however, that could spell trouble for both of them. “They have an exaggerated sense of how many people actually bought into their core agenda,” Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester and a research investigator at the independent think tank U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me. He noted that while both men were able to successfully leverage a contentious wedge issue—nationalism—to unite different groups among their respective electorates and catapult themselves to the top, they didn’t necessarily earn enough widespread support to stay there. “Ultimately their influence does have some relationship to their electoral power. Farage got himself on the agenda because he was pulling votes from the Conservatives; Bannon catapulted Trump to the top through a series of upset primary wins. So the same mechanism that put them up can pull them down—and is already pulling them down, it seems.”

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Haaretz: Behind Far-right German Party’s Successful Scare Campaign: Adviser to Netanyahu, Trump

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which will soon enter the Bundestag for the first time after Sunday’s elections, hired the services of an American media consultant who has worked for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump. [...]

Its election campaign stood out on social networks and used prominent billboards, focusing on a threat of an Islamic takeover of Germany. 

Behind the scenes, the AfD used the services of Vincent Harris, CEO of Harris Media, an online communications consulting firm founded in 2008. The company is based in Austin, Texas and is known for its provocative campaigns. It has also worked for a number of conservative Republican candidates, such as senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Harris also worked with the right-wing UKIP party in Britain. [...]

Harris has used the growing “Muslim threat” before online. During Trump’s presidential campaign Harris produced a video clip warning of the dangerous implications of electing Hillary Clinton. Germany lost control of its borders, we must not let that happen in the United States, he said. The clip shows a Germany in the not distant future that has become part of Islamic State. The Cologne Cathedral, one of the symbols of Germany and German Christianity, has become a mosque and the Oktoberfest festival, another major symbol, now bans the sale of beer and pork.

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Politico: Euroskeptics in free fall at European Parliament

In the latest blow, Ludovic de Danne, the secretary-general of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), one of the two main anti-EU groups in Parliament, was dismissed last week in what he described to French media as an “inevitable divorce,” partly due to his alleged role in the group’s recent problems with its finances and corruption allegations. [...]

And in a twist, even the Euroskeptics’ success on Brexit has worked against them in the European Parliament: the other main anti-EU group of MEPs, the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), now stands to lose 20 of its members from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) when Britain leaves the EU in 2019. Without UKIP, the EFDD would fall short of the minimum of 25 MEPs required to form a group in Parliament, and may have to disband. [...]

The populist Alternative for Germany party is expected to win seats in Germany’s parliamentary election later this month and other anti-EU parties like the National Front in France and the Populist Party for Freedom in the Netherlands made gains in their national legislatures, even though they fell well short of their targets. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) is expected to make a strong showing in parliamentary election next month. [...]

But in the European Parliament, the weakening of Euroskeptics suggests that pro-EU leaders have had at least some success in imposing their cordon sanitaire  — essentially an effort to choke off the anti-EU groups and deny them influence in policymaking. Leaders have also sought to keep the Euroskeptics off balance by pushing for investigations into alleged corruption, including misuse of Parliament funds for national political purposes. [...]

France’s National Front is in the midst of an investigation by OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud agency, and the Paris prosecutor involving allegations of “breach of trust,” “organized fraud,” “forgery and use of forged documents,” and “undeclared work.” The investigation will determine whether some assistants in the group were paid by the Parliament to carry out non-parliamentary work.[...]

Last year, the Parliament suspended payment of some €90,000 to a think tank linked to Nigel Farage’s UKIP because of suspicions that it accepted donations from firms and individuals, only to pay the money back using cash from the Parliament by awarding them contracts that far exceeded the amount they had donated.

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Quartz: Populist, authoritarian leaders are still on the rise across Europe

One in five Europeans (a total of 55.8 million people) voted for a populist party in 2016 and 2017, according a new study by the European Policy Information Center. The think tank analyzed electoral data in EU member states as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia, and Montenegro and found the vote share for authoritarian populist parties jumped from 10.6% in 1980 to 18.4% in 2017.

Most of this success has been quite recent. The average vote share of populist parties increased by only 1 percentage point from 1980 to 2000, but then jumped by 7 percentage points from 2000 to 2017.

The vote share for populist parties has overtaken support for liberalism in the last two decades. Over the same period, there’s been a decline for support for mainstream ideologies, including of conservatism and Christian democracy (down 4.7 percentage points), while support for social Democracy has decreased by 4.1 percentage points. [...]

The last decade has also seen the return of the radical left. The vote share of these parties declined between 1980 and the late 2000s, but gained ground over the last seven years. The radical left increased its average vote share to 6.3% in 2017. The examples of left-wing populists included in the report were Spain’s Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (a far-left presidential candidate), who plans to make a ruckus in the French parliament.

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Social Europe: How Populists Win When They Lose

Less obvious, but more pernicious, is the insinuation that citizens who do not share the populist’s conception of “the people,” and hence do not support the populist politically, are less than legitimate members of the polity. Think of Farage claiming that Brexit was a “victory for real people.” The 48% who voted to remain in the European Union, he implied, might not be part of the “real” British people at all. [...]

Populism is thus a form of anti-pluralism. To say that “the people” are rising up against “the establishment” is not a neutral description of political developments; it’s actually populist language. It accepts the populists’ claim that they authentically represent “the people.” [...]

The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.

In fact, if anything, Trump’s election was a confirmation of how partisan US politics has become: 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; they clearly could not fathom voting for a Democrat, even if many Republicans in surveys registered deep doubts about the party’s nominee. To this day, no right-wing populist has come to power in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. [...]

The idea that the Dutch and the French elections heralded the arrival of a “post-populist moment” fails to appreciate the distinction between populism as a claim to a moral monopoly on representation and the policies – think of restrictions on immigration – typically promoted by populists as part of their exclusionary identity politics. For example, Wilders, who really is a populist, did less well than expected in March. But his main competitor, center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte, adopted Wilders-like rhetoric – telling immigrants that they should leave the country if they do not want to behave “normally.”

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ArguingFromIgnorance: UK Election 2017 — Part 4 — How Will Each Party Reform The UK Political System?

ArguingFromIgnorance: Election 2017 — Part 3 — Where Do The Parties Stand On The NHS?

ArguingFromIgnorance: Election 2017 — Part 2 — Where Do The Parties Stand On Brexit?

ArguingFromIgnorance: UK Election 2017 — Part 1 — Why Is There Another Election?

The Guardian: Stick or switch? The way voters are swapping parties suggests a big Tory win

More than half (57%) of voters currently plan to vote the same way as they did in 2015. However what is more interesting is the differences between the parties when it comes to Stickers, Switchers and Undecideds.

Only about half of people who chose Labour, Ukip or the Liberal Democrats in 2015 plan on sticking with that party this time, while the rest have either moved party or are still undecided at this stage.

In sharp contrast, the Conservatives are holding on to a far higher proportion of their vote. More than three-quarters (77%) of their 2015 voters say they will vote for the party again this time around. [...]

Among those that wanted to remain in the EU last June and have since switched who they plan to vote for, 43% have moved to the Liberal Democrats. These remain Switchers are generally coming from Labour and the Greens, with a smaller number moving from the Conservatives. [...]

Labour has seen a dramatic drop in its vote share as it has been losing both remain and leave voters to other parties.

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BBC4 Analysis: How Voters Decide: Part Two

What makes us change our mind when it comes to elections? We are all swingers now. More voters than ever before are switching party from one election to the next. Tribal loyalties are weakening. The electorate is now willing to vote for the other side.

Professor Rosie Campbell from Birkbeck University finds out what prompts voters to shift from one party to another. Quentin Davies had been a Tory MP for decades when he crossed the floor of the house. He believes his views stayed the same - but the world changed around him. Journalist Janet Daley was once too left wing for the Labour Party - until Margaret Thatcher came along. Meanwhile Daryll Pitcher felt as though no party wanted his vote. Today he is a UKIP campaign manager.

Does age make us become more right wing? Have the main political parties alienated their core vote? And what does this mean for democracy?

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