Now that the dust has settled, we can get the BNP’s recent electoral successes into perspective. As the indispensable anti-fascist blog Lancaster Unity reminds us:

The results are not good - there’s no getting away from that fact - though the BNP’s net increase of ten councillors and the idiotic Richard Barnbrook’s election to the London Assembly are more as a result of the rocky position in which the current government finds itself rather than anything the BNP has done or said. That said, the result is very far short of the BNP’s expectation - they were hoping for forty new councillors and three Assembly members. And there is even more good news, as reported by Searchlight, which pointed out very clearly how the BNP’s vote in many of its heartlands has gone down, in some cases quite considerably. Nevertheless, with the Euro-elections coming up, we need to remain alert and to keep working hard and continually against the ever-present threat of the far-right.

That’s certainly not something I’d dispute. The BNP’s London breakthrough is not symptomatic of a sudden rightwards surge in public opinion.  Left unchallenged, however, Barnbrooke (once he sobers up after his slurred-but-scary victory speech) and co are sure to drag fascist ideas even more into the mainstream.  Already the BBC laments the plight of the forgotten whites and the respectable “liberal” media hypes up the Islamic threat, and it’s hard to see the rhetoric getting much worse without a significant escalation in racist violence.

That’s why Love Music Hate Racism has called a demonstration outside City Hall at 6pm on Tuesday; hopefully the momentum generated by the spectacularly successful carnival will carry accross to make this a big success; I’d urge anyone in or near London to get down to it.

The far-right have long enjoyed much less success in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, and this is in large part because anti-fascist movements have enjoyed much more success here.  In 1936 the lefties, Jews
and Irishmen of the East End united to stop Mosley’s fascists from marching down Cable Street, in what many saw as an extension of the Spanish Civil War.  The Blackshirts never recovered.  A broad anti-racist coalition - in which my very own SWP played a leading role - won a similar victory in Lewisham in 1977, galvanising an antifascist movement that smashed the NF for a generation.  In both cases, the police made themselves the vanguard of the fascist marchers.  Now I wouldn’t like to see the state banning fascist marches and organisations, given that they would ultimately end up applying those powers against us more than against anyone else, but it’s interesting to see how far they’ll go.  Compare the beating, arresting and, in at least one case, killing to defend the fascists’ “freedom of speech” with the attempted banning of the antiwar protest in October, the absurd restrictions placed upon anti-corporate campaigners, the arrest of the “lyrical terrorist” and other Muslims with questionable reading material, and tell me you don’t see a pattern of hypocrisy emerging.

But I digress.  It is because of the Anti Nazi league and its successors that the BNP have had to take the electoralist pretence of respectability so seriously.  In the continent, where the Neo-Nazis have not faced such vigorous and consistent challenges, they are in positions of much greater strength.  It’s a lesson they are now applying in Germany; in news every bit as encouraging, in its own way, as the spectacular antiwar dockers’ strike in America on the same day, 7000 antifascists thwarted a 1000-strong fascist march on the streets of Hamburg this Thursday.  Incidentally, while you could argue that the Hamburger partisans went a bit far, you have to remark at the BBC’s spectacularly biased reporting of the incident.

In this spirit, I’ve been listening to theexcellent Battle of Lewisham discussion from last year’s Marxism festival over at Resistance MP3s.  Whether such street fighting will become necessary this time around remains to be seen - and I for one sincerely hope it doesn’t - but we cannot afford to let the Nazis go unchallenged.  If there’s one thing that literally everyone should have learned from history, that should be it.  Wherever they pop up to spread their hatred, we must be there to stamp it out.

In the long run, we must accept that people turn to the BNP because they are desperate, because they feel abandoned by the system and its incumbent leaders, and we must be there to provide an alternative.  The token anticapitalist rhetoric common to acolytes of Mussolini, Hitler and Nick Griffin shows just how important it is that the Left puts its politics forward and guide that disillusioned dissent the right way (as opposed to the Right way).  This is why, for all the frustration and the setbacks, projects like Respect and the Left List remain so important.

At the same time, it is important to keep the antifascist movements as broad as possible, and resist the urge to tie them down to any particular political project.  For all the energy we may rightfully expend opposing Labour and the Tories, they are welcome allies in the fight against fascism (like when Buffy the vampire slayer accepts help from Spike the vampire to prevent Angel from destroying the world at the end of series two, ahem).  See Lenin’s post on antifascism and the left.  And I promise to talk about something else in my next post; isn’t it high time I commented on the goings on in Latin America?