Politicians and commenters have drawn attention repeatedly to the threat of the extreme Right in England. Anecdotally the British National Party is making headway among the poor, but in other, and most unexpected, places of relative wealth, too. Where there have been local votes, they have done well in pushing established parties into third place, though as yet they have had few first place victories; tactical voting still sees them kept out under our voting system.
They are kept out, too, by their racialism. We more than condemn racialist views, we are deeply embarrassed by them. In all fairness, our society does not really care about race. Curiously, the racial stuff has been imported by cultures that do care about race. Our culture cares about class, and wealth, and accessibility of resources. We couldn't care less about how people look (just look at how visitors to Florence from England look - do they care? They do not).
So why is the British National Party, whose identifier is racialism, making such notable progress in all and every election that manages to get itself held in England?
The removal of the economic and financial safety net that has been beneath every family since the institution of a basic, inalienable living standard, by all political parties in the United Kingdom since 1945, has done the damage. The fact that you have a mortgage on the house you live in, and a job, and the children are doing reasonably well in reasonable schools, and if you are ill there is accessible diagnosis and treatment, that your streets are safe and the bus and train are there and affordable has been profoundly undermined in the last 11 years.
The safety net, so crucial to most of us with few resources other than our own skills and social ties, is now fully occupied. If we stumble, if we need to ask the council for a house, if we need support during a period of unemployment, if our health seriously and chronically fails, we will be plunged into a maelstrom of savage competition for resources we thought were ours and paid for.
We have had not just our pensions undermined by Brown and his 11 years of ill-intentioned and poorly understood, rabid, classist policies. Undermined as well has been our social insurance, that was there for our parents and grandparents, but is no longer there for us, and for our children who do not face the benign economic climate in which we made our way in life.
Not the very poor; but those who might think of themselves as middle class, responsible, capable, are frightened that everything that was there should external forces strike us down, is no longer available.
And so a racialist party profits from social and economic fear, or even just bewilderment, as our sense of building a society in our country that we can be happy in, and proud of, is destroyed to deliver on an agenda for the permanent installation of European-style statist governance that was never put to us and to which we would never have agreed.
We have extended our growing well-being to the poorest. What we have not been allowed to do is replenish and extend the resources devoted to this, because that would have meant taking from the share of the rich, which has held steadily in England to some 50% of all wealth in our country. The rich are untouched by the needs of others; they are too far removed from the experience of destitution. We are not; and we have responded, but now we are on a knife-edge of real poverty ourselves, and there is nothing to catch us as - not if - we fall.
New Labour is nothing to do with the socialism we all might agree with, that isn't really socialism at all, just a sense of decency, and sharing, and giving everyone a chance, and that some things can be done better together and with a bit of direction rather than everyone for himself. People keep quoting George Orwell but they're quoting from the wrong book. It's Coming Up For Air that really says it all, and all we have lost.
'We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that
even in Lower Binfield life would have changed. But the place
itself wouldn't have. There'd still be the beech woods round
Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the
horse-trough in the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just
for a week, and let the feeling of it soak into me. It was a bit
like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I
should think, the way things are going, there'll be a good many
people retiring into the desert during the next few years. It'll
be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was telling me
about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting
list for every cave.
But it wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to
get my nerve back before the bad times begin. Because does anyone
who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump--no knowing, except that
it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you
can't face that kind of thing unless you've got the right feeling
inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war [or 11 years since the New Dawn, ed.]. It's a kind of vital juice that we've
squirted away until there's nothing left. All this rushing to and
fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of
buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits,
empty places in our bones where the marrow ought to be.'
Are the British National Party picking up on this and, despite their despicable racialism, going to find supporters not among the very poor, but among the newly vulnerable whose insurances have been cashed to buy a voter base, and whose efforts over the generations redirected to ensuring permanence in power for a national and supranational political class?
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