Lots of discussion in various places about the meaning of the BNP. If you look back at fascism in thirties Britain it took place amid a more general consensus that the 19th century way of doing things – parliamentarianism, free trade, laissez faire and all of that good stuff - had come to the end of the line. Hence also the near simultaneous collapse in the Liberal vote. The corporatism of the fascists was an extreme manifestation of something more general. In milder forms fitted in with Labour socialism and Tory paternalism. Of itself it was the centrism of its day: it was the right of the Labour Party that tended to reify the state, along with the Joe Chamberlain wing of the Tories (the Fabians, btw, started out as an offshoot of Tory social imperialism before drifting leftwards. It was the same tendency gone rancid which provided British fascists with their early cadre).
So it’s not surprising to see the fascists revived now that the latterday experiment in laissez faire, free trade and classical liberalism seems to have run out of road. At the very least we have a critical mass of people who believe that they are being neglected while at the same time believing that they have a right to private facts – that, in short, political correctness gone mad is giving all their money to the Pakis.
What this means ultimately is that the future is statist and that the only real question is what kind of state we’re going to have, bearing in mind that the nature of a state in a democracy is very largely conditioned by the things that the electorate and its own ideology obliges it to do. This is the Libertarian error, by the way: that states are either big or small. If you give a state nothing to think about all day but enforcing the monopoly of violence, the last thing you’re going to get is a free society.
We can see this working out with New Labour, which built on the heritage of Thatcherism in the sense that where the Tories of the eighties freed the state from many of its obligations, the state under New Labour used this freedom by transforming itself into a project for widespread social engineering: it’s the behaviour modification party, soliciting extensive business involvement in a wider project to control and change individual behaviour through monitoring, punishment and incentive. It’s not too surprising that people who don’t believe that they’ve benefited from this proportionately – who don’t believe that their very real concerns have been met – should find more radical forms of this ideology appealing. From this perspective, the government is making promises - is in itself a kind of promise - that only the BNP can keep.
World War Two itself discredited fascism: but it also ended in a consensus by which the state provided extensive social goods and insurance in a context of growing personal freedom, a combination which made it extremely hard for fascism to make a sustained comeback. Under these circumstances, why would anybody want it? While opposing the BNP is necessary and can minimise its effect, you’re not actually going to solve the problem until the state is both brought back under control and made to do useful things on behalf of the public without expecting some sort of payback or tradeoff in the form of increased control. Nobody wants a fuhrer when they think they’re in charge.
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