Coddling the Far Right

The Conservative Party has a far right problem. Not in terms of its membership taking to the streets and attacking black and Asian people, setting fire to a Citizens' Advice Bureau and a community library/food bank, looting shops and throwing bricks at the plod, but the reflex action of party representatives that justifies the "real concerns" supposedly motivating the fascist mob.

Consider Cllr Alan Hosker, leader of the Tory group on Burnley council and a county councillor for Lancashire. He writes "Regarding these riots all over our Country it's down to the Labour Government to get a grip. Migration is way out of control. Folk in our Country feel they are being 2nd class citizens watching migrants be put up in hotels first class medical services including first on housing list". How is this any different to the ranting of the sieg-heiling fash on social media?

With a better grasp of written English but with the same awful politics, the chair of the Police and Crime Commissioners' organisation for England and Wales put out a statement (now deleted) calling for "calm and honesty". Donna Jones, PCC for Hampshire says "The behaviour of some of those protesting has been extremely violent, highly distressing and absolutely criminal". Leaving aside the dubious claims that any of them could be described as "protest", the nod to the customary respectability of the mainstream sits awkwardly with the thumbs up she gives the far right's politics. Sympathetically, she amplifies the fash complaint of "two-tier policing". She wrote the violence was driven by "the desire to protect Britain's sovereignty; the need to uphold British values and in order to do this, stop illegal immigration". This is the root cause, and banging people up does not address this problem. With the implication there will be more disorder until it's sorted. There's a word for this: apologism. Jones gives succour to mobs who target mosques and shout racist abuse.

But where Tory politics are concerned this pair are small fry. They're only putting out their mixes of the tunes performed by leading figures. These arguments are not dissimilar to what Robert Jenrick was pushing at his campaign launch, or what Rishi Sunak has been pushing since he came to office. And appearing tough on immigration is now a hill for Tory leadership campaigns to die on. In her Saturday interview with the Telegraph, the paper chooses to highlight Kemi Badenoch's comments on "integration". She says,

They should be saying that we need a clearer strategy on integration, which we don’t have at the moment. Instead, we just pretend that everything is fine and it’s a few bad apples, which is sometimes the case. But if you want to have a successful multi-racial country, you need to make an effort to do that. You can’t just pretend that there are no tensions. And we’ve been seeing this not just between ethnic minorities and white British people, but it’s even between ethnic minorities. This is not normal.

What a steaming pile. Integration is a byword for the deep unease some have about concentrated pockets of people from minority ethnicities in certain areas. It's a mix of fear and envy that mean Muslim communities, for instance, have greater ties of solidarity and commonality with their neighbours than the average elderly Daily Mail reader sat alone in their majority white village, small town, or suburb. If there are barriers "integrating" minority ethnicities into dominant norms and values, where is the evidence? What "British values" do Muslims, for example, find objectionable? Fairness? Respect? Freedom? The problem, and not one ever likely to be championed by Badenoch and her dreadful opponents are structural inequalities. Where are her concerns for black and minority ethnicity wage gaps? The persistent exclusion of people from whole sections of the economy? The poorer physical and mental health experienced by most minority ethnicities? The whipping up of rhetoric by her party that tells people that they're in this country under sufferance, regardless of whether they were born here or not? The evidence is quite clear. Minority ethnicities are discriminated against to sustain a racialised division of labour, and one that has persisted since the dawn of industrial capitalism. Badenoch doesn't want to believe in "institutionalised racism" because it's embedded in the inequalities and hierarchies she thinks are just fine and dandy.

Badenoch blames minority ethnicities for the problems they face. So does the far right. The only difference is she believes in intervening in, disciplining, and closely monitoring individuals and communities, while retaining them - above all Muslims - as handy scapegoats for when political occasion demands. The fascists just want them driven out in an orgy of violence and blood letting on the way to establishing a terroristic dictatorship. Neither side cares about the consequences of their arguments and actions because both seek to profit politically from division. It follows an anti-fascist politics can't take on "real concerns", it has to challenge and rebut them. And it also means, always and everywhere, making clear the links between the hateful rhetoric of the far right and the more restrained, but no less consequential, racism of the mainstream.

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