Could the spectre of the elusive far-right be the new covid?
These days left and right-wing refer more to your cultural outlook than your class allegiance. If anything, the richer you are in Western Europe, the more likely you are to identify with the progressive left and the poorer you are the more likely you are to harbour politically incorrect views.
By any fair historical standards, the indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles have never been more tolerant of racial and sexual diversity, if these are the new metrics of progress, and probably more tolerant than the peoples of most other countries. Millions of native Britons of all political persuasions have close friends or relatives who are black, Asian, mixed-race and/or gay. Many leading figures in the so-called alternative right, such as David Kurten or Ben Habib, are non-white and many others, like David Starkey or Peter Whittle, are openly gay. Yet we’re supposed to believe gay-bashing Neo-Nazis have whipped up racial tensions by spreading fake news. Countless polls have shown that while most voters want to live peacefully with their neighbours from different ethnic backgrounds, most believe current levels of net immigration are too high. Many other common concerns such as unaffordable housing, overburdened public services and social cohesion are all linked to migratory pressures. Very few would advocate mass deportations of anyone but hardened criminals, but millions, including many Labour voters, would like to see net annual immigration levels brought down to under 100,000 a year. Even with zero-net-migration (e.g. 200,000 in either direction), we would still need to build more houses and infrastructure as well as invest in better community relations, ensuring that the much-maligned white working classes are not left behind. White working class boys are now the least likely to graduate from university, falling behind their British-Afro-Caribbean peers.
As I write, rising food prices have reignited sectarian violence in Bangladesh with mobsters burning down the homes of the country’s Hindu minority. As bad as recent riots in English towns may have appeared, they led to relatively few casualties, if we exclude the murders of three young girls that triggered angry protests in the first place.
Controlled Opposition
So why is the mainstream media obsessed with the mythical far-right, personified by Tommy Robinson also known as Stephen Yaxley Lennon? It turns out Tommy’s main beef is not with people of other races or sexual orientations at all, but with Islam. His hometown of Luton has experienced a rapid demographic shift from mostly white British in the 1970s to a white-minority town today as confirmed by the 2021 census. The growing Muslim community, mainly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent, dominate the town’s inner and western districts. Anyone growing up there since the 1980s would have had a hard time at school as a white supremacist. My mother taught in a primary school in the Bury Park district that went from around 50% Muslim in 1980 to 95% Muslim by the end of the 1980s. Over the next three decades this trend spread to other schools, prompting an exodus of other Lutonians to the outer suburbs and surrounding market towns.
In his infinite wisdom, Mr Yaxley Lennon chose to collaborate with the well-funded Israel lobby via the deceptively labelled and allegedly socially conservative Canadian outfit, Rebel Media. They’ve bankrolled many of Tommy’s court cases over allegations of grievous bodily harm or contempt of court. Mr Yaxley Lennon started the now disbanded English Defence League as a reaction to local protesters shouting “burn in hell” during a home-coming parade for soldiers who had served in Iraq around 2009. Does that mean he supported the invasion of Iraq and failed to understand the close ties between the Military Industrial Complex, the Israel lobby and proponents of mass migration? As much as the establishment media vilify him, I think the Tommy Robinson ™️ brand is controlled opposition, a safety valve for the pent-up anger of the settled working classes, yearning for a bygone interlude of post-imperial Cool Britannia with its iconic mix of rock and reggae bands superimposed on a landscape of industrial decline, creeping Americanisation, half-hearted urban renewal and quirky insular customs.
On the sidelines, genuine ethnonationalists and racial segregationists do exist. Their positions vary from those who advocate monoculturalism within stable nation states to those who want to restore monoracial societies in Western Europe. Britain First, which is not exclusively white, may come close to the first tendency, while only fringe outfits like Patriotic Alternative support the latter. Both tendencies may advocate some form of repatriation or population exchange, although historically such exchanges have seldom been peaceful. However, none of the fringe right-wing groups openly supported the riots or urged their followers to burn asylum seeker hotels. Those calls came from hasty social media posts. In the recent past, many virtue-signallers have wished death on the unjabbed and a journalist by the name of David Aaronovitch called for the murder of Donald Trump, two weeks before an attempted assassination on the former President. This is the same towering intellect who not only supported all of Tony Blair’s wars, calling opponents pro-Saddam fascists, but also wrote a book attacking conspiracy theorists, Voodoo Histories. If you scour social media sites, you’ll see plenty of death wishes directed at undesirables or the perceived enemies of progress. Any violence attributed to the far-right came from feral gangs of disillusioned and largely apolitical youngsters as well as a few agitators who egged on small groups of hotheads on the margins of otherwise peaceful protests. The only examples of online incitement to mindless violence came from some unexpected sources, such as the wife of a Tory councillor, Lucy Connelly, who wrote on X/Twitter “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******* for all I care... If that makes me racist, so be it” in the immediate aftermath of the Southport stabbings. These are not the musings of a hard-headed activist of any political persuasion, but outpourings of anger and emotional turmoil. Of the over one thousand people arrested and fast-tracked for sentencing, are many with long-term psychological traumas. A 69-year-old alcoholic was condemned to 32 months in jail for violent disorder and possessing a truncheon, while a 22-year-old young man with learning difficulties got a 26 months jail sentence for smashing windows of nearby residential properties. Meanwhile rapists, muggers and murderers have been released early after only 6 or 12 months in jail for much more serious crimes.
Intellectual Diversity
In the not-too-distant past, we could more easily respect a wider diversity of opinions on the key ethical, scientific and economic issues of the day, as long as we adhered to common social etiquette. I know for a fact many of my Church-going neighbours in the 1970s considered homosexuality a sin, opposed abortion and had not yet embraced colour-blind multi-racialism, largely because most people were, outside of London and a few other urban districts, still boringly pale-skinned, especially in leafy suburbs and small market towns.
I grew up in a staunch Labour household. My father believed he stood up for ordinary working people of all creeds and colours. He campaigned against Britain’s membership of the European Economic Union and supported greater public ownership. We would discuss politics at the dinner table. For a while my elder brother would try to outdo my father’s newfound radicalism. He joined the Young Socialists, supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, opposed US imperialism and took a stand against the racism of the anti-immigration National Front, which had started to pick up protest votes from the disillusioned working classes, although seldom more than 5%. A large map of Palestine showing the expansion of Israel into the occupied territories bedecked his bedroom wall. Apart from occasionally trying to point out their hypocrisy on some matters, I didn’t really engage in meaningful political debate until the age of fourteen when my brother dragged me along to the large Rock against Racism concerts in London and later introduced me to the National Union of School Students with its campaigns for school councils, getting rid of school uniform, banning corporal punishment, ending religious education and providing more explicit sex education. Two of my brother’s comrades persuaded me to attend the union’s small conference. One belonged to the tiny Communist Party (of Great Britain) and the other hung out with the trendier Socialist Workers’ crowd. I may have been the youngest attendee. Indeed, most were either radical organisers in their 20s or sixth-formers (aged 16 to 18) eager to enjoy the free gig and disco laid on that evening. Later in 1978, I would get expelled from high school for distributing NUSS magazines with articles on the joys of masturbation and homoeroticism, both taboo subjects among many Catholic families. I still recall my head teacher’s words: “You’re not mature enough to understand the consequences of this propaganda. You’re being used. You’ll have your say when you’re older.”.
Anti-racism was one of many rebellious causes that sought to break ranks with Britain’s imperial past and its new role as junior partner of US imperialism, with its covert support for racially segregated South Africa and its proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere. The establishment had not yet fully rebranded itself. Then in 1979, the Southern English working classes rejected Labour as Maggie Thatcher wrapped herself in the Union Jack and promised council house tenants could buy their homes. The new government let failing industries go bust, privatised many state-owned businesses and presided over soaring unemployment. To this day, millions in Scotland, Wales and Northern England hate Thatcher for destroying the country’s industrial heartlands. Labour took a turn to the old radical left, calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU. For a short while, Labour was ahead in the polls. Then in April 1982, Argentina, under General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta, invaded the Falkland Islands. Within a week, Margaret Thatcher’s government sent a task force to recapture the sparsely populated islands 300 miles east of Patagonia. The mass media cheered on the war effort, with dissent confined to a few columns in the Guardian or radical leftwing press. Although Michael Foot supported the war effort, because it highlighted the importance of a strong navy and conventional weapons, the Tories rose in the polls and won a landslide victory in 1983 on the back of jingoism. The suppressed truth is that successive British governments had neglected the Falkland Islands, with only 1600 permanent inhabitants in 1982. In the late 1970s, amid IMF-imposed budgetary constraints, British diplomats had considered transferring sovereignty to Argentina and leasing the islands back to keep alive their outpost around Port Stanley. The Falklands war represented the last gasp of Rule Britannia just as most of British industry came under multinational control. While the UK government spent countless billions to defend the self-determination and customs of a couple of thousand Islanders, it neglected the plight of once proud working-class communities back home unable to adapt to the fast-paced gig economy and often trapped in a vicious cycle of welfare dependence and family breakdowns with a steady brain drain of the best and brightest. Whole neighbourhoods lay mainly empty with boarded-up terraced houses, only to be resettled by new culturally diverse communities, sowing the seeds of future internecine conflict in the event of economic meltdown on a comparable scale to that seen before the breakup of Yugoslavia.
End goal of Surveillance
Some may rejoice at the new government’s focus on far-right thugs as retribution for past colonial crimes, but once the precedent has been set to police private communications for hints of racism that may, in theory, incite violence, it can be applied to any type of dissent. Lincolnshire Police gave the game away by charging 40 year-old Wayne O’Rourke with “anti-establishment rhetoric” in the wake of anti-mass-migration protests. Everyone from the Prince of Wales to the Archbishop of Canterbury has joined a chorus of condemnation not only against reactionary plebs, but against the one tech billionaire, Elon Musk, who still allows free speech on his X/Twitter platform. When the likes of Alastair Campbell, whose dodgy dossier on WMDs persuaded MPs to back UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq, join forces with woke broadcaster, Carol Vorderman, to call on the government to censor social media, you know something is wrong. By now, it must be crystal clear the establishment no longer hides behind the garb of Britishness, except when commemorating the world wars of the last century or celebrating sporting achievements. It has fully embraced global technocracy and sees angry free-thinking plebs as obstacles in their plans to reengineer society.
As recent experience with the demonisation of covid sceptics and anti-Gaza-genocide protesters has shown, it will not stop there. Public health, antisemitism, women’s rights and/or transphobia can be easily invoked to silence critics of mandatory vaccination, Israeli war crimes, abortion, puberty blockers or gender self-identification. All these positions are essentially anti-establishment. The establishment wants medical mandates, an expansion of the war machine (and not just in support of Israel), easier abortion and moves towards transhumanism without natural procreation. However, different cultural groups may stand against these policies. Opposition to abortion and LGBTQ education comes both from devout Christians and Muslims. On current trends, opposition to assisted dying services may also be deemed far-right, a new synonym for heretical.
Just like covid, the symptoms of far-right thinking keep changing and the bug itself is almost impossible to detect without magnifying its strands. It may mean anything from football hooliganism and drunken thuggery to social conservatism or principled opposition to a one-world government. You could test positive for far-rightness by criticising any of the establishment's 2030 Agenda goads for sustainable development.