AWL leaflet text: BNP plan election blitz

Submitted by Janine on 1 January, 2000 - 9:27

BNP plan election blitz:
Workers' action to beat the fascists!

The British National Party pumps out racist filth against black and Jewish people. Their speciality is to blame black and immigrant workers for the more blatant problems caused by British capitalist society - unemployment and terrible housing - and Jewish people for the dog-eat-dog, money-rules ways of Tony Blair's new Britain. They promote a jingoistic, white-only, might-is-right culture.

They are also thugs, who make a cult of violence. Their members have been responsible for racist attacks and their propaganda incites racist violence.

The BNP are a threat to us all. If they succeed in setting white workers against black and Jewish people, in the illusion of solving white unemployment and poverty at the expense of black workers, we will all lose out.

If the fascists came to power they would crush opposition parties and smash the unions. They would kill or expel black and Jewish people.

Don't trust the establishment to pull the plug!

The BNP say they will stand a "full compliment" of candidates in England and Scotland in the European elections to be held on 10 June. They expect to have a party political broadcast shown on BBC 1 and 2 on Friday 21 May, and they state they will distribute 15 million leaflets during the election campaign.

We all want to stop the BNP getting onto our television screens, and to stop their election addresses coming through our letter boxes - and more generally end the threat of the BNP altogether.

But the BBC is committed by its charter to 'fairness' and impartiality - even for fascists.

The Royal Mail management is hardly a friend of democracy and progress. Ask anyone who works for Royal Mail about their bosses!

Appeals to their good nature will not work. If we want to stop the BNP, we alone can do that work. Postal workers who have refused to deliver the BNP's election material have shown the way to stop the Nazis - through workers' action. Workers have the power to stop the fascists, and an interest in doing so, too. The unions would be destroyed by a fascist government.

The idea that the establishment can be relied on to do the job of stifling the fascists is an illusion. It is the sort of misunderstanding which drugged millions of liberal and socialist opponents of Hitler into a passivity which aided the Nazis in their march to power. They looked to the state and the "authorities" to deal with the racists. Even when the state did act (Nazi uniforms were banned for a while in 1932) it did not seriously inhibit the Nazis. In the end, in Germany, "the authorities" helped Hitler to smash the labour movement and set up, first, concentration camps and, then, the death camps.

What type of anti-fascism?

If the fascists remain a force on the edge of British politics a few police bans might well be an effective anti-fascism.

But if political and social conditions change, new possibilities for the fascists may open up, exposing these policies as inadequate and sometimes even counter-productive.

And we may be witnessing such a change. Tony Blair's New Labour government has altered the political landscape. Blair has continued with Tory policies. But his government rests on what in name remains the traditional party of the trade unions. Under Labour in the 1970s alienated white workers did turn to the fascist National Front as 'their' Labour Party betrayed them.

The fascists have a very simple message for alienated white workers: 'Want jobs and decent pay? Blame the immigrants and asylum seekers. Take the jobs from the blacks.'

New Labour mimics the Tories. Everything they do is designed to please one-time Tory voters. One consequence is that millions of people now feel that nobody speaks for them.

The fascists aim to exploit this situation.

Britain "lags behind" many European countries, such as France and Austria, in developing a large-scale fascist movement. If that changes, bureaucratic forms of anti-fascism will not be enough. The idea that we can rely on the state - the police who protect fascist marches, or on the BBC or the Royal Mail's management! - will lull into inactivity people who might otherwise take to the streets. That will make the growth of fascism easier.

We need positive answers

Anti-fascists are opposed to fascism. But what are they for?

It is not only necessary to know what we are against, but to be effective anti-fascism must also offer a positive alternative.

The labour movement must offer a real alternative to the poisonous demagogy of the fascists.

Right now effective anti-fascism means black and white workers' unity in a fight against all racism and for jobs and homes for all workers.

Perhaps this would cut us off from a few people in the church, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, the Liberal Party and a few freakishly benevolent Tory MPs? Yes, of course! But we would have an effective policy for the big majority in society, the working class. We would have real answers for those vulnerable to foul, racist demagogy.

An effective policy

The concentration of serious anti-nazi activists can not be on appeals to the establishment to gag the fascists. They allow the nazis the opportunity to present themselves as the persecuted victims of democratic hypocrites, who want free speech - but only for themselves and their preferred opponents.

The key to effective anti-fascism is to look to the working class, black and white united, and to mass action around a positive set of policies:

  • Jobs for all workers by cutting the working week with no loss of pay.
  • Rebuild the welfare state - high quality health care and free education for all!
  • Build decent homes for all.

Who should pay? A workers' government would make the rich pay for what the working class needs.

Black and white, unite and fight against all racism, and for socialism!

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