peaccenicked
3rd July 2002, 01:56
This article from the Grannydud, I mean the Guardian,
argues that because fascists have used 'respectability' to gain media coverage that the platform has already been instituted and maintained. The media is part of the State and journalist sent out by their capitalist task masters should know better. Why are they giving these racists any coverage? How would they like to feel intimidated by the fascist con trick. It is fostering ignorance and fear.
What do you think?
''Give the BNP a platform - and kick it from under them
Fascists are being normalised with soft-focus lifestyle media treatment
Jackie Ashley
Wednesday May 1, 2002
The Guardian
Leon Trotsky has not made a big impact on my life, except for the circles and the arrows. Everyone on the left in my generation probably remembers them: the symbols of the Anti-Nazi League.
It may have been kicked off by the Socialist Workers' party, but thousands of Labour activists, trade unionists and students carried the circles and arrows, back in the 1970s, as we marched against the National Front. Immigrants were welcome here, we said. No platform for racists and fascists, we shouted.
And back then it seemed to have worked. The National Front collapsed. During the last part of the Wilson-Callaghan period, there were plenty of would-be Le Pens in England - ex-army paranoids, such as General Sir Walter Walker and Colonel David Stirling, who wanted order and control and were mingling anti-trade union rhetoric with racist politics. But they went silent. No Jean-Marie Le Pen built up an organisation in our deprived and declining cities.
Or did it work? Was it the ANL? Or was it Margaret Hilda Thatcher, with her talk in 1978 of immigrants "swamping" British culture and her hard-line rightwing policies, which convinced the NF's potential voters they could relax - that Britain was in the hands of a woman who was basically on the same side? Oppose or appease?
As Gary Younge argued last week, New Labour's instinct has rather been to speak the language of the right than to confront it - with David Blunkett's talk of "swamping" and the return to a focus on crime and asylum. And of course this was tried by the French socialists, with disastrous results. But Labour does not speak with one voice either, as Alastair Campbell's appeal to the voters of Burnley showed at the weekend.
So which approach works best? Looking back, there's no doubt that the ANL was successful against the National Front. Thatcherism had some effect, but the thugs and Nazis were intimidated by the number of those who came out against them, just as Cable Street marked a moment of decisive reverse for Mosley.
But this is not the whole story and certainly not now, for times have changed. The National Front and the British National party are subtly different. The NF was more unashamedly neo-Nazi, with its shaven heads and bovver boots. Its strategy, like the Hitler followers of the bierkeller era, was pubs and streets first, votes later.
The BNP is a little cleverer. It tries to present a respectable, scrubbed face. It talks, as does the French National Front, about crime and fear and "the kids' future". Of course, we know what they're really about. We know this is just a new form of the virus, evolved to survive better.
But who is "we"? The most unsettling thing is how successful the BNP has been in insinuating itself into parts of the mainstream media. Last week, the London Evening Standard carried what read almost like a lifestyle article about an ordinary seeming couple of BNP candidates in their north London flat, with books by Guardian writers on the shelves. It discussed their eclectic taste in music, and their hopes for the future.
The Daily Telegraph followed suit, with a long piece about a community care assistant from Burnley, married to a former paratrooper who fought in the Falklands. Here is a taster: "Wearing a nurse's tunic and surrounded by porcelain figurines and the framed photographs of her children, Sharon Kenyon embodies all the characteristics one would expect of a typical loving mother. An attractive, slightly diffident woman in her mid-thirties, she speaks passionately of her loathing of paedophiles... She speaks too of her Asian friends and her determination to provide a better future for her children."
Sharon is, of course, a BNP member and her husband Andy is standing for the party in Burnley tomorrow. Sharon is not stupid. "There is nothing extreme about me or Andy," she tells the Telegraph. "We are a normal, everyday working family who pay their taxes and want to do their best for their children. Some people put us down as though we're from the National Front, but we're not. There is no comparison at all. I don't look that kind of person do I? And I wouldn't be doing a caring job if I wasn't a caring sort of person."
That, as with the Evening Standard's interviewees, is the carefully scripted line chosen by the BNP's leader, Nick Griffin. Both newspapers went on to talk of the fascists' dark side, but in both cases the overall impression was at least partly of ordinary, unextreme people who'd just "had enough". The strategy is crystal clear: the BNP are trying to normalise themselves, to wriggle into a kind of respectability that in turn allows more and more voters to excuse their own "dark side" and give them support. And it worked for Le Pen.
What is really worrying is that in our increasingly infantile public culture, where political debate is reduced to swapping soundbites and there's little sense of history, it could work here too. A country which is bored and cynical about politics, whose kids are constantly searching for the next new thing, and where being "open-minded" is the ultimate virtue, is easier to fool. Agitation through colour supplements?
"Respectable" British nationalists are already appearing on the mainstream media - on the Today programme, on Channel 4; it can only be matter of time before they are invited on to the sofas of the daytime TV shows as well. They have the oxygen of publicity whether we like it or not.
And out there, according to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times last week, there are plenty of people waiting to vote fascist, as soon as they are given the minimal excuse of a shred of respectability: 22% say they would support a British version of the French National Front - anti-Europe and anti-immigrant - if it was on offer.
So we must have a new strategy too. Britain in the 70s, with its high levels of political involvement, its powerful trade unions, its passionate arguments, is long gone. "No platform" no longer makes sense in the old way because the fascist arguments are already working their way into public life.
We have the worst of all worlds, where the BNP is getting "personal angle" coverage but where its foul ideas are not openly displayed or argued down. And again, it isn't just Britain - there's Pim Fortuyn, the eccentric hardline rightwing leader in Holland; the glamour of Haider; Le Pen's loving daughter. Modern Europe has created a glossy, soft-focus, insufficiently rigorous media space into which the ultra-right are sliding.
The time for mass marches and reclaiming the streets may come. But the urgent need now is to reclaim the media - to expose, confront and shred the arguments of the BNP and their like far more aggressively. That is a job for journalism, yes, but for political leaders too. The most urgent thing is to make fascism disgraceful again. Give them a platform, I say: then, by the power of argument and debate, knock it away from under them. ''
argues that because fascists have used 'respectability' to gain media coverage that the platform has already been instituted and maintained. The media is part of the State and journalist sent out by their capitalist task masters should know better. Why are they giving these racists any coverage? How would they like to feel intimidated by the fascist con trick. It is fostering ignorance and fear.
What do you think?
''Give the BNP a platform - and kick it from under them
Fascists are being normalised with soft-focus lifestyle media treatment
Jackie Ashley
Wednesday May 1, 2002
The Guardian
Leon Trotsky has not made a big impact on my life, except for the circles and the arrows. Everyone on the left in my generation probably remembers them: the symbols of the Anti-Nazi League.
It may have been kicked off by the Socialist Workers' party, but thousands of Labour activists, trade unionists and students carried the circles and arrows, back in the 1970s, as we marched against the National Front. Immigrants were welcome here, we said. No platform for racists and fascists, we shouted.
And back then it seemed to have worked. The National Front collapsed. During the last part of the Wilson-Callaghan period, there were plenty of would-be Le Pens in England - ex-army paranoids, such as General Sir Walter Walker and Colonel David Stirling, who wanted order and control and were mingling anti-trade union rhetoric with racist politics. But they went silent. No Jean-Marie Le Pen built up an organisation in our deprived and declining cities.
Or did it work? Was it the ANL? Or was it Margaret Hilda Thatcher, with her talk in 1978 of immigrants "swamping" British culture and her hard-line rightwing policies, which convinced the NF's potential voters they could relax - that Britain was in the hands of a woman who was basically on the same side? Oppose or appease?
As Gary Younge argued last week, New Labour's instinct has rather been to speak the language of the right than to confront it - with David Blunkett's talk of "swamping" and the return to a focus on crime and asylum. And of course this was tried by the French socialists, with disastrous results. But Labour does not speak with one voice either, as Alastair Campbell's appeal to the voters of Burnley showed at the weekend.
So which approach works best? Looking back, there's no doubt that the ANL was successful against the National Front. Thatcherism had some effect, but the thugs and Nazis were intimidated by the number of those who came out against them, just as Cable Street marked a moment of decisive reverse for Mosley.
But this is not the whole story and certainly not now, for times have changed. The National Front and the British National party are subtly different. The NF was more unashamedly neo-Nazi, with its shaven heads and bovver boots. Its strategy, like the Hitler followers of the bierkeller era, was pubs and streets first, votes later.
The BNP is a little cleverer. It tries to present a respectable, scrubbed face. It talks, as does the French National Front, about crime and fear and "the kids' future". Of course, we know what they're really about. We know this is just a new form of the virus, evolved to survive better.
But who is "we"? The most unsettling thing is how successful the BNP has been in insinuating itself into parts of the mainstream media. Last week, the London Evening Standard carried what read almost like a lifestyle article about an ordinary seeming couple of BNP candidates in their north London flat, with books by Guardian writers on the shelves. It discussed their eclectic taste in music, and their hopes for the future.
The Daily Telegraph followed suit, with a long piece about a community care assistant from Burnley, married to a former paratrooper who fought in the Falklands. Here is a taster: "Wearing a nurse's tunic and surrounded by porcelain figurines and the framed photographs of her children, Sharon Kenyon embodies all the characteristics one would expect of a typical loving mother. An attractive, slightly diffident woman in her mid-thirties, she speaks passionately of her loathing of paedophiles... She speaks too of her Asian friends and her determination to provide a better future for her children."
Sharon is, of course, a BNP member and her husband Andy is standing for the party in Burnley tomorrow. Sharon is not stupid. "There is nothing extreme about me or Andy," she tells the Telegraph. "We are a normal, everyday working family who pay their taxes and want to do their best for their children. Some people put us down as though we're from the National Front, but we're not. There is no comparison at all. I don't look that kind of person do I? And I wouldn't be doing a caring job if I wasn't a caring sort of person."
That, as with the Evening Standard's interviewees, is the carefully scripted line chosen by the BNP's leader, Nick Griffin. Both newspapers went on to talk of the fascists' dark side, but in both cases the overall impression was at least partly of ordinary, unextreme people who'd just "had enough". The strategy is crystal clear: the BNP are trying to normalise themselves, to wriggle into a kind of respectability that in turn allows more and more voters to excuse their own "dark side" and give them support. And it worked for Le Pen.
What is really worrying is that in our increasingly infantile public culture, where political debate is reduced to swapping soundbites and there's little sense of history, it could work here too. A country which is bored and cynical about politics, whose kids are constantly searching for the next new thing, and where being "open-minded" is the ultimate virtue, is easier to fool. Agitation through colour supplements?
"Respectable" British nationalists are already appearing on the mainstream media - on the Today programme, on Channel 4; it can only be matter of time before they are invited on to the sofas of the daytime TV shows as well. They have the oxygen of publicity whether we like it or not.
And out there, according to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times last week, there are plenty of people waiting to vote fascist, as soon as they are given the minimal excuse of a shred of respectability: 22% say they would support a British version of the French National Front - anti-Europe and anti-immigrant - if it was on offer.
So we must have a new strategy too. Britain in the 70s, with its high levels of political involvement, its powerful trade unions, its passionate arguments, is long gone. "No platform" no longer makes sense in the old way because the fascist arguments are already working their way into public life.
We have the worst of all worlds, where the BNP is getting "personal angle" coverage but where its foul ideas are not openly displayed or argued down. And again, it isn't just Britain - there's Pim Fortuyn, the eccentric hardline rightwing leader in Holland; the glamour of Haider; Le Pen's loving daughter. Modern Europe has created a glossy, soft-focus, insufficiently rigorous media space into which the ultra-right are sliding.
The time for mass marches and reclaiming the streets may come. But the urgent need now is to reclaim the media - to expose, confront and shred the arguments of the BNP and their like far more aggressively. That is a job for journalism, yes, but for political leaders too. The most urgent thing is to make fascism disgraceful again. Give them a platform, I say: then, by the power of argument and debate, knock it away from under them. ''