Clod-hopping

Much hoo-haa recently about the BNP, with everyone pretty much conforming to type. As previously mentioned, Labour tried desperately to energise its base by predicting that "eight out of ten" voters in certain boroughs might vote BNP. (In fact, it was eight out of ten "families", which raises interesting questions itself. I thought the family-as-block-vote gag was only pulled by those least likely to vote BNP, but whatever. Apparently the white working class, too, likes to discourage independent thought in its children. No wonder Labour keeps getting elected.) As a piece of electioneering, it was generally held to have been an unmitigated disaster (in terms of generating free publicity for and sparking debate about the BNP and thus fixing their name in voters' minds), so no change there for Margaret Hodge. The BBC forgot it was supposed to be impartial and had David Dimbleby destroy Nick Griffin live on air. The Conservatives appeared to have all undergone procedures to remove the words "asylum" and "immigration" from their vocabularies, thus ensuring that any stray Labour votes from the white working class really would go to the BNP. The Lib Dems continued their policy of studied irrelevance, neither gaining nor losing much ground in all the fuss. And everyone continued to insist on referring to the BNP as a far-Right party.

This suits Labour, of course, since the Conservatives are (or at least used to be) a Right-wing party, and nothing is more likely to frighten centrists or swing-voters away from the Conservatives than the idea that they're essentially of the same stripe as the BNP. It suits the BBC, too, for the same reason. As long as this fatuous meme can be perpetuated, half the battle against the Conservatives is already won.

It's slightly alarming that I have to reply on the cadaverous Lord Tebbit to back up this argument, but mostly I do. There was a brief exchange of correspondence in the Telegraph, in which Tebbit pointed out the fallacies inherent in the description of the BNP as Right-wing, Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis displayed his ignorance (as befits a trades unionist) and reflexive acceptance of said fatuous meme, and Tebbit elaborated, with a little back-up.

Then Toby Roberts got in on the act. I've never heard of him before (I rarely read the Sunday Telegraph), which is clearly because he's not that bright and isn't allowed to write for the serious papers very often. His article consists almost entirely of a cheerful description of his background, before carefully constructing an elaborate straw man argument and tearing it down quite emphatically. In the last paragraph (the only part of the essay that contains any actual propositions) he concludes that because the BNP "would institute legal distinctions on ethnic grounds ... would make policy by labels [and] ... really are haters", they must be an extreme Right-wing organisation. This doesn't contradict anything said by Tebbit, of course, but that didn't stop him descending into abuse. Tebbit's point was only ever that racism, in and of itself, is not Right-wing any more than it is Left-wing. It is simply racism. The BNP takes its racsim and dresses it up in Left-wing policies. Ah, fuck it: Tebbit said it better anyway. But I'll just quote the best bit:

The fact, which even the most confused clods should be able to understand, is that nationalism, racism and anti-semitism are not uniquely of the Left or Right but can be found on either side of the spectrum. The misunderstanding of this goes back to 1939, when Hitler and Stalin were allies, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war with Hitler by fomenting strikes in the mines and the docks.

Our efficient propaganda machine labelled the Nazis "Right-wing", both to counter the far Left's efforts to assist Stalin's ally Hitler, and to help Attlee bring the Labour Party into Churchill's wartime coalition.

Labour, and the Left in general, has been buying into this misapprehension ever since, and has been persuading the voters to do so too. Freddy Salinger isn't deceived.