Love thy enemy

At the height of the civil war within the Labour party that eventually led the creation of the SDP, Shirley Williams issued a warning to anyone complacent about the danger of the extreme left.

‘I was brought up as youngster to learn about fascism. My parents fought against fascism, and they were both on the Gestapo blacklist, so I know something about it. But there can be fascism of the left as well as fascism of the right.’

I was reminded of that quote by events at the Oxford Union yesterday. What we saw was fervent anti-fascists being overtaken by a most fascist impulse. They were so intolerant of those who disagree with them that they were prepared to use force to get there way.

Let’s be clear about this. You have a right to object to Irving and Griffin being invited to speak. You have the right to protest about that decision. But at no point did anyone acquire the right to break the law in order to threaten people attending a perfectly legal meeting.

The views held by Irving and Griffin are indeed reprehensible but this will do nothing to help counter those beliefs. Trying to stop the fascists being heard is a strategy bound to fail. There are a regrettably large number of people who sympathise with them and they will make us hear them one way or another. The way to stop them is not through violent protest but by engaging in the kind of community politics that makes a difference to people’s lives and shows them that there is a real alternative. That requires us to be able to tackle the fascist’s arguments and that requires us to have heard them.

What makes someone a true anti-fascist is not joining unite against fascism or waving placards in the rain but the willingness, simultaneously, to tolerate and to challenge views we find repulsive.

P.S: The best account I have seen of what happend comes from Jonny Wright’s Hug a Hoodie blog. Please do read it, it will be worth your time.

Rose tinted Rivers of Blood

‘Rivers of Blood’ was a deplorable attempt to inflame hostility to outsiders for political gain. Its author deserves condemnation not exaltation.

I am sorry to comment twice on the same speech in as many days but I am really angry. I have just read Simon Heffer’s latest rant in the Telegraph and it has left me with smoke billowing from my ears. Heffer's attempts to paint Enoch Powell as a visionary hero trying to save Britain from being destroyed by immigrant hordes is by turns laughable, infuriating and outrageous. He angrily instructs us to ‘Read the speech. Make up your own mind.’ Well I have and I am at a loss to see how anyone else, who has could be in any doubt that it is a truly shameful speech.

Heffer starts off with familiar claim that ‘Enoch was right’ not only about immigration but also about ‘the British peoples irreconcilability to the EU’ and ‘the destruction of the United Kingdom if devolution was allowed.’ Well last time I checked the UK was still united and still a member of the EU, so I am not quite clear why Mr Heffer thinks this demonstrates insight on Powell’s part. When it comes to immigration, Powell’s apparent Clairvoyance is not much more convincing. ‘We have 52 dead in attacks by Islamist fanatics in 2005 to prove how integration has failed’ exclaims Heffer. 7/7 was a horrendous event but we must bear in mind that it was carried out by just four people. There appalling actions should not and must not overshadow the fact that millions of people from ethnic minorities live peacefully in Britain, following the law and paying taxes. We are still very far from Powell’s predictions of the death of our nation.

Heffer goes on to claim Powell ‘had merely been highlighting the danger of the racism of others’ and to deny that Powell was a racist. For what it is worth I agree that it is unlikely that Powell was himself a racist for the reasons that Heffer presents. What he did do was deliver a speech that set out quite deliberately to associate him with racist sentiments for political gain. It is striking that at no point does Powell condemn racism and in many places he seems to actually condone it. A man who says that ‘in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ is described by Powell as ‘decent.’ The most powerful section of the speech deals with the persecution of an elderly woman by her black neighbours. It is a very emotive story and Powell lingers on it for a while. Yet when he adds in the little detail that she had refused to have black tenants, he does not pause for a second to suggest that this is anyway wrong. Such tricks inevitably left Powell open to charges of racism and justifiably so. Powell must have known this yet he left them in. The only conceivable reason to do so was that he hoped to be associated with racist sentiments and to derive some kind of political gain from that fact.

Probably the most bizarre claim in the entire article comes in a short paragraph towards the end. Heffer writes that: ‘In a smug observation last week, the equality tsar Trevor Phillips congratulated David Cameron on "de-racialising" the immigration question. But who racialised it in the first place? It wasn't Powell. It was the Left, whose aim of destroying our nation state not least by destroying our culture was furthered by attacks on Powell for telling the unpalatable truth.’ This comment moves Heffer from being simply misguided into the realms of the tin foil wearing nut jobs. The left is not on a mission to obliterate Britain or its culture. While you can quite legitimately oppose left wing ideas and policies, doing so on the basis that your political adversaries are the servants of some sinister plot is to lower yourself to Naomi Kleinesque levels of absurdity.

To compound the error he includes no evidence to support the notion that the left are to blame for the connection between race and immigration and he fails to mention that Powell most certainly did contribute to the blurring of the debates about race and immigration. He devotes as much of the speech to talking about racial discrimination laws as to immigration. Heffer tries to bolster his case by pointing out that Powell never says the word race in the speech, when in fact he does. For example, in the section about the harassed pensioner he says that: “When the new Race Relations Bill is passed...” He also talks about skin colour and ‘Negroes’. So to claim that the speech is not about race is bizarre.

It is entirely possible to talk about immigration with talking about race. If you want to see examples then look no further than David Cameron’s speech on immigration last week. The contrast between this and the hateful, provocative rhetoric of ‘rivers of blood’ could not be clearer. The Conservative leader certainly deserves the praise he has received for tackling the immigration debate in such a responsible way.

Heffer suggests that Cameron has ‘wilfully misunderstood Powell’ when in reality it is Heffer with his desire to exonerate his hero, who his mistaken. As Enoch Powell knew all too all well, words are weapons. And on April 20 1968 he unleashed a verbal arsenal against Britain’s vulnerable immigrant communities and the consequences of that callous decision are still with us today.

Anyway must be off, I’ve got nation states and cultures to be destroying....

The accidental racists

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The view that accusations of racism are an attempt by liberals to shut down debate on immigration is wide of the mark. In reality they are our killer argument.

I want you to imagine something. What would happen if the Mayor of London decided that in order to protect the wages of ordinary Londoners, he was going to prevent people from outside London coming to work in the capital? This would be regarded not only as completely barmy but also deeply unfair; Why should jobs in London only be available, when there are plenty of people in the rest of the UK perfectly capable of doing them? Surely, this is a rather nasty form of discrimination? Now replace the word ‘London’ with ‘America/Europe’ and ‘UK’ with ‘world’ and you have a pretty good description of the iniquities of immigration controls.

I raise this issue because on one of my favorite blogs, Dizzy Thinks, there is an entry asking: ‘How can you sell any immigration policy…without being called a racist?’ The answer is that you can’t because these policies are inherently discriminatory. They rest on the assumption that it is legitimate to deny certain rights and opportunities to people solely on the basis of their nationality.

I am not suggesting for a minute that the people advocating these policies are all skin headed neo-Nazis. It is entirely possible to support tougher limits on immigration without meaning to support a racist policy. This is not about the intentions behind a policy but there impact. That is why I am endeavoring to talk about these policies as ‘discriminatory’ rather than ‘racist.’ The problem for these accidentals racists is that many people are going to assume that because they are promoting a policy with racist results that they have racist motives.

A possible response by those who want to reduce immigration is to suggest the fact that white migrants are affected by controls means that they aren’t racist. This is true but it misses the point. They do not necessarily discriminate on the basis of skin colour (though the bulk of people they effect are non-white) but nationality. To suggest that someone opportunities in life should be determined by what passport they hold is no better than suggesting it should be on the basis of their race. Both are largely the result of an accident of birth rather than personal decisions.

Another commonly used to defense is to claim that it is legitimate for us to place the interests of British nationals above those of foreigners because the state’s primary responsibility is to the people that make up the political community. This does not really rebut the claim that immigration controls are discriminatory but instead tries to provide a justification for it and it is not even a terribly convincing one. In the American South during the era of segregation, the state authorities that imposed the race laws were representing a political community composed of white Americans that did not entitle that state to take actions designed to uphold the dominance of the white majority. The states responsibilities to its citizens is not a license to infringe the rights of foreign nationals.

If all people are created free and equal, then jobs should not be denied to talented individuals simply because they are, say, Mexican rather than American. What we have done by trying to block global migration is to reintroduce segregation, only this time on a global scale. It is unjust and should be ended.

Sweeney Vs the Nazis

I have no idea what posses someone to spend their weekends dressed in Waffen SS uniform re-enacting the most bloody conflict in human history. I have even less idea why they would consider it fun. Its tasteless, tacky and not a little weird. It really stretches Voltaire’s principle that ‘I may not like what you have to say but I will die for your right to say it’ to the limit because I really don’t like what they are doing and I would be rather reluctant to die for their right to do it. I will, however, happily write a blog piece defending their rights to do it.

Many European countries, mainly those that formed part of the Third Reich, have laws prohibiting expressions of support for Nazis and denying that the holocaust took place. These laws often include a ban on Nazi symbols and uniforms. There was a recent attempt by the German government to get this ban passed into EU law.

As a student of history such laws alarm me because if you are to have such a law it must cover historians if it is not to have an elephant sized loophole in it. Nazi memorabilia, books and the like are important historical sources. Even Nazi sympathisers have their value. The historian Ian Kershaw, the author of the definitive biography of Hitler, first became interested in the Nazi period after he encountered a former SS officer while studying in Germany and wanted to be able to explain his anti-Semitic rants. If we do not make use of all the sources at our disposal, our understanding of Nazism will be poorer and as a consequence we will be less able to learn the lessons of that dreadful period. And you know what they say about people who do not learn from history.

I am sympathetic to the idea that such a law would protect the feelings of
those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. What they must feel when they see some twerp condoning or trivialising what happened to them is unimaginable but banning things because they cause offence is a dangerous game to get into. A lot of things cause offence to a lot of people. If we can only say things that don’t offend people then we will end up living in silence.

The effectiveness of these laws in combating the far right is dubious. They are as likely to create neo-nazi martyrs as they are to prevent people from being corrupted by propaganda. Austria, the country that locked up David Irving for holocaust denial was also the first country in Europe is also the country where Jorg Haider’s Freedom party got into government. Jean Marie Le Penn was convicted of holocaust denial but still got into the run off of the French presidential election. If we are to beat these fascists then we need to fight them at the ballot box and in debating chamber rather than in the courts.

If free speech is to mean anything then it cannot just apply to views we agree with. Upholding the rights of people like David Irving, Nick griffin and their fellow pond life is not a pleasant thing to do but it is something that needs to be done. Defending freedom of speech is worth doing because it gives you the right to say just what you think of Nazis.

Strange Fruit

There's an excellent article in todays Guardian looking at the story of Billie Holiday's song 'a strange fruit.' It is written by a playwright who named a play 'Strange Fruit' unaware of the connotations it has for many people. He only found out when he found himself on a long car journey through Alabama with the father of a girl murdered by the Klu Klux Klan. It is a fascinating read and I recommend, nay insist, that you read it.