Right-Wing Populism in Europe

Politics and Discourse

Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, Brigitte Mral, Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, Brigitte Mral

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780933443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Governo americano

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Right-wing populist movements and related political parties are gaining ground in many EU member states. This unique, interdisciplinary book provides an overall picture of the dynamics and development of these parties across Europe and beyond. Combining theory with in-depth case studies, it offers a comparative analysis of the policies and rhetoric of existing and emerging parties including the British BNP, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Danish Folkeparti. The case studies qualitatively and quantitatively analyse right-wing populist groups in the following countries: Austria, Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia, with one essay exclusively focused on the US. This timely and socially relevant collection is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners wanting to understand the recent rise of populist right wing parties at local, countrywide and regional levels.

Section II

Case Studies – Western Europe

7

Ploughing the Same Furrow? Continuity and Change on Britain’s Extreme-Right Fringe

John E. Richardson

In this chapter, I discuss two British political organizations and their relationships to British fascism. The first of these is the British National Party (BNP) – which is, at the time of writing, the largest extreme right-wing party in Britain. In contrast to certain published academic work (e.g. Mudde 2007, Fella 2008, Mastropaolo 2008), this chapter will argue that the BNP should not be categorized as a ‘populist radical right-wing’ party. Operating at the highest levels of the BNP, a coterie of hardcore (ex-)National Socialists can be identified who, across the decades, have acted like a ‘container group’, ensuring the continuation of their political ideology. The origins of this coterie date from the re-establishment of the British tradition of National Socialism in the late 1950s, since which time it has acted to protect and maintain the flame of British fascist ideology. Accordingly, categorizing the party as ideologically ‘populist’ ‘may serve as an unintended form of democratic legitimization of modern xenophobia and neo-fascism’ (Mammone 2009: 174). The second organization discussed in this chapter is the street-fighting movement the English Defence League (EDL), whose nascent ideology contains populist and radical elements. However, the EDL is not a political party and, as such, it lacks a mandated leadership, a stable ideological position and a widely agreed upon programme of political action. These facts create difficulties for both the classification and policing of the EDL, as I discuss below.

Working from the arguments of previous analysts of British fascist ideology – primarily those of Billig (1978) and Copsey (2007, 2008) – I argue that an understanding of extremist parties requires comparative analysis of texts produced at different times and for different audiences (insider and outsider; potential voter and party initiates) (see, for example, Richardson & Wodak 2009a, 2009b, Richardson 2011). This analysis needs to be contextualized through examining the histories and activities of the party, ‘their history, cultures and heritage, on forms of party socialization and membership, and ideology and internal discourse’ (Mammone 2009: 176). The remainder of this chapter briefly discusses the surface and depths of BNP ideology, the political records of certain party members, the associations between the BNP and other European fascist parties and organizations and the party’s continued anti-Semitism. Following this, I will briefly discuss the EDL and the ways that the ideology of this fractious movement could develop in the future.

BNP ideology: Surface and depth

As the BNP Leader Nick Griffin has himself noted, the BNP has its ideological roots ‘in the sub-Mosleyite whackiness of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League’ (Griffin 2003, cited in Copsey 2007: 70). Arnold Leese has been described as the ‘high priest’ of British Nazism (Thayer 1965) and, until very recently, there were core members of the BNP who had been his contemporaries in the 1950s – John Bean, for example, the last editor of the BNP’s magazine Identity. In essence, the BNP’s political ideology still draws strength from Leese’s antisemitic racial fascism and remains committed to the racial purification of the national space by anti-democratic paramilitary means.

This is not to claim that the BNP core ideology is a simple mimetic reproduction of the concerns that dominated the fascist parties of the inter-war period. Nor do I regard the ideological commitments of the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), the British Union of Fascists (BUF) or any other fascist party of that period as a touchstone against which contemporary movements can be measured. As Paxton (2005: 14–15) has argued, such an emphasis on historic definitions provides ‘a static picture of something that is better perceived in movement . . . It is like observing . . . birds mounted in a glass case instead of alive in their habitat’. Other political ideologies have mutated and transformed relative to changing social and political circumstances, so it would be odd to believe that fascism has not also.¹ Fascism is, as Weber (1964) put it, a dynamic but vague ideology, with few specific predetermined objectives, and is inherently prone to opportunist shifts. However, this much I believe we can argue – this much does remain a constant: when analysing the discourses of fascist parties and movements, ‘more than in most others, it is essential to separate the propaganda from the real attitude in order to gain an understanding of its essential character’ (Mannheim 1960: 120). The history and core ideology of the BNP are concealed from the wider public through the adoption of a ‘dual style’ of political communication: ‘esoteric appeals’ are used to communicate to ‘intellectual’ insiders and grossly simplified ‘exoteric appeals’ to address both the mass membership and the electorate (see Taylor 1979: 127). The current leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, is on record as arguing explicitly for this Janus-faced communications policy. In an article published in the magazine Patriot shortly after his first trial for incitement to racial hatred, Griffin outlined to BNP activists his plans for ‘modernization’ of the party:

As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern . . . we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness . . . Of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore, for, like you, I do not intend this movement to lose its way. But when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on – all ordinary people want to know is what we can do for them that the other parties can’t or won’t. (Patriot, No. 4, 1999)

The importance of this extract – acknowledging that the BNP adopts a ‘moderate’ public face to hide an ideological core – cannot be over-emphasized. Here, Griffin explicitly makes a distinction between exoteric and esoteric appeal, arguing that it is both possible and desirable to appeal to ‘ordinary people’ while teaching ‘the truth to the hardcore’ by more covert means. Further, the article indexes this strategy of exoteric/esoteric appeal in a more fundamental way. Even here, writing for party members on the subject of strategically moderating the BNP’s ‘careless extremism’, Griffin partially conceals ‘the truth’ to which he and his party remain wedded: in British fascist discourse, ‘racial differences’ is a code for racial hierarchies; ‘genetics’ is a code for scientific racism, and theories of genetic racial superiority/inferiority more specifically; ‘Zionism’ is a code word for Jews, the ‘Jewish Question’ and the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy in particular (Billig 1978); and ‘historical revisionism’ refers to Holocaust denial. In their place, Griffin argues that the party needs to concentrate its propaganda on ‘idealistic, unobjectionable, motherhood and apple pie concepts’ (ibid.): freedom, democracy, security and identity (see Copsey 2007, 2008).

British National Party members

The actions of party leaders, members and supporters reveal an enduring commitment to fascist politics. To take an anecdotal example first, I personally took the photographs below (Figures 7.1a and 7.1b), at the BNP’s Red, White and Blue Festival, in August 2009. The man, saluting the crowd I was part of, was later arrested by the attending police.

The man pictured below is by no means an aberrant case among BNP members. And, in case readers may feel I am selecting only the most extreme outlying members of the party, fascist tendencies can also be identified in the party’s senior members. On the eve of the 2010 UK General Election, Searchlight published brief biographies of 19 BNP election candidates showing their commitment to racism and political extremism. Two of the more straightforwardly fascist of these included:

Barry Bennett (Parliamentary candidate for Gosport) who wrote the following on the Stormfront website: ‘I believe in National Socialism, WW2 style, it was best, no other power had anything like it. The ideology was fantastic. The culture, nothing like it. If it was here now, I’d defect to Germany.’

Jeffrey Marshall (Eastbury ward, Barking and Dagenham Council), the Central London BNP organizer, who in response to the death of David Cameron’s six-year-old son, wrote in an internet politics group: ‘We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it . . . There is actually not a great deal of point in keeping these sort of people alive, after all’ (see Williams and Cressy 2010: 12–13, Richardson 2011).

Figure 7.1a Fascist salutes at the BNP ‘Red, White and Blue’ festival, August 2009. © John E. Richardson.

Given that the people above were selected to stand as parliamentary candidates, it should come as no surprise that the leadership of the party also has similar political inclinations. Nick Griffin has been a leading member of fascist parties since the 1970s – initially the National Front (NF), and later the International Third Position (ITP). He has also edited, written and published various fascist publications, including the pamphlet Who are the MIND-BENDERS? (Anon 1997), which drew on the antisemitic fraud the Protocols and adopted the structure of Who Rules America? written by an American neo-Nazi, William Pierce. In more detail, Who are the MIND-BENDERS? (ibid.) detailed the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to brainwash the British (white) people in their own country. In this pamphlet, Griffin claimed: ‘The mass media in Britain today have managed to implant into many people’s minds the idea that it is “anti-Semitic” even to acknowledge that members of the Jewish community play a large part in controlling our news.’ Jews are also accused of ‘providing us with an endless diet of pro-multiracial, pro-homosexual, anti-British trash’.

Griffin has been prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred on two occasions – successfully in 1998 for Holocaust denial material published in his magazine The Rune, for which he received a nine-month suspended sentence. When interviewed by the police during this investigation, Griffin argued:

Figure 7.1b Fascist salutes at the BNP ‘Red, White and Blue’ festival, August 2009. © John E. Richardson.

[Griffin] I cannot see how any Jew should be upset, erm, if they find out that such large numbers of their people weren’t horribly killed. It’s good news! I can’t see it’s insulting to anybody. . . .

[Police questioner] By promoting the fact that they believe, as history bears out, that the Holocaust occurred-

[Griffin] History does not bear that out.

[Police questioner] Well, the recognized history, for the majority of people then, the-

[Griffin] The orthodox history accepts it in the same way that people once thought that, erm, that the sun goes round the earth, yes.

He has never distanced himself from these statements. Indeed footage filmed by journalist Dominic Carman (Griffin’s unofficial biographer), in 2004 using a concealed camera, shows he still believes ‘The Jews’ have ‘simply bought the West, in terms of press and so on, for their own political ends’, and ‘If Hitler hadn’t been so daft, they’d have exterminated the German Jews’.² I see little evidence in this of the claimed ‘modernization’ and rejection of fascist ideology in the BNP.

Griffin currently represents North England in the European Parliament, but until 2012 the BNP also had a second MEP, Andrew Brons, who represented Yorkshire and the Humber. Bron’s links to British and European fascist movements go back almost 50 years. A briefing document, produced by the campaigning website Nothing British on his election as an MEP, describes him as follows: ‘Brons is a true ideologue from the National Socialist wing of the British politics. He is a strong believer in the pseudo-science of racial hygiene’.³ In 1964, aged 17, he joined the National Socialist Movement, an organization deliberately founded on 20 April 1962 (Adolf Hitler’s birthday) and led by Colin Jordan, the leading figure of post-war British Nazism. Throughout the 1960s, NSM members were responsible for an arson campaign against Jewish property and synagogues. In a letter to Jordan’s wife, Françoise Dior – who was herself charged with arson attacks against London synagogues in 1965 – Brons said: ‘I feel that our public image may suffer considerable damage as a result of these activities. I am however open to correction on this point.’ Towards the end of the 1960s, with Jordan serving another jail term under the Public Order Act for a highly racist pamphlet The Coloured Invasion, Brons joined John Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement (GBM). This party was founded on what Tyndall termed ‘British National Socialism’, though its constitution looked as Nazi influenced as the NSM, arguing ‘Only those of British or kindred Aryan blood should be members of the nation’ and that ‘The removal of the Jews from Britain must be a cardinal aim of the new order’. Brons then joined the NF, was voted onto its National Directorate in 1974, and became party Chairman in 1980, when Tyndall left to form his New National Front. His leadership of the NF did not lessen his contribution to street politics however, and in June 1984 Brons was convicted by Leeds magistrates of using insulting words and behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. The court heard how Brons and another NF member were heard shouting slogans such as ‘Death to Jews’, ‘White Power’ and ‘National Front’.⁴

In a speech at the 2009 Red, White and Blue festival, Griffin acknowledged the ideological debt that the party owed to Brons, identifying him as the person who introduced distributism to party policy. Distributism (also known as distributionism, distributivism) is a political-economic theory developed chiefly by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in which the means of production (but not wealth) are spread as widely as possible, rather than concentrated in either the hands of the state or with a small number of monopolistic (international) corporations. It accepts the capitalist mode of production but seeks to restrict capitalist ownership within national boundaries and share the alleged benefits of the accumulation of surplus value among as many as possible. It is these commitments that made it attractive to fascists – an economic system that posits a spurious equality between the propertied classes and workers and which aims to insulate the Nation from the influence of ‘International Finance’. A...