I’d like to start by congratulating Jeanette Arnold, who is seemingly, according to her CiF biography…

Chair of the Labour Group on the London Assembly and deputy chair of both the London Cultural Consortium and the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.

…not to mention ‘the only black London Assembly Member’ – in the village? – for providing a timely and salutatory reminder of pretty much everything I’ve increasingly come to despise over the years about…

…Mmm, what should I call it? The’ race relations industry’, perhaps?

That is the commonly used bit of rhetoric in some right-wing circles and in some ways it’s a fairly apt way of putting it, even if I don’t by any means buy into anything like the full right-wing rhetorical package.

A more accurate description would the ‘an ideological theory of racial politics derived from a syncretic fusion of identity politics and Marxist class theory’ but that doesn’t exactly trip light off the tongue…

Oh, bugger it, its the same kind of outmoded nonsense that been peddled by the likes of Lee Jasper since the 1980’s so for the purpose of this article, and this article alone (because Jasper’s just not that big a deal) we might as well call it ‘Jasperism’ for brevity.

Coming hot on the heels of start of BBC2’s calumnious ‘White’ season, about which I can do nothing to top Justin’s appraisal of its dubious ‘merits’:

Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.

Here come the Poles to steal our jobs, women and dignity. Let’s take a trip to putative BNP launchpad, Barking. If the programmes don’t feature some wildlife footage of scantily-clad honkys puking in a gutter outside a nightclub, I’ll run round the town with my trousers round my ankles.

… Arnold’s article was always guaranteed to get my back up.

Rest assured, if the prospect of being assailed by the sight of Justin flailing around town with his arse-cheeks flapping in the wind sounds just a little unappetising (no offence intended) then you can relax because there’s absolute no prospect of him needing to make good on his ‘promise’

But getting back to Jeanette’s article, perhaps the best thing that be said of it is that she sets out here stall nice and early, giving those of us who’ve heard it all before plenty of chance to move on and read something rather less hackneyed and more productive before wasting too much time on her remarks:

Why I fear the BNP

The British National Party could easily win seats in the London Assembly elections – unless voters wake up the threat

Yes folks, there are elections coming up fairly soon so its time to break out the only political strategy that the ‘Jasperites’ know and remind everyone that the barbarians are at the gates of the capital and that if they do get in then ‘we’re aaaaallll doooomed’ – © Private Fraser.

So its time, once again, to ‘man’ (woman, staff, – whatever… choose your own preferred word, I’m long past the point of caring) the barricades, repel the fascist hordes and beat down the bogeymen (and bogeywomen… oh stuff it, unless advised to the contrary do what lawyers do and treat masculine pronouns as being generic references to ‘human’).

Look, it’s like this. I’ve got absolutely no problem with anyone putting over the idea that BNP members and elected office go together like wheezing grannies and Harold Shipman – what really hacks me off is how the ‘Jasperites’ go about trying to put that idea over and, more to point, what they think people should doing to put a stop to it, i.e. putting up arguments like go something like this…

The facts are stark. For one seat on the assembly, the BNP need just 5% of the vote. For two seats they need 8% and for three seats 11%. For anyone doubting how achievable these targets are, at the last GLA elections in 2004 they got 4.8% – just 5,000 votes away from credibility and a stepping stone to further power…

…An increased turnout is the only way to stop the BNP gaining a foothold in London. If 45% of Londoners turn out to vote, the BNP would need 120,000 votes for one seat and almost 200,000 for two. In 2004 they got 90,000 votes.

The simple fact that Arnold blatantly overlooks here is that we live in a democracy, and if 5% (or more) of Londoners are dumb enough and/or pissed off enough with mainstream parties to vote BNP in the mistake belief that its usual coterie of racists, misogynists, scumbags, knuckledraggers and low grade morons will actually do anything to make their lives even the slightest bit better then let ‘em give it ago – some folks will only ever get the message if they’re given the chance to learn things the hard way and if some people insist on doing really dumb things, like voting BNP, then who am I to deprive them of the opportunity.

Just think for a second about what Arnold is saying and what that, in turn, says about her attitude towards tackling and defeating the BNP. The ONLY way to stop them, in her estimated is to work the electoral system and try to shift the finishing line they need to hit to get one of their members into an elected office.

What about trying something different, something a little more – dare I say it – constructive?

What about working to deprive the BNP of its ’support’ by working to address the concerns and fears of those who’ve turned the BNP out of sheer disillusionment with mainstream politics, who do feel that they’ve been abandoned by Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats alike. I agree with Justin when he says that:

this idea that white people in this country are somehow oppressed is a load of old crap

… most of us aren’t – but some are.

Some do have legitimate cause to be aggrieved at their lot. Some feel that they have been abandoned by the society around them, that they are put upon, ignored, disregarded, disenfranchised and treated like shit. It may be arguable as to whether we should consider them to be still part of the working class, or whether they’re a distinct underclass in their own right – personally I’m not sure they’re all the way there just yet, but many are well on their way to becoming what Marx referred to as the ‘lumpenproletariat’ – and ugly word for an even more ugly idea.

Yes, it true that many of these people do squarely lay the blame for their situation at the door of ‘incomers’, of Britain’s growing and, in some case, increasingly thriving migrant population but then just what the hell do you expect from people who, almost every day, are told by press and politicians alike that if its not their own fault that they’re in the shit, then its the fault of those nasty ‘Johnny Foreigners’ who’re coming over here in hordes – it’s always the ‘hordes’ that cause all the problems -to take ‘their jobs’, ‘their homes’ and, yes, even today, ‘their women’, and who are generally living the ‘life of riley’ at their expense because playing on fear and prejudice born of ignorance is the no-brain(er) route to turning some of these people into easy and unthinking ballot-box fodder.

Does that make them racist?

Yes, in many cases it does, but theirs is most often the kind of racism that derives from ignorance, parochialism and a fear of the unknown and unfamiliar. Most have no express ‘theory of race’ – in fact many wouldn’t know that its even possible to have such a thing as a ‘theory’ of race and they certainly harbour no illusions as to their inherent racial superiority over others (well, perhaps with the exception of the French). All they ‘know’ is what they’re told, and what they’re told is constantly is that everyone else is doing better than them, especially the ‘everyone else’s’ who’ve been coming here from overseas and that its because of all these these recent arrivals that they don’t get their fair share.

Its also the kind of racism that is most easily tackled and overcome because its predicated on ignorance, fear and desperation and these are things that can be taken on and defeated. You can educate and inform. You can allay people fears of the unknown and unfamiliar by making the unknowns known and the unfamiliar familiar – sorry, but of Rumsfeld thing going on there, but hopefully you get my drift. You can raise aspirations and give people hope and opportunities and a life that’s worth living.

And you can take on the BNP without resorting to scaremongering and cynical games of electoral calculus – I know and I know from my own experience because I was born and brought up in just the kind of working class community that Arnold fears will deliver London an unwanted BNP assembly member – several member of my family still live in that community. I know how these people think and how they feel. I know their hopes and their aspirations, their successes and the failures and I know all that because they’re not ‘these people’ to me, they’re my family, my friends and my community and for all that I know their manifest faults and failings, I am genuine getting sick and tired of listening people like Arnold and Jasper talking about them and about their fear of these people voting for the BNP as if every lasy one of them has a shrine to Adolf Hitler taking pride of place in their living room.

That’s not how you ‘fight’ the BNP, by treating the people who are desperate enough to believe the party’s lies like pariahs and turning them in surrogate bogeymen. You fight the BNP by having the courage and respect to treat the people living in these communities with a bit of honest and some basic respect and most of all, you don’t run away from their problems and you tell them the truth.

You show them exactly who and what the BNP really are, not just ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’ but also misogynists and lunatic conspiracy theorists, hypocrites – and nowhere more so when claiming to be tough on crime – incompetents, liars and you show them that their efforts to legitimise their prurient beliefs know no bounds of taste or common decency. This approach works, and it works because of something that I know for certain but which the ‘Jasperites’ have either forgotten or care nothing about – that for all their problems and their faults, most of those who have voted BNP in recent years and who may vote the same way at the upcoming election are, at heart, honest and decent, if badly misguided, human beings.

A few thousand miles away, at this very moment, there’s a young-ish Black man named Barak Obama making political waves like we’ve not seen for a long time in America on the back of a very simple and yet compelling message.

Yes we can!

If you’re in London and looking to ‘fight’ the BNP, then take it from me – you ignore what Arnold has to say, it’s old, tired, outdated and counter-productive, the politics of division and separation and you get out there and start reminding the people living there that the ‘we’ in ‘Yes we can’ damn well includes them!

About the author
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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