History has shown us that the working class have little to gain from far right groups like UKIP

The unfortunate electoral success of the far right over the past year ought to be a wake up call. It should alert anyone who has yet to notice that the world is not content.

One of the beneficiaries of this discontent are UKIP. They have found fertile ground for their anti-immigrant, anti-government, right-wing populism in the South East of England and now look to test the soil in the North.

Those to whom they will look for new support are the working class who make up the traditional base of the Labour Party's support. They will look to these people in hope that their disillusionment with the Labour movement, and its many deals done with and within a distant Westminster establishment, not always in the worker's best interest, will be enough for them to supplant the Labour Party in working class affections (The Guardian, 2014).

Their play seems simple enough. Lower taxes, protection of the NHS, curbs on immigration and a restoration of national pride - out from under the European Union (Mason, 2014).

The trouble is that these are vague, and often bad, promises. The interests of the working class are not served by a society restructured for the benefit of only a capitalistic few, no matter how the policies leading to it are dressed up in a simplistic and emotional pitch. Cutting taxes is being pitched to the working class, but benefits only the wealthy. The poorest are most likely to be deeply disadvantaged by resultant public service cuts, and to find the least recompense from the market.

The comedy in the promise is that it's not as if this is the first time these kinds of promises have been made, to the working class by the far right, and its not as if they haven't failed before. Spectacularly.

Fascism

The fascist parties that emerged following the Great War made many of the same promises that the far right still turns to today. The main difference is that these parties believed in a state dictatorship that would oversee a populist nationalist movement - one that would restore national pride and advance the national interest, which usually led down violent and racist paths.

Fascism, on top of its fundamentally conservative aims - preservation of tradition, moralism and social status-quo from any sort of change - carried corporatist ideology. They sought to manage society, in a fundamentally totalitarian fashion, through state affiliated trade unions, or entire sectors of the economy through massive private corporations.

The policies of Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista in Italy saw the most ready applications of those beliefs, though other countries, such as Spain where Franco's regime and the Falange party ruled, saw fascism flourish as well.

Mussolini tried to achieve full employments through state guilds, or national syndicates, that enlisted all men, and even banned women from the workplace - confining them to a 'traditional place' in the home as wives and mothers. His efforts however produced few results.

More prominent were the social attitudes of fascists, that drove militaristic language and attitudes into civil society. Mussolini in particular, in his The Doctrine of Fascism, said that:

"Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers."

Fascism in Spain was also heavily infused with militaristic nationalism from the beginning. Franco's Regime began as a military coup against Spain's Republican government, its Republic constitution and the political left that supported it. It sought to regiment society in an authoritarian order, along the lines of conservative values - tradition, hierarchical order and morality.

Though Franco's system of fascism was altered in subtle ways from the Italian model, with a greater emphasis on national moralism - Spanish Catholicism - it retained most of the common elements. A patriarchal society, deeply controlling, with dictatorships that protected the landed classes and the wealthy, and their institutions, by holding the population in an iron-handed grip.

The people were controlled by the state, in favour of those with vested interests and good connections, with the benefits to the people being peripheral or dependent upon a complete denigration of individual choice and an acceptance of, and compliance with, authoritarian rule.

Neoliberalism

The new era of far right movements, represented by political parties such as UKIP, have learned the lessons of fascism's failure. But, they have also learned the lessons of English classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and of American libertarianism and objectivism.

It is no longer necessary to control the state, and thence society, to protect the interests of the upper classes. The language of militarism has been replaced by the language of the boardroom and the stock market floor. The powerful corporations no longer find themselves beneath the authority of states (Orr, 2013).

Protection of the interests of the upper classes today takes place in a world run by money and financial investments, where most of the vested interests find any kind of government at all to be an inconvenience. So begins the era of small government and minimal taxes.

Talk of freedoms is twisted to fit the narratives of the privileged elite, who became so thanks to the protections of 'English liberty' - the protection of private property and the freedom of business and financial transactions. The state, home to the public institutions that restrict and regulate the interests of the elite, becomes a hindrance.

But even a minimal state still requires democracy, with voters on your side, and the trouble for the 1% is that there are just so few of them. In their search for populist narratives to supported a conservative political establishment that is favourable to the interests of elites, the old far right overtones seem to have been revived.

Historically, the far right of old either made an autocratic appeal to the army and suspended democracy; or it made a popular appeal to the people - the poorer, more numerous, and more ignorant, the better - on simple emotive terms. It appealed to religion, to nation, to duty.

The new front of the far right seem to have found for themselves a new role within that neoliberal, economic conservative, pro-business, anti-state era. They are wedding the neoliberal economics of globalised corporate capitalism, with the politics of nationalism, traditionalism and moralism that underwrote the old far right - in a way that has been so effective in the United States.

Controlling the state has become bypassing and minimalising it - even maiming it along the way to keep it quiet and ineffective as a token veil of democracy that is being otherwise shredded in favour of elitism.

Promises

UKIP, as the newest voice of the far right in the Britain, makes all the same appeals as the far right groups of the past. It appeals to popular sentiments, promising national revivals and returns to traditional values, while wielding a language of divisive nationalism - combined now with profitable capitalism.

But those promises, when made by the far right before, have not been kept, and have often been sought along those paths at a great price. The lie of nationalism has divided workers into nations, and then divided them again, against themselves, into cynical ideologically named groups like 'strivers and skivers', of hardworking citizens and welfare cheats.

It is to be hoped that UKIP's brand of far right populism finds itself far removed from the dark days of fascism. But their own brand of anti-Europe, anti-government, anti-immigrant, low tax, pro-business and National revivalist politics, bearing all the hallmarks of the far right of old, deeply conservative and deeply reactionary, carries plenty of causes for concern.

The far right of today may not want to control society by controlling the state any longer, but their attempts to popularly undermine the state does no favours to the working classes. The state is not necessarily in itself a good thing, but its replacement as an establishment force by a capitalist market dominated and controlled by the interests of massive corporations and a 1% of wealthy elites is hardly an improvement.

More privatisation, with corporations given even more of a free hand, together with being bound within a narrow society shaped by narrow perceptions of otherness, does not give the impression of either freedom or prosperity. Neither laissez-faire capitalism, nor far right nationalism, have ever offered the working class something without taking more for a powerful elite. There seems to be no reason to believe that has changed.

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References:
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+ The Guardian's 'The Guardian view on Ukip conference: Nigel Farage’s phoney flutter'; 26 September 2014.

+ Rowena Mason's 'Ukip vows to slash immigration and cut taxes in pitch for blue-collar vote'; in The Guardian; 29 September 2014.

+ Deborah Orr's 'Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom'; in The Guardian; 8 June 2013.

For more information about Fascism and the historical far right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falangism