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

Four years, two hundred articles, and there are still reasons for hope

This is the two hundredth weekly post on this blog. Over the last four years we have covered everything from the Scottish independence referendum, to the Hacking Scandal, to the Chilean Winter student protests and the first free elections in Tunisia since 1956.

The purpose of this blog, from the beginning, has been to observe politics, society and authority; to scrutinise them and attempt to find moderate solutions to our contemporary anxieties. This has meant searching out the motivations behind political and social movements, identifying ideological themes, exposing them and analysing them.

At times that has been a gruesome task. The past year, in particular, has seen the world take a significant turn for the darker. War has broken out once more in some parts of the world, like Iraq, where the West had believed that peace had been achieved.

In other places, war has broken a long peace. Ukraine has been pulled apart by war after protests against the government led to a severe split in the country, between the pro-European and the pro-Russian elements.

Furthermore, the world has yet to break out of the economic crisis that began in 2008, and continues to be affected by how governments have responded - especially the, Conservative ideology influenced, economic orthodoxy of public sector cuts.

The cutbacks and the hard times associated with them are not unconnected to the rise of far right populism in Europe, having often being the breeding ground for it in the past. Right wing groups have made a significant impact, gaining political representation in a number of countries, including the UK and France, and it has caused concern to many.

But in amongst these depressing events, over the past four years there have been reasons for hope.

Even while voting turnouts have dropped, public engagement with politics has been high. Progressive protesters of all kinds have taken to the streets to campaign for everything from the right to education, to the protection of vital public services like healthcare, pensions and welfare from ideologically driven public sector cuts, to the occupy protests that demanded a more equal society, free from exploitation.

The long struggle for equality of civil rights also continues. Awareness of feminism is at a new high. Rape culture and everyday sexism are all now well known issues, and people are standing up against them. The rights of gay people to civil equality is being taken seriously around the world, and beginning to bear fruit - the first steps of which has been gay marriage.

Rising awareness and greater possibilities of being better informed and better connected than ever before promise us that a new era of radical reformism is only just around the corner. Hypocrisies, contradictions and corruption are being exposed. People are speaking out, openly, about the need to pursue civil liberties, social justice and a sustainable society, and they are getting together to go out and campaign for them.

After four years, and two hundred weekly articles - posted every Monday - of sifting through corruption, hidden agendas and political double-speak, I can still see hope. There are lights sparking everywhere that, just maybe, can illumine the way forward. Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you back here again next Monday.

What now for Scotland, and for Britain?

The votes are counted and Scotland will not be independent. That result will not, however, change much about the situation that the UK finds itself in.

There are 45% of the people of Scotland who wish for the country to break away. Nowhere did less than a third of voters choose independence. Those are not insignificant numbers. Furthermore, even a no vote comes with the promise of some additional autonomy.

For the Unionists, all they have won is a delay until the question is asked again. But, for supporters of the Union, there was really no way, as it presently stands, they were ever going to able to revel in a victory - shy of achieving a comprehensive 90% or more rejection of independence.

Even with a no vote, the autonomy of the provinces will increase, and continue to do so in a lopsided fashion - something bound to agitate those who see the situation to be unfair upon English voters. Westminster will, likely as not, continue to be despised as a distant and out of touch central government.

Scotland is still divided, still drifting away, still retaining its autonomy and independence remains popular. If it comes to vote again, and economic conditions are not so dire as to give Unionists such ammunition for a negative campaign, it is possible that independence could just scrape through.

The rest of Britain could also likely follow the Scottish path to greater regional autonomy and more federalisation, rather than centralisation. The close no vote could well act as a positive spur for Britain to finally claw its way towards modern institutions; towards decentralised, federal government with more power sent to the provinces and local government.

Or, the public will lose interest now that change has been prevented, and Westminster, responding with victorious flag-waving patriotism, will take the no vote to be an opportunity to change nothing at all. It is to be hoped, however, that this referendum will prove a turning point.

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References:
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+ BBC's 'Scotland Decides: Results'.

+ James Landale's 'Scottish Independence: What happens after the decision?'; on the BBC; 18 September 2014.

+ Nick Robinson's 'The people have spoken. But it's not over'; on the BBC; 19 September 2014.

+ Andrew Black's 'Scotland votes 'No': What happens now?'; on the BBC; 19 September 2014.

+ BBC's 'David Cameron sets out UK-wide changes 'to build better future''; 19 September 2014.

+ Rafael Behr's 'Nine things the indyref campaign has taught us'; in The Guardian; 18 September 2014.

+ Martin Kettle's 'Scotland votes no: the union has survived, but the questions for the left are profound'; in The Guardian; 19 September 2014.