British voters have before them the first major election since the onset of the economic crisis, when June’s European parliament ballot rolls around.

The Labour Party anticipates a drubbing, short of a miracle between now and June, and much has been written about what exactly can be done to limit the damage. After that, however, the biggest worry for the political establishment is the possibility of a British National Party breakthrough – the list system does not quite so comprehensively exclude smaller parties that fall outside the political mainstream, and the country’s largest far-right organisation, mostly recovered from the internal ructions that destroyed some of its older bases, will be hoping to take full advantage of the economic turmoil surrounding the election.

As usual, a spectacular show has been made of ‘unity’ against the ‘Nazi scum’ who stand against timeless ‘British values’ – generally enumerated along the lines of tolerance, fairness and so on. If you have not stifled a contemptuous snort on reading that last phrase, you have probably picked up the wrong paper – the attempts by an increasingly reactionary ruling class to separate itself from the less tasteful excesses of its own regime are starting to border on the hilarious.

Take the case of last week’s Winston Churchill controversy. Addressing a crowd of supporters in Crawley Down, Sussex, BNP leader Nick Griffin had the temerity to pose before a poster of Churchill, and imitate the latter’s iconic V-for-victory sign. It gets worse, for those basking in the cosy glow of the British chauvinist mythos: “If,” Griffin went on to declare, “you look at what Churchill said and wrote about the issues affecting our times – mass immigration, dangers of radical Islam – you would see that Churchill, were he alive today, would be thrown out of the Conservative Party for things he said and his political home would be with the British National Party.”¹

This was all rather too much for Nicholas Soames, Tory MP for Mid-Sussex and grandson of the officially certified Great Man. The very notion was “absurd”: “I resent very much and think many people will, the use by the BNP of the use of [sic] Winston Churchill, showing in a way as if it was to condone their views, which quite clearly he would never have done.”²

The Churchill shtick is a fairly obvious provocation by Griffin, who – despite his hardened neo-Nazi roots – has steered the BNP towards a more distinctly Anglicised style of extreme-right politics. Gone are the stiff-arm Sieg heils, to be replaced with the victory salute. As a provocation, though, it is an intelligent one – there is no figure in 20th century British history so widely admired, and so Griffin is trying to hit the motherlode.

Is he right about Churchill? The answer is yes and no – but he is certainly closer to the mark than Soames would like to admit. This is, after all, the man who considered imperial subjects to be “uncivilised tribes”, against whom it was ludicrous to hold back from using chemical weapons;³ the man who grumbled about the machinations of “international Jews”, who were for him the agents of Bolshevism;⁴ who implicitly supported the forced sterilisation of the mentally ill⁵ … the list goes on.

All this is starting to look more than a little Hitleresque – but at least Churchill was a consistent opponent of Nazism proper. Wasn’t he?

Well, he was inasmuch as he never supported the German regime as such, and opposed the policy of appeasement with regard to Hitler. But his opposition was not the fierce defence of democracy in the face of tyrants that it is made out to be – it was a defence of British imperial interests, which by the mid-1930s were already on very shaky ground, irreparably damaged by the 1914-18 war. Hitler himself was the subject of considerable admiration from Churchill for his great patriotism (that’s one way of putting it); the latter wrote in a 1935 article, ‘Hitler and his choice’: “… if our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable [as Hitler] to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”⁶

In fact, one of the problems with Griffin’s confident assertion is simply that the BNP – though it counts as members, and even leading members, a good number who hold Hitlerite views – has itself moved away from openly making such propositions. Were a BNP leader to publicly advocate sterilising the mentally ill, Griffin would not leap to his defence – even the relatively modest phrase “uncivilised tribes” would cause headaches in his PR department. In fact the BNP is now too politically correct for Winston Churchill.

The more substantial problem with the idea that Churchill’s legacy lies with the BNP has to do with the source of his virulently reactionary politics. The forced sterilisation of the “feeble-minded” is a position shared by Hitler and the young Churchill – but also by a vast body of contemporaneous literature. Eugenics was a highly fashionable pseudo-science at the time, as were notions of ‘racial hygiene’. It is not only Churchill who, by Griffin’s measure, would be unfit for membership of today’s Conservative Party, but probably the vast majority of its MPs of his time.

While bourgeois conservatives like to imagine that fascism was something like a comet – a completely unforeseen and external malevolence successfully resisted by ‘good’ and ‘decent’ people – the truth is, it was simply a particularly virulent combination of reactionary ideological elements, of which ‘Churchillism’ was a fairly close cousin.

Now, however, that background ideological atmosphere has changed. It was not easy – the running battle within the Tory Party over race was only finally concluded under Thatcher, whose more famous battle against the more pro-welfare ‘wets’ was shadowed by another against the extreme-right Monday Club, nicknamed the ‘shits’ (and including Griffin’s father, Edgar); but it has been pulled off. The state declares itself opposed to racism, to genetic purges of the disabled; race wars have been replaced by so-called ‘culture wars’, particularly between a totalitarian Islam and a democratic west. Today’s Churchills do not echo their forerunner’s sentiments; but most of them do drift into the Tory Party, and do wheel out unconvincing anti-BNP tirades.

The Conservative Party reliably maintains significant state functions even when not in government – until the Blair era, it was unanimously considered the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain, with Labour looked on as a party for crises. Such formations are generated by the realities of political power – the bourgeoisie cannot exercise state power directly, as was the case for the aristocracy in pre-absolutist feudalism.

Reactionary ideas are the ideas that allow the right to do its job – public anxiety over immigration is manipulated so that it works to the benefit of the ruling class, for example. A necessary excrescence of this process is the existence of groups who ‘really mean it’ – who really would expel migrants, prosecute a violent ‘culture war’ against recalcitrant Muslims and the like. Thus it can be fairly said that the BNP has no less than three daily papers – the Sun, Mail and Express.

During periods of social stability, this far right is a small, niggling presence (which is still, in spite of hysterical reactions to a few council election results, the case today). In periods of upheaval, the far right grows, as a jolting shock ripples out the system, which begins to turn to the petty bourgeoisie to shore up the flagging power of the bourgeoisie proper. The substantial ideological difference between the largest far-right groups (as opposed to small crankish sects, such as Britain’s November 9 Society) and the ‘centre-right’ is almost always relatively small. The substantial differences pertain to class character and function (to say nothing of concrete political practice) rather than programme.

For this reason, those on the left who treat fighting the BNP as an overriding priority more important than fighting bourgeois ideology in general are highly mistaken. It may well be the case that comrades operating in BNP hot spots need to attend more closely to their personal security – beyond that, the BNP does not present at this time a ‘special’ threat of any kind. A breakthrough in June – that is, a couple of MEPs – will be symbolically worrying, but not any kind of mortal threat to the workers’ movement.

For those variants of this policy that involve suppressing criticisms of the big bourgeois parties, this applies a hundredfold. The insistence of the Socialist Workers Party’s Unite Against Fascism popular front on reducing anti-fascist activity to sub-liberal verbal denunciations of ‘Nazi scum’, counter-propaganda emphasising the criminal records of BNP candidates rather than the political questions, and urging votes for literally anyone else, is one of the most harmful features on the left today.

Our task is not to emphasise the shining goodness of Nicholas Soames, as compared to Nick Griffin, but to emphasise the myriad continuities between their politics – and to articulate a real alternative: that of communism.

Notes

1. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7955799.stm
2. Ibid.
3. War office departmental minute, May 12 1919, Churchill papers 16/16, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.
4. Illustrated Sunday Herald February 1920.
5. In a letter to Herbert Henry Asquith of 1910: “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate … I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.”
6. Reproduced in W Churchill Great contemporaries London 1937.