10th August 2006

 
Jack Guest, currently lives in Cheltenham and wrote this article with another Green party activist, Phil Hutchinson:

How does a Green Understand a Vote for the BNP?

It is now clear that a small minority in Britain understand the BNP to represent their views. Only through understanding the party and its supporters can we keep them a minority.

Those of us engaged in politics rarely disagree about the problems Britain or the world faces. We disagree about the causes of the problems, the best solution to them and their importance relative to other issues.

For example, what have we done to cause global warming, how should we fix the problem, and is doing so more important than securing jobs in airports or allowing people to drive whatever car they like?

It’s easy to spot the problems, and much harder to provide the right solutions. Yet few would deny that the problems upon which the BNP capitalises are, in fact, problems.

Disillusionment and apathy towards the mainstream political process. Breakdowns of social cohesion and community ‘well being’. World War Two veterans living in economic and emotional poverty. And so on.

The all-encompassing cause of these problems is, according to the BNP, multiculturalism and immigration. The ‘solution’ offered: a range of extremist policies frightening to imagine. From closing our borders to dismantling the Race Relations Act and letting citizens carry arms.

To many the threat presented by the BNP remains laughable, but it might not always be this way.

The potential for huge economic and social instability as we approach ‘peak oil’, global water shortages, and the catastrophic reality of climate change, is very real.

In such times the BNP would offer a solution. Not because their diagnosis of multiculturalism as the cause of our problems is in any way correct, far from it. But because accepting their solution would represent such a potent force: the will to radically change our society at the cost of so many people, that is to say, at the cost of a significant proportion of that society.

And let’s be clear it would be a tremendous and terrible cost. Both to the millions who would be oppressed and to the millions who would let it happen. It is unthinkable.

Yet in times of instability the scapegoating of ‘other people’ as the cause of our problems is a simplistic and powerful move. It is one which we have seen repeated time and time again throughout modern history. And it is vital that we recognise and understand the potential, albeit slim, for it to happen again.

Only then we can do all that we must to prevent it.

 
We must recognise that for many people, sitting back and letting the political status quo unfold does not represent doing enough about the problems in their lives.

We must recognise that as global forces put pressure on our way of life we have the potential to take big steps forward, or to take tragic steps backwards.

Our own ideas about what we must do follow on from this.

When we encounter people who are sympathetic towards the far right we must challenge their simplistic assessment that ‘other people’ are the source of their problems.

Instead we should offer the possibility of realising our freedom and ability to act to make our lives better. To change the way we approach and think about ‘other people’. To get involved in our communities through voluntary organisations and local groups. Even to change the way we shop and eat.

Such actions represent taking life seriously and recognising our own power. They are more difficult, both mentally and practically, than the comfortable option of blaming society’s ills on easily defined groups of ‘other people’. Yet the attitude of active responsibility is one that we can all take. No matter how economically or socially deprived we are.

We should also challenge the mistaken but prevalent philosophical view of ‘biological determinism’ and its ties with ‘evolutionary biology’. The ridiculous views of the BNP’s ‘press officer’ such as “Africa has not faced the same evolutionary pressure as Europe so the black people are less intelligent” are derived from such thinking. And such thinking is, simply, false. It has no basis in any biological facts, at all. We challenge anyone in the BNP to demonstrate otherwise.

The nonsense peddled by the BNP needs combating with sense. People need educating so that they might be better able to see through the racial pseudo-science peddled by those with fascist tendencies, throughout history.

The media must also take responsibility. Too often, documentaries which expose BNP members as no more than fascists are forgotten by the news media (frequently from the same channel) when reporting BNP electoral success or potential for success. This is an abdication of social responsibility on the part of that news media.

A news program which allows those holding demonstrably fascist views to be discussed as if they were a legitimate party representing legitimate views is complicit in the crimes that will inevitably result from awarding political power to those with thinly veiled fascist views. This is the responsibility of that part of our society that work in the news media: to make it clear that a vote for the BNP is a vote for fascism; and to remind them that a vote for fascism is a vote for a political ideology based on plain lies about scientific fact, plain lies about the nature and cause of our moral ills and plain lies about human beings. Exposing these lies, to reiterate, is the media’s responsibility.  

Our responsibility, as Greens, is to make it easier for people to see that the ills of our society are not addressed by either the BNP electoral rhetoric or their thinly veiled, closely held, but ultimately dangerously false beliefs. We need to show those tempted by the BNP rhetoric the ways that our problems are complexly interlinked. And then show them how to make a real difference.

Those of us involved in party politics might want to act by breaking away from the mould of the political mainstream to create parties that are more accessible and more real.

The Green Party represents a worthy and serious attempt at this. It is radical in so much as its policy is based on ideas like our common humanity, the sanctity of life well lived, and the driving knowledge that ‘ideals’ like peace can become a reality- if only we have the will.

We are seriously concerned about many of the same problems as the BNP’s electoral rhetoric claims that they are concerned with: better housing, a safe environment for our children and our elderly, energy security, and a sustainable future for Britain. But our, green, concerns are not merely electoral rhetoric. The concerns we stand on at elections genuinely are our deep concerns. Furthermore, our solutions couldn’t be more different to the simply contemptible pseudo-solutions of the BNP. If future circumstances do demand a radical change in British politics, then the choice may become stark.

The old slogan, ‘socialism or barbarism’, needs revising for those looking for an alternative to the empty managerialism of the three main parties in the Britain. ‘Ecologism or fascism’. Green or BNP. The psychology, values and policies of our Party; or the psychology, lies and pseudo-solutions of theirs.


Jack Guest and Phil Hutchinson
May 2006

Profiles
Phil Hutchinson is a Green Party activist and lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Jack Guest is an ethical business entrepreneur and Green Party activist who has graduated in Philosophy and Politics at UEA, Norwich. He is currently living in Cheltenham but may return to live in The Forest of Dean where his family come from.


Thanks to Rupert Read for comments on an earlier draft.