The Griffin business in the UK raises some interesting questions about the position of nationalism at the heart of the junior partner in the Atlantic system.

Apologetic Post-Imperialism

Republican Americans seem to have little problem with espousing a fairly militaristic national patriotism. Tony Judt in his 'Reappraisals' (2008) of the dangers of forgetting recent history put this down to the fact that modern Americans had never experienced the horrors of war on their own territory.

European anti-nationalist ideology can be deduced from the opposite - the obvious trauma of the European Civil War from 1914 to 1945 (some would say 1989). But the British seem to have been crushed by their withdrawal from empire.

One side of the political equation seems to be lost in a world of liberal guilt for slavery and colonisation and even for a holocaust for which no Briton was responsible.

This apologetic culture is compounded by the fact that the United Kingdom contains an English heartland, from which empire sprang, that is in tension with its smaller Celtic partners, not sure whether they are the victims or the beneficiaries of imperial history.

Given that all the significant parties of the Right (Conservative, UKIP and BNP) refuse to recognise this tension and the centre-Left parties (New Labour and the Liberal Democrats) pander to it, no wonder those most consciously English, from which the BNP takes its support, are confused and depressed,

Bear-Baiting on the BBC

What we saw over the past week was a remarkable baiting of a fairly small force in British politics by an entire establishment. The BBC kept to its liberal duty of allowing Griffin a platform on the premier popular political programme and it played it fair despite immense pressure from the official Liberal-Left.

But the discussion was not one of the usual four separate positions (the three main parties and some often clueless intellectual fluff) debating against each other, scoring cheap points and providing more heat than light on the great issues of the day.

No, on this occasion, the aim was to get Griffin to 'show his true face' to the British public while a baying mob outside the studio and a fairly aggressive studio audience put him in the position of a bear in a bear pit surrounded by snapping dogs.

This is not to imply any sympathy for Griffin or the BNP as a political ideology. Even though his party does represent some serious and legitimate discontent, partly cultural but mostly socio-economic, and in a serious recession at that, he poses three fundamental threats to the country.

First, his opportunistic Islamophobia is the stalking horse for an irrational and primitive view of human relations that is a-historical and fuelled by a fundamental ignorance of how individuals and communities develop organically. It is essentialist in a world where essentialism tends to exclusion and repression.

Second, his party is authoritarian in a way that goes far beyond any interest in corporatist economic planning - its sentiments are anti-democratic in a very profound way. Combined with the essentialist world view, this authoritarianism must mean a sclerotic rule by the few of the many.

Third, the BNP has a very confused vision of national identity where a particular authoritarian vision of the people is merged with the real authority of the Crown in a way that would reproduce the fascism of the 1930s: a national security state without even the limited restraints of New Labour's version.

Left-Liberal Self-Indulgence

But the problem with the liberal-Left is that it refuses to parse out the real meaning of this programme or understand why it is beginning to catch on in the darkest corners of the country.

The liberal-Left response is self-indulgent and moralistic. It presents its position as self-evidently right to the extent that (as we reported in our last posting) it is quite prepared to use illiberal methods along European lines to preserve the liberal consensus.

Unfortunately for that liberal consensus, the British are not Europeans. Some of the population will see the judicial warfare, the bear-baiting by a discredited elite (in the context of administrative incompetence and the expenses scandal) and street protests as bullying.

The British do not like bullies so we have the paradox that a party of potential bullies is going to be seen by some as the victim of bullies - they may have a 'point'.

The New Public Squalor

Certainly, metropolitan intellectuals do not get out and about much. They are missing a reality that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with failed economics - the growing islands of public squalor that co-exist with the comfort of the private homes of the majority of most of the population.

This recession has not hurt the bulk of the middle class (yet) but it is hurting those who are marginal. The slow-down in public spending (with more to come) and the strains of migration in specific areas are creating a sense of desperation about community and order that is not wholly irrational.

It is interesting that the news that the police would be carrying some serious weaponry into key London council estates arrived after Griffin's performance.

He would have had a field day with it - the estates are black and yet we have had twelve years of multicultural expenditure. Guns are historically one tool that consensual British policing has never had to use. The implication is that community has collapsed, much as many have been privately predicting.

The liberal establishment is in denial. We covered some of this in our last posting but the Generals are in denial about their squaddies, the Home Office about the police, the media about the underclass (with the exception of the BBC) and the politicians about the country.

Even as we look at the 'dark side' of the BNP, we have to recognise that it gets votes. The demonisation of its voters is on the edge of the demonisation of minority groups by the fascists themselves. The BNP-voting underclass and peite-bourgeoisie are regarded as if they were vermin to be exterminated.

The Refusal To Engage

And yet ... they have some cause for grievance. There are questions to be asked about the social sustainability of migration, ostensibly based on humanitarian asylum claims but actually about cheap labour and economics. There are serious questions about relative allocation of resources.

Sir Andrew Green has been called a racist for raising migration issues. He has threatened to sue anyone who does. He is not. Migration Watch may or may not be right but the level of vituperation directed at him for raising important issues of sustainability shows that these concerns are not being addressed.

Many of the most aggressive liberals scarcely hide their belief that borders should be open as recompense for Britain's imperialist past without understanding that those 'native' communities that are in the front line in terms of pressure on services are precisely those that stayed and did not colonise.

And then there is the attitude to identity? In the US, half the population are assertively proud of being American. In Russia, the figure is probably 90% and includes the young who celebrate their own anthem in rock versions. But, in the UK, national pride is more than diminished, it is treated with contempt.

Even the Generals, in their attack on the BNP, have emphasised the role of the Army in an international liberal and humanitarian context which largely misses the point to those many Britons who thought that the Army existed to defend their country and that was that.

Defeating the BNP

The dangerous aspects of the BNP are truly there - this is a dark and potentially vicious organisation that would pauperise our culture and our people - but it is moving into a vacuum of the liberal establishment's own making. They are the flip side to left-liberal arrogance.

The probable truth is that the country itself is largely liberal, probably libertarian, broadly happy with multiculturalism and globalisation - but it is not happy with public squalor nor to risks to personal security and it is not happy with foreign wars and growing 'liberal' authoritarianism.

Into a culture dominated by 'oughts' from ideological liberals, the public sees what 'is' - the first signs of serious social collapse spreading from the inner cities outwards as recession takes hold.

And this is where, to the great discomfort of left-liberals, some harsh truths about a significant minority of British people need to be accommodated. The light side of the move towards the BNP is the desire for community security, a sense of respect for identity and a democracy that works.

It is not that individuals do not feel secure but they feel that their communities are crumbling before their eyes. It is not that they do not respect others but that they feel that they are not respected. And they have decreasing faith in the political classes' ability to restore prosperity and social order.

We do not take the BNP too seriously but we do take this mood of concern very seriously indeed. It is what will probably fuel the arrival of a Tory Administration in 2010 and guide the future shape of its policies, fortunately still within a fundamentally liberal, even libertarian, framework.

When the history of the strange death of New Labour is written, it won't be the Iraq War or possibly the credit crunch that did for it ... it will be the attempt to impose from above an alien ideology that opened the gates to the arrival of a right-wing hegemony that may now last a generation.

The left-liberal elite is getting into one heck of a panic about the access to the media that Nick Griffin of the Far Right British National Party has been getting. The most fascinating aspect of this is that Griffin's access is based on liberal principles.

Hysteria

After years of struggle, circumstances have allowed his party some traction within a portion of the electorate. To ignore the views of his relatively small but still significant vote would seem churlish, especially as the votes have only emerged on the back of left-liberal policy failures.

The BBC, in particular, has been castigated for letting Griffin appear on to that paradigm of British political theatre Question Time. Government Minister Peter Hain has been strutting around threatening legal action. The liberal-Left are losing their cultural hegemony and they know it.

But it is the scale of the hysteria that is fascinating because it is out of all proportion to the actual size of the BNP vote or to its likelihoood of getting seats in Parliament, let alone becoming Government of the day. There are constant and increasingly a-historical references to 1930s Germany.

But after a while, it sinks in - the panic is not about the BNP getting power, it is about what happens when the liberal-Left lose power.

The Beast Adapts

Griffin, meanwhile, like any sensible creature that wants to survive in a changing political ecology is adapting fast. After much internal pressure, his Party is reforming (at least a little) from within, moderating its overtly racist platform. He has also become surprisingly adept at public relations.

His performance on BBC Radio 4's World At One on 20 October was measured and he handled tough questions with sophistication and without losing his cool. His message, though, remains that of the bar room - aggressive patriotism, capital punishment and fundamentally anti-migrant.

The BBC has been right to resist pressure. 63% of the population want him to be heard. This does not mean they are in agreement with him, even if some of them may be sympathetic to Griffin's position on public squalor, Britishness or 'unsustainable' migration. It means they want to make up their own minds.

From the perspective of libertarian observers, this is a struggle between two authoritarian peas in a pod - on the one side, a party that might bully through the use of force if it gained power and, on the other, a party that actually bullies from a position of power, at least on use of language and on thought. 

Soldiers and the Far Right

Where Griffin was beginning to build a base was where there was anger at the treatment of ordinary soldiers, widely seen as victims of incompetent management of incoherent foreign policy decisions.

We have now seen an intervention by former Generals from the liberal establishment castigating the BNP for its use of military symbols for political purposes. Griffin then blew it by calling some of them war criminals and the big guns then moved against him.

Unfortunately for the establishment, the intervention might have back-fired because it gave Griffin the public platform he needed to perform his new role as squaddies' champion against incompetent and malign management.

Fortunately for them, Griffin has has probably alienated most soldiers with what he calls a 'joke' (that Dannatt and Jackson should be tried as 'war criminals') - but some of his hard core criticism of the establishment may yet hit home.

Military Instabilities

We may all be missing the point here. The senior military may have been getting very worried about the way that the BNP was making inroads into the squaddies. Soldiers are given an induction to military life that is still filled with pre-1970s post-imperial imagery in a country of increasing public squalor.

It's not just about 'equipment' but about the living conditions of military families, a general sense of 'disrespect', the questioning of what the Britain is that they are fighting for and the authoritarian instincts of people attracted to service life.

The army could and would not mount a coup. It is thoroughly liberal at the top and, in any case, is simply too small and society is too complex. Insurgency and a 'dirty war' would be the only likely result. But some mid-level officers are developing strong anti-establishment, almost 'Cromwellian' sentiments ...

The higher officer class is sending a signal that it is firmly loyal to the liberal consensus after a long period of open dissent with Government and that it is trying both to turn the tide of squaddie discontent and to ensure that no angry 'colonel' does anything silly in a vain attempt 'to restore order'.

Keeping the Lid on Things

The problem is that the Army are trying to keep a lid on discontent that has much good cause, much as the New Labour Government is trying to do the same as public spending silently dries up at the grassroots as they face electoral oblivion.

What electoral defeat means to New Labour has to be understood. Previous Labour Governments would leave control of the State to their rivals quite happily, knowing that the same machinery would be available to them once the wheel of political fortune had turned again. This time it is different.

When New Labour came to power in 1997, it had an ideological vision. It politicised the entire intermediate area between the formal State and the community - this meant jobs largely in the gift of Government, or associated with pleasing Government, and reliant on public money.

Generationally, this was a massive jobs for the boys and girls operation that had an ideological purpose - not redistribution, as in traditional socialism, but the creation of a new civil society based largely on the type of identity politics that underpins what most people short-hand as 'political correctness'.

Rather like New Labour relying on a particular, but now collapsed, economic model in which private sector growth provided the 'bunce' for rapid public sector expansion, so its control of the State relied on a social model that was based on mobilising civil society to transmit the Party's programme.

The Left-Liberal Programme

That programme was left-liberal but not socialist, so it emphasised equality for identity-based groups but not equality in the traditional sense of economic outcomes (though some useful work was attempted on skills). However, most electors are driven by economic issues.

So long as the economy kept growing, there were jobs (the full employment mantra) and the informal politicised sub-state could grow and extend its reach, mostly in the urban areas. Cut off the flow of funds and the system starts to seize up. Worse, the 'clients' start to wonder what the point of it all is.

This system is now under threat at both a micro- and macro-level, far beyond issues of economic unsustainability. Tory local government has worked out that this substrate is precisely the 'fat' that it can cut without affecting the provision of most services that most people want most of the time.

At the macro-level, the imminent arrival of a Tory administration offers the biggest threat of all. This substrate has no constitutional basis. It is merely tolerated by the official State structure.

Many people in early middle age have made a career out of their roles. A slash of a pen could eliminate their jobs without any effective recompense or future career prospects - or so they fear. An incoming Administration owes them nothing.

The removal of this substrate is a fairly easy political and economic operation. The top end of it will soon be scrabbling to get the political peerages on offer as New Labour airlifts its favoured ones from this political Saigon. The rest have not only few prospects but a hard learning curve into the private sector.

The BNP as Voice of the Clientage

Why New Labour wants to silence Griffin is because the BNP does nothing to undermine the Tories (that task is the prerogative of UKIP). It undermines New Labour because it is the revolt of Labour's own 'damnes de la terre' neglected for twelve years. It is the revolt of the clients of a failed system.

The double fear - that of the formal establishment in seeing the politicisation of the authoritarian forces on which it relies to maintain order and that of the main left-liberal party watching part of its base go into open revolt against liberal values - is at the heart of the war on Nick Griffin.

In the end, they'll probably get him. He has too much embarrassing history for them not to get him. But the cost will be high. They will have exposed themselves on the very liberal values they claim to uphold and they will leave a festering sore of resentment that will not go away without serious concessions.

The paradox of Mr. Griffin is that in exposing the authoritarian pretensions of the post-Marxist 'official' Left and drawing attention to the consequences of incompetence in the administration of policy, he has probably split the authoritarian coalition that has kept progressives in power for such a long time.

With the Left split, with left-libertarians increasingly sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats and with the Tory Party increasingly libertarian largely because New Labour is not, the next political cycle may indeed see the withdrawal of the State from many spheres.

Hence the sheer panic of politicians like Hain and Harman. It is all crumbling before their eyes. The public actively wants to see their hegemony unravelled. The base that their party built up to secure election after election through clientage and expenditure is seizing up. It may all end very badly.

(WARNING: This posting contains important spoilers regarding the BBC Sci-Fi Series Torchwood. You are advised to bookmark it and read it later if you have not yet seen the full series and want to do so.)

The sharp increase in deaths amongst serving soldiers in Afghanistan (8 men in 24 hours, 15 in a week, and a total now exceeding Iraq) is now headline news.

The argument is less over whether we should be there (which might be interpreted as insufficiently supportive of ‘our boys’) and far more over whether sufficient resources have been provided to protect them from the Taliban’s intelligent strategy of leaving behind a few men but many roadside bombs.

The Military Situation

There are not enough soldiers and helicopters to do the job in Afghanistan. The Land Rovers, Vikings, Jackals and Vectors are certainly not up to the job either. Above all, the longer the war goes on, the more mayhem and the greater the loss of local ‘hearts and minds’.

The greatest risk is that the Afghan Presidential Election proves to be a farce in the key province of Helmand. This portion of a much wider war has to be ‘won’ within perhaps six to eight weeks or it may well come to be regarded as a defeat.

The Sunday Times shows a photograph of every dead soldier, mostly in their early 20s. Many of these are apparently dead because they were travelling by road in inadequate vehicles and not by helicopter.

The Taliban are not fools. They have largely withdrawn to fight again later, but they have left behind guerrillas who have created a new type of guided minefield, placing IEDs (roadside bombs) that can be triggered for maximum damage. The troops retreat from one bomb and then get caught in another.

The Government at a every level, right up to the Prime Minister, is preparing the public for a summer of deaths of young men. Their argument remains that the mission is ‘vital to the safety of the world’, a somewhat grandiose interpretation of what should have been little more than a police action in 2001.

The Brown Government has now committed itself to remaining until the job is finished - much as Johnson’s did in Vietnam with probably a very similar outcome. The concern within the military, of course, has nothing to do with whether the British should be in Afghanistan (that is a political decision). 

The military concern is with the tools being provided to do the job. If anything, Sir Richard Dannatt is an aggressive booster for the somewhat dubious justifications for the war. But conditions on the ground are now helping to create a political crisis at home.

Growing Tensions Between Government & Army

We have been reporting the growing tension between the military and New Labour for quite some time. Even before the credit crunch, there was a debate about expenditures between ‘guns’ and ‘butter’. The military pointed out that a progressive foreign policy of the Blairite type requires adequate funding.

The military complaint has lately been that too much was going into expensive hardware that was irrelevant to anti-insurgency operations and to the security services, with not enough support for boots on the ground.

The underlying strategic debate has now come out into the open as Secretary of Defense Gates starts to shift the US from Cold War megatron power (big and expensive metal objects) towards soft power support, intelligence and tactical flexibility.

This debate should have taken place in the UK long since, but its ‘poodle’ approach to the US, waiting on Washington for a lead, and electoral considerations have mean its own Strategic Defence Review has been left until far too late, just as its economic base is getting ready to crumble.

Until the Northern Rock crisis, the military might have expected sufficient compromise to get important concessions. Now, they are scrabbling for a diminishing pot. The Government is scarcely likely to cut health and education before it has won its election.

Governments have, in the past, been able to appeal to the standard soft militarism of the British working class and to the sheer weight of industrial jobs linked to the killing machine in order to deliver a fair proportion of budget to the ‘guns’ side of the equation.

The credit crunch and the associated political scandals have completely changed that scenario. The Government has to manage big wasteful job-creating metal-ware projects, its naked fear of domestic insurgency and major overseas commitments, all within a shrinking budget.

Weak Government & Torchwood

If you scratch the surface of public opinion, you find that there is still stomach for supporting the troops but little stomach for the war in Afghanistan or for toadying up to the Americans (who no longer seem to want us anyway).

New Labour is also undoubtedly gambling with its fiscal policy. The entire political class is at best distrusted and, at worst, in pockets, actively hated. It now acts as if this is not so - or just does not matter.

The military are thus faced with the problem of a weak Government which does not have the political credibility to throw more funds after bad in an endless mini-Vietnam undertaken for strategic reasons now lost in the mists of political time.

The public may be disengaged rather than anti-war, but the Government knows that it cannot afford to shift funds too noisily into its foreign and defence policy away from its domestic public sector nor can it conscript men - nor accept too great a death rate - without shifting that perspective dramatically.

The army is also beginning to lose ‘hearts and minds’ not so much in the mass of the population but increasingly amongst the liberal influencers who feed prejudice and opinion. An example of the shift lies in the popular sci-fi series Torchwood.

Torchwood is a horror story that played for five consecutive nights on prime time TV last week and will be repeated regularly. It is not at all about Afghanistan but it is about the relationship between the people and the organs of the State in these troubled times.

In this story, the Government was shown to be self-centred and cynical, prepared to take no responsibility for its past actions, and duplicitous to an American ally which effectively ran the country in a crisis. Sections of the population were to be judged disposable.

Some people were deemed less ‘useful’ or not ‘nice’ (a fairly common trope in liberal fiction) but the link to New Labour was very obvious in one line – these sections were to be identified for destruction through school league tables, ‘after all what is the point of having them otherwise’.

Hokum Is Power

Much of this may be too subtle for many of its audience, but the sight of British troops willingly rounding up people as a machine of the State was graphic and vivid. It had troops in our council estates, seizing children from schools.

Many public servants were portrayed as deluded in their obedience to orders if not ‘bad people’, but the core image was a revolutionary one – of agents of the State as enemies of at least some of the people and certainly of those most vulnerable and most currently angry at their condition in life.

Of course, this was fiction and ‘hokum’. Yet, like the X-Files in its time, such stories reflect what audiences are thinking privately. They also guide their thinking in the near future and an election is only a year away.

A theme was the authorities’ constant reference to ‘trust’, the sort of nonsense ‘spin’ perpetrated on the people by Blair. The message of the writers was undoubtedly to trust no-one in authority. This was coming from the premier nationally-funded broadcast network that needs public money to survive.

All this preamble about the mood in the country is necessary because military resentment at continued failure by Government to deliver the funding that it requires to pursue a war not of its choosing, and as auxiliary to a foreign empire, is becoming an increasingly open matter.

Senior New Labour figures are now fighting back, accusing the military of interfering in politics (an extremely rare accusation in the UK). But what do the military actually want? Not a great deal. They need 2,000 more troops (a debate that Brown does not want to have in Parliament) and helicopters.

The alternative is the worst of scenarios – more British deaths in a war that, if it is won, will be a public humiliation because the Americans will, with their superior force, be the ones who do the work in the end. To many military, it might be better to withdraw than be degraded and humiliated in this way.

The Political Problem

The political problem, the Torchwood factor if you like, is that this debate is being played out over the heads of a sullen public that does not trust the political class as a whole, let alone the Government.

Genuine concern for soldiers on the ground is tempered by a more general irritation with the indignity of the country’s poodle status and a growing distrust not only of the politicians but of all the organs of authority transmission, including the police, the media and local government.

This distrust is on the cusp of spreading to the Armed Forces. It gets complicated at an elite level because none of the political parties has had the imagination to tell the truth – that a mid-sized power needs to rethink its global role.

The Liberal Democrats strut as if they were statesmen even if they do make the most sensible analysis of current events.

The Tories continue to try to encourage the natural instincts of the officer class to support them. New Labour anger grew in part because Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, dined with Tory MPs to lobby for the additional troops that he needs.

There is a great deal at stake here. Perhaps the public is still passive, alternating between a degree of traditional support for ‘our boys’ and cynicism, but the growing military-Tory alliance is a major breach of the convention that soldiers do not dabble in politics.

However, the military is now close to desperate – it faced a certain degree of humiliation in Basra and it faces something similar in Helmand. It needs a diversion of resources but the British Government fears being mired in a mini-Vietnam at election time.

Behind all this is the fear that the Government itself is just not fit for purpose. The Sunday Times reports that the departing maverick Minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, the classic loose cannon, has averred that Brown’s government is more ‘chaotic’ than many administrations in the developing world.

This makes sense – the Prime Minister appears to have a track record of dithering, his claims often lack substance, he has no ‘vision’. His Cabinet is watching the political car in which they are passengers hurtle towards the cliff, with the driver insisting that he knows what he is doing.

If true (and we must take the Sunday Times with a pinch of salt), Malloch-Brown’s complaint would appear to centre on the problem of ‘strategic thinking’ – which rather confirms the failure to drive forward the Strategic Defence Review.

State servants need a strategic vision so that they can make decisions.

Too strong a vision without administrative control can lead to the chaotic evil of national socialism or the tyranny of communism. Too little can lead to a social anarchy that starts from the top and steadily works its way down to the street. The fish, as they say, rots from the head.

www.tppr.co.uk

www.pendrywhite.com

If you want to follow TPPR events and commentary, try http://twitter.com/TPPRNews

If you want to follow Pendry White events and commentary, try http://twitter.com/PendryWhite