An obsession with Nazi Germany has become almost a neurosis amongst Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. To some extent, this is understandable.

National socialism was central to a much wider political crisis that started with the great war for imperial advantage in 1914 and was only resolved (for Western Europe) with Hitler's defeat in 1945.

It is even more understandable when you consider the sheer scale of destruction, including the attempted deliberate extermination of at least two ethnic communities, and the fact that the crisis induced by the collapse of the old dynastic system was not resolved for Eastern Europe until 1989.

But interest in the Nazis has reached such absurd levels that the facetious Godwin's Law of 1990 (which states that, as a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1) is in daily operation on Facebook and in the blogosphere.

The reality is that the Nazi conservative revolution was limited in space and time and that it has been over-privileged in political theory. Hitler's hold on Germany lasted only as long as New Labour's over Britain and the war he initiated lasted fewer years than the War on Terror.

Similarly, Europe (excluding the British Isles and Iberia) and North Africa were held by the Nazis for less than half a decade and its 'culture' was wiped out within a quarter of a century of its initiation. Yet it has become a persistent meme like (say) the 'noble savage' for liberal intellectuals

What Was Nazism?

Nazism was dramatic vicious episode, worth studying as a pathology, but not one that truly crushed any competing culture, neither its primary ethnic target nor communism. It was based on bad science, was highly disorganised at its core and its economy was unsustainable in the long run.

It arose out of very peculiar historical conditions, in a crisis of modernisation, which are almost certainly unrepeatable. Its subsequent influence, in terms of the now widely ignored but high standard of the intellectual life that sustained it, has been wiped from the world for over sixty years.

In every respect, it was 'sui generis'. Yet it has become the instant comparator in any onslaught against any illiberal culture that is not avowedly communist. On the social networks anyone who stands up to Washington is a Hitler and anyone who fails to stand up to such 'Hitlers' is an appeaser.

This has taken on salience domestically as liberals rush to call our homegrown fascist Party, the BNP, Nazi when what they mean is neo-nationalist, corporatist, racist or fascist, all categories that extend far beyond 1930s German conditions to embrace many different phenomena.

The Hitler-Drexler Programme of 1920

Back in 1920, the NSDAP publicly presented its programme, drafted by Hitler and Anton Drexler. It is instructive to review it and see what was 'generic' (i.e. could apply to another time and place) and what was particular to its time - and how much of it matched the horror to come.

The horror to come was the crushing of dissent (including dissent from 'socialists' within the NSDAP itself), the war on the Jews and the mobilisation of a destructive general war that caused the deaths of tens of millions - all within twelve years.

To take contemporary British parallels, this is like a programme for a small party formed in 1984 which seizes power in 1996, enters a war in 2003 but sees utter crushing defeat in 2009. We may smile at the current parallel ...

Just as the trajectory of the Labour Right after 1996 cannot be understood without understanding the hold of Tony Blair so the trajectory of national socialism cannot be understood without understanding the ruthlessness of Adolf Hitler ...

... and yet neither the Old Labour Right nor national socialism are entirely to be explained by the ultimate beneficiaries' full adoption of the 'Fuhrerprinzip'. They represent intellectual and ideological movements that could mobilise first hundreds, then tens of thousands, then millions of people.

The Contrast with Marxism

There are oddities in national socialism from the very beginning - the NSDAP is ostensibly a limited aims party that claims to anticipate its own dissolution once its aims had been achieved.

Its ideology is collectivist and nationalist, opposed to special interests whether of class or values. This is revolutionary and would have been appealing to many people now as then.

But all Hitler & Drexel had done was to replace the notion of proletariat with that of volk in a way not quite so far from Engels' German Idealism as we might like to think.

As Tristram Hunt in a recent talk pointed out, Engels was not the absolute egalitarian that some communists would like us to believe. Engels too accepted difference after the withering away of the State but this difference was to be based on attainment or talent not race or nationality.

The 'volkisch' ideology of national socialism merely drew up its new barriers between the squabbling French, Italian, English, Russian and German socialists of the previous half century whose management had created the authoritarian attitude that led to the vanguard revolutionary socialism of the Bolsheviks.

The Marxists had lost much of their humanity in trying to square very different cultures within socialism. Socialism then experienced a new crisis when internationalism amongst the working classes collapsed within days of the 1914 declarations of war.

Many natural socialists were further perplexed when the Russian Revolution created an aggressive militarised revolutionary force in the Red Army under Trotsky that actively sought (Germany was the primary target) a proletarian dictatorship across cultural barriers.

If the solution to squabbling on one side was centralised vanguard internationalism based inevitably on a locus in the first country to have a revolution (the Soviet Union), then the solution on the other side was to scrap the pretence to internationalism and have a national socialism.

The Horror, The Horror

In the six years before Drexler and Hitler started writing their programme, international socialism had already collapsed into a quasi-national socialism in the West, the soft pacifistic socialism of Jaures and Lansbury was in terminal decline and the threat from the East was militant and 'Jewish-materialist'.

The whole horror that is to come is embedded in one Clause (4) of the 1920 Programme where blood is linked to nation and it is baldly stated that 'no Jew may be a member of the nation'.

It stands out so much that the Jews need not be mentioned again - they are 'non-citizens' and quite literally alienated (5). In summary, from the beginning of the movement, aliens (not only Jews of course):-

• cannot vote or hold public office
• should be deported if there is not enough food for everyone (a grim precursor of what was to happen after 1940)
• cannot control or participate in the media

In fact, though harsh, the idea of non-citizens being limited in their rights may be radical but is not necessarily evil once you accept some degree of historic continuity in a community or resource limits.

What disturbs the modern mind is a) the association of blood (or genes in modern terminology) with the labelling of a whole component of existing society as alien and b) the refusal to permit migrants a say in the society they are joining. In addition, some migrants (since 1914) were to be forced to leave.

Make no bones about it - this is illiberal. There is an understandable fear that the BNP, even if it would not institute the extermination camp, would find it easy to consider some groups as non-citizens and follow a similar programme. There is no other party in the UK today that would advocate this approach.

'Jewish-Materialism'

The other direct reference is to the 'Jewish-materialistic' spirit as something to be fought. In hindsight, this seem obviously 'racist' but it is only the second direct reference to Judaism in 25 clauses and there is another ideological interpretation that is based on a distressing fact.

As Tony Judt has pointed out, Jewish intellectuals, for comprehensible reasons regarding their own status in society, played an inordinate role in the spread and intellectual development of Marxism and of materialism. If Marxism became the primary rival so must the Jews to national socialists.

To the national socialists, international socialism was (after 1917) wholly associated with a class-based rival essentialist philosophy whose birthplace had been from well within the German Idealist tradition and which privileged the intellectual and de-privileged the community or 'volk'.

General anti-semitism becomes linked to the reality of a particular Jewish intellectual tradition within Europe and to a perception of a new imbalance, because what Stalinists (in many ways quasi-national socialists within the Marxist tradition) later called 'rootless cosmopolitanism' had achieved dominance.

The defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a vacuum into which Marxist revolutionaries and urban intellectuals moved speedily, with short-lived international socialist revolts that seemed to have a disproportionate Jewish component.

In this fevered atmosphere, enormously intense over only two years of collapse, the vast mass of ordinary Jews who led wholly blameless existences as doctors, merchants, ordinary workers and peasants were tainted with this brush of the enemy within.

To many national socialists, the Jews thus represented a philosophical taint. To Hitler, the philosophical taint was embedded in the genes. An ideological war morphed quickly into a race war with dreadful consequences.

Back to the 1920 Programme

The first three demands are entirely of their time and place: union of the volk on the basis of national self-determination; renegotiation of the recent treaties on equal terms for Germany; and empire.

These are the demands which lead to war but, other than the fact that Germany had been defeated so that the demands were wholly unrealistic from that perspective, none of these demands was absurd from the perspective of the times.

Today, we would, rightly, baulk at demands for empire but imperialist attitudes were normal across European culture. Even international socialists could not be relied upon not to have some intrinsic racial attitudes that placed 'primitive' peoples below the 'civilised'.

But the idea of national self-determination and of equality of nations was ostensibly Anglo-Saxon liberal so these 'demands', though idealistic and politically absurd, merely pointed out the hypocrisy of confused victors who could not decide whether they had ideals or were inclined to imperial vengeance.

This is the tragedy of the first three clauses - German national socialists were naively doing little more than taking the liberal wing of the West at face value. Much of the subsequent horror might (in theory) have been avoided if the West had imposed a stronger democracy on a Greater Germany.

This was politically impossible for a variety of reasons, mostly related to the fact that the victorious powers would not have been allowed by their own peoples to 'reward' an aggressor with territory, albeit territory that Hitler would later seize by force in any case and at greater cost.

Domestic National Socialism

However 21 of the 25 points of the 1920 Programme relate solely to domestic matters. This is where we have to try and find what makes a national socialist programme in its essence and whether it could apply to any rising party today (removing the particularity of it being German).

If we remove the foreign policy considerations and ideological war on 'Jewish-materialism', we still have the bulk of a programme related to domestic conditions, as you would expect in any Party seeking to appeal to a population that wanted jobs, respect and food on the plate.

Let us make the mental shift and de-Teutonise and de-racialise the programme, what would it say to the British if it was recast into '1984 terms'? It is avowedly Statist - party politics withers away, not the machinery of power. It is highly centralised and implicitly bureaucratic.

All citizens (once the exclusions have been made) are equal. Unlike the international socialists who see the middle classes as a barrier to the revolution, national socialism sees the middle classes as a central backbone for the nation.

There is also a 'liberal' attitude to religious freedom, though clearly with reserve powers given to the national-socialist State to decide what might or might not be acceptable. Interestingly, given its later history, the NSDAP advocates a 'positive' non-denominational Christianity.

Roman Law would be replaced with German 'volksrecht' and there would be capital punishment for the criminal classes, including 'usurers' and 'profiteers', with a specific charge that this would apply as much to pure blood Germans as Jews.

Press and cultural censorship is explicit with controls to ensure that the public could only read German newspapers owned by Germans. There would be a conscript people's army in place of reliance on a purely professionalised force.

The Socialism in National Socialism

So far, we have an authoritarian, corporartist and militaristic regime but not a socialist one but the socialist aspects soon come to the fore in a range of policy prescriptions that you do not find in most of the petty fascist regimes of the rest of Europe:

• The State has a duty to provide full employment
• No unearned income will be permitted - there is a specific reference to the 'slavery of interest'
• Confiscation of war profits
• Nationalisation of trusts (large conglomerates)
• Profit-sharing in large-scale industry
• Insurance for old age
• Transfer of the large department stores to small traders on low rents
• Preference in Government procurement to small business
• Land nationalisation without compensation, abolition of ground rent and an end to land speculation (this was later [1928] clarified as directed solely at special cases and 'Jewish' firms engaged in property dealing)
• Higher education for all directed at practical (implicitly technical) matters but also according to nationalist ideology.
• State funding of education for the gifted disadvantaged.
• A progressive health policy, directed especially at mothers and children
• Prohibition of child labour
• Compulsory fitness and sports aimed at youth

In return, citizens have a duty to work in employment for the general good and, presumably, serve in the people's army.

Stripped of the aggressive racism and foreign policies, much of the socialist aspect of national socialism, half of its programme perhaps, could be those of any traditional aspirant social democrat administration right up to the 1970s with perhaps only a little less emphasis on compulsion.

Nazis & Bolsheviks

The NSDAP is even more radical than any social democrat in its attitude to the capitalist (though this changed within a few years as Hitler needed money and friends in high places).

Its appreciation of the middle class gives it a couple of policies on small business that would sit happily in the modern Tory Party. The whole orientation against special interests and democracy gives it a peculiar stance that is not easily categorisable in post war left/right terms.

One common libertarian claim is that the Nazis and the Bolsheviks (at least under Stalin) are like two peas in a pod. There is some merit in the comparison, especially as both were trying to find a way to force through modernisation strategies on behalf of mass populations.

But the differences are important, if only to assess where one stands in the 'which-was-more-evil' debate that seems never-ending amongst competing left and right liberals.

Hitler removed much of the more obviously anti-capitalist platform of the Party, slaughtering the leading members of that faction in the Night of the Long Knives (1934), but the essence of national socialism has to be seen in its 1920s form if it is to be debated cogently.

The defeated faction still survives today as the various forms of National Bolshevism, a name indicating the original nature of the split between the NSDAP and international socialism. The argument was not with revolutionary vanguardism but with internationalism.

The essence of the difference lies in the idea of volk. If, in practice, Stalin behaved as if he was a nationalist socialist, his 'socialism in one country' like that of all national Marxists was always tactical.

When Hitler invaded a country, he treated it as subordinate at best and as plunder at worst. This was no better than the Aztecs.

Although not averse to a bit of tactical plundering, when Stalin invaded a country, he imposed a system that subordinated the country but it was also designed to function within a regime that was, at the end of the day, universalist. Indeed, the satrapies were often subsidised at the expense of the centre.

Similarities between the BNP and the NSDAP

BNP figures are known to be as educated in 'Hitler lore' as their Trotskyist enemies are in the lore of Marx & Engels but Hitler's radical racism is no longer tenable even for these extremists. The BNP has shifted from blood or genes to culture, gone easy on the Jews and targeted the Muslims instead.

BNP concerns are not imperialist but survivalist. National sustainability within their ideological model is placed above the sort of strutting on the world stage that we would associate with New Labour. They fear the destruction of the volk rather than its simple containment.

But, although defensive because there is no political advantage in antisemitism or war for its own sake, the BNP is, like the NSDAP, both nationalist and socialist, trying to use the strong State to feed the needs of both workers and small businessmen at the same time.

If anything, we are missing the point by concentrating on its attenuated 'rassenpolitik', the real concern we should have is not its 'ideology' (which is a rather soft version of the really hard line fascisms of the 1930s) but its appeal to the authoritarian personality - and its own negative attitude to democracy.

Nazis Don't Win, Democracies Lose

In this context, there is a rather curious concern in the 1920 Programme with ensuring that all offices are filled with the best persons rather than loyal persons - ironic in view of the role of party membership in gaining state sector employment within a few years.

But this attitude strikes a chord today with the 'expenses' scandal and the growing distrust of the political class as a whole. Such discontent is not unique to the job-fixing environment of Weimar. It was at the root of resentment in the French Third Republic and is emerging as a force here in the UK.

It is a common symptom of distrust of any democratic State that has lost its way and it may be the most dangerous legacy of the New Labour Administration. It is certanly getting all too easy to be negative towards democracy in the UK at the moment.

The political class is increasingly degenerating into greed and ignorance and the Government it sustains seems to be riddled with confusion and incompetence. From that perspective, we should be concerned at the BNP's rise because such movements thrive on democratic failures.

In reality, there are also liberal and libertarian challenges to liberal democratic failure. The BNP are not the only natural alternative in the absence of a strong Marxist Left.

On the contrary, if I wanted to preserve the existing system, I would be worrying less at the rise of the BNP and more at the libertarian rage against the strengthening but incompetent State and at a revival of working class discontent when Government finally gets around to the necessary budget cuts.

As we have said in the past and will say again, the obsession with the Nazi-like characteristics of the BNP is misplaced, the sign of a liberal intelligentsiya in panic over its own loss of power.

Yes, the BNP are in a line of descent from Drexel and Hitler's programme of 1920 but, in the 85 years since its production, the social and technological conditions that permitted the rise of fascist and communist leaders of the type of Hitler and Stalin is past.

The real problem for liberal democracy is not the capture of the State by an authoritarian machine (after all, we've had that for the last twelve years) but the collapse in acceptance of the State by the population as a viable organiser of social and economic relations.

The BNP are an atavistic attempt to recreate state power as a tool of the popular will when, for technological reasons, the population will no longer accept that anyone can speak for it but itself as producer or consumer of resources and culture.

This is the problem to which 'bourgeois democrats' should address themselves ... their own loss of authority arising out of an inability to respond to public anger at their own incompetence and self-interest. The fascists are just an unpleasant side effect of a wider crisis.

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.