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 There are constant and increasingly a-historical references to 1930s Germany.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.

The pressure on the Prime Minister from the Army to increase the long term British military presence in Afghanistan has been intensifying after 15 deaths in 12 days in Helmand Province. The Army wants a rise in British troop levels from 8,300 to 9,000 in November and it is backed by the Tory opposition.

The media consensus tends to back the Army and the Tories but without much enthusiasm. Opinion polling either shows the country to be evenly split on whether the British should even be there at all. Many want the British to pull out.

Politicians Play At Statesmen

Given a lack of engagement in the war by the public, the political class of all parties once again appears to be detached from reality. The criticism is still not of the war but of the conduct of the war.

However, the Tories are beginning to demand some strategic explanation of why losing lives in Helmand province is so important to national security. Privately, most intelligent politicians know that, without massive American engagement, this war is not winnable – and perhaps not even then.

So why are British soldiers being permitted to die! The rhetoric of Government has given up on Blairite high ideals (democracy and human rights) and it has shifted to the threat to British streets. But this is scarcely credible.

British actions in West Asia are likely, eventually, to re-target terror to the UK, whether to extend the war to bring it home to us or perhaps to exploit popular doubts or as an act of desperation in defeat.

The real reason for British engagement is solidarity as junior partner to the US and as an attempt to make NATO relevant but these are truths that dare not be spoken too loudly after Iraq.

The Prime Minister is also personally asserting that the Army has the right equipment and manpower to do the job this summer – he is claiming military support for his contention.

It is as if he is waiting for some short term success, based on US determination not to let the British fail, to enable him to shift funds back from butter to guns later in the year - perhaps relying on some patriotic tabloid surge of popular support based on a victory in the field and on signs of economic recovery.

Bluff & A Possible U-Turn

But what is not credible is the assertion of military backing for the Government. The military probably accept that they will get little now but their fear is that their men are dying to give cover to a dodgy election. The ground won to put Karzai and his cronies back in power will be ceded.

Yes, military chiefs will try to stay out of politics and will get the strong hint from New Labour that further direct comments are unwise – but this will not silence the informal dialogue between angry military figures and both media and opposition.

There is no credible source that does not know that the military are furious that political dithering has turned a serious military operation into a bargain basement effort, threatening to repeat past blunders (through poor resourcing and management) in Iraq.

Beneath this is the sense of being used as a blunt instrument for ill thought out political ends. We can sense an eventual political u-turn in the making, with some face-saving formula to limit the political damage, but, as a political ‘fix’, when it comes, it may be too little, too late.

What the Army wants is a permanent rise in numbers on the ground after the Afghan election in order to hold ground. This is an open Treasury cheque for a period when the Government knows that it will be preparing the public for post-election spending cuts on services.

The British Army may get the political traction for a permanent presence in Afghanistan but not before proof of the military pudding on the ground - that is, unless the Government really cannot hold the line against dissenters. And that is now quite possible.

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