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 There are constant and increasingly a-historical references to 1930s Germany.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

There have been two stories in the British media this week that help to demonstrate why the New Labour Government is having a problem connecting with the population at large. They are not stories about foreign wars or economic crisis but about the management of private life.

The first saw a 19-year old Canadian woman effectively kicked out of the country because of new visa rules despite having married a Welsh man and being happily settled with him in an apparently stable relationship on British territory.

The second is the announcement that anyone, including parents, who regularly drives children around for social reasons will have to undergo criminal record checks or (in theory though less so in practice) face major fines.

What these stories have in common is an attitude of mind. In a large and complex society, Government has resorted to sledgehammers to crack recalcitrant nuts. Lobbyists against specific abuses have driven Government into solutions that look good on paper but bad in the street.

In these cases, and in many others, the instinct of New Labour progressives when faced with an abuse by a small minority is to create new rules (often begging the question of effective enforcement) that add petty bureaucracy and inconvenience (and costs) to millions.

There are many other examples, low and high. The identity card scheme (in abeyance but far from forgotten) imposes European style social control mechanisms in a forlorn attempt to manage and control massive social security fiddling. Most middle class people just can't see the point.

Sometimes, these approaches are designed to support special interests. New technologies are creating problems for the creative industries so the Government plans to introduce draconian measures on filesharing that could ultimately have coppers bursting in on private homes to arrest teenagers.

If you think this is extreme, observe the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Squad's arrest of a teenage artist who dared to challenge the might of Damien Hirst, actually the might of the protectors of the right to print money of fashionable artists needing to preserve value for their patrons.

At other times, the Government follows a different ideological tack. Its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, is a hardline old-school feminist who does not like prostitution. Her solution would be to bring in more draconian Swedish-type laws that would outlaw paying for sex.

In her case, just as the change in visa laws is related to forced marriages and the criminal records registration requirements to the risk from paedophiles, the real driver behind Harman's rather potty idea (under British conditions) is the very real problem of sex-trafficking.

If it is not sexual conduct, then it is right behaviour in environmental matters or in late night drinking. Sensible reforms are often made ridiculous with a bridge too far in attempts to control language (implying control of thought) instead of just behaviour.

In Scotland, it would seem a barman cannot volunteer the phrase 'same again' lest that 'nudge' you into that extra drink. The public are treated as mindless zombies. Much of this legislation appears to be guided by a new breed of manipulative cognitive scientists.

Then there is the security agenda which results in increasingly oppressive and patently daft applications of counter-terror legislation in local government. There is not an amateur photographer in the land who is not angered by the increasingly odd behaviour of the police.

Many of the British are beginning to get increasingly irritated by all this interference because it indicates a Government that is weak rather than strong, unable to deal with particular problems through decisive executive action. It can only create blanket rules which it often fails to enforce.

The net effect is a climate of anxiety, fear and inconvenience in which the majority of the population is cowed into avoiding behaviour that they would probably never have considered in the first place, while the really bad people go ever deeper underground where it can be pretended that they do not exist.

There are other irritations. Most of the specific problems that are emerging are the result of globalisation (the easy flow of peoples from other cultures into Britain to meet cheap labour needs) or of community breakdown under free market pressure. But migration and economic interventionism are taboo subjects.

New Labour is trapped by its ideology in two directions - its egalitarian liberal human rights agenda means that rules should apply to everyone equally and its free market agenda fails to permit any  effective and targeted interventionist strategies that can deal with economic root causes.

Not only are there real and vicious abuses in society to deal with but New Labour is also determined to support certain 'creative industrial' interests as part of its competitiveness agenda and to keep its own ideological minorities as happy as possible given its crumbling electoral base.

We are in the position where ordinary British families, generally a-political and best characterised as 'lazy libertarians', are finding that, increasingly, they have to start owning documents and registering to prove they are to be trusted or fear the heavy boot of Plod at every bit of grey area bodging.

They are not only pushed around by uniformed jobsworths (not necessarily the police) when they try to take a snap but they are being forced to snoop on their own kids.

History is repeating itself. In the early 1950s, the Labour Government that created the welfare state and undertook a massive postwar housing programme lost an election to the Conservatives. 

There were many reasons for that defeat but one was that the 'lazy libertarians' decided that they had had enough of 'socialist' regulation and rules and wanted more basic freedoms.

Admittedly a narrow defeat but Labour was slow to understand that many in the electorate saw regulation as a temporary necessity rather than a way of life.

Even though there is now scarcely a socialist bone in New Labour's body (despite the claims of Tory libertarians to whom Roosevelt was a Communist), it has not shaken off its Fabian-derived instinct to manage the population from above through direction and regulation.

There is an element in the New Labour elite that fears HG Wells' projection of his time into a world of Eloi and Morlocks. To Tories like David Davis, council estates are still filled with Disraeli's 'angels in marble' whereas some sour progressives see a seething mob marked by a 'poverty of aspiration'.

Tories have held on to working class votes since Disraeli's time not only through crass nationalism (as Labour people like to claim) but by ensuring a 'laissez-faire' approach to private life. Beer drinkers would naturally gravitate to the centre-right to the degree that the 'temperance' loons took over the left.

In the current Government's case, the ideological predisposition towards social intervention (perhaps accentuated by its refusal to consider economic intervention) is compounded not only by the chaos caused by economic globalisation but by the attempt to Europeanise British culture.

The regulatory frame of mind is normal in parts of Europe. In Germany, it seems accepted that language (as in the criminalisation of holocaust denial) can be a subject for legislation - and this mentality has drifted over into anti-racism legislation and the debate about blasphemy in the UK.

Wherever you look in British public life, in the dying days of what may be the last centre-left administration for a long time, you see a propensity to use the blunt instrument of petty regulation of private life to solve problems that its policy approaches created in the first place.

The gap between the Tories and New Labour will narrow over the coming months as the special interests underpinning the centre-left start to realise what is in store for them - but the general public have accumulated so many petty irritations that a tipping point may have been reached.

As we wait for the results of the European Elections today, the chaos at the top of the Labour Party has caused media attention to drift from detailed analysis of the vote in the local elections.

This Election was cataclysmic for New Labour, with the loss of 327 seats. It was not great for the Liberal Democrats either who lost 50. With the Tories gaining 285 and many of the ‘others’ (92 gains) being of the right, this was the shift to the centre-right that we expected.

Actual power, that is the administrative dominance of county councils, has certainly shifted to the Conservatives, with seven gains from all parties. Yet a calculation of equivalent vote at the national elections was much less impressive for the Tories than this implies.

Labour certainly now appears to have been in a possibly terminal and steady decline from the 2005 election victory, coming third to the Liberal Democrats who, in turn, despite their losses, have seen a slight recovery in actual vote. Yet the Tory vote has also sharply declined. So where is this all going?

The British system has its own peculiarities. What we are seeing is a potential time-bomb for all the main parties. It appears that some voters have shifted to a variety of neo-nationalist, green and (very marginally) neo-socialist parties but that the vast bulk have simply decided not to vote.

Is this inertia or resentment? Some of these voters may well return at a national election, but this is no longer certain as the expenses scandal and resentments over immigration and the economy create anger and cynicism below the surface.

The British political system allows silent resentment to be ignored as unimportant, so that a party that is despised by the majority might yet form a Government with a mandate of sorts. But this still gives it a problem of legitimacy.

This has been Brown’s problem since he failed to call an election after taking power from Blair. It could become a Conservative problem under a flaccid Cameron leadership that seems to be adopting John Smith’s ‘one more heave’ strategy for power as an alternative to any decisive reform of its own failings.

Current projections (not a reliable guide given what actually happened in 1997) give the Tories an overall parliamentary majority of 34 if an election were held now. This would place Cameron under permanent pressure from whatever awkward squad appeared on his backbenches.

Labour’s main opposition role would, under these projections, not be much threatened by the slightly higher number of Liberal Democrats and ‘others’ in Parliament. Its very survival in adversity would enable Brown to be removed with honour and provide a base for revival under an untainted leader.

In this analysis, Labour, unlikely to win an election now, could still recover afterwards on Conservative failures. Unfortunately, the scenario does not take account of wider disenchantment in English society nor of the future effects of tax rises and spending cuts.

Tax rises and cuts will reflect back on New Labour’s past stewardship of the economy but there is a real danger for a Conservative Government that it could face a war on two fronts - an aggressive and revived official opposition without any real legitimacy in the country’s eyes for itself …

The Blair coalition has not merely been shattered (as the Sunday Times suggests). Its middle class elements are loose and angry and have not yet accepted that the Conservatives are any better. Blair’s success has, in any case, been exaggerated.

The Blair coalition had long since been whittled away by foreign policy issues and perceived Government incompetence well before the economic crisis added fuel to the fire. A new coalition is now necessary on the centre-left and only Alan Johnson currently appears in a position to do this.

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