Dogwash

The Searchlight/UAF Hate not Hope operation and its mainstream sponsors get ever more bizarre by the day. In this piece puffing an upcoming BBC shock horror programme about the BNP's official attitude towards established ethnic minority populations in the UK, a sinister sounding document called the BNP Language & Concepts Manual is described as having been

... leaked to an anti-fascist group and seen by the BBC ...

I presume that they mean the document which may be found on the BNP website at Organiser Guides => General Guides => Language Discipline. By all means challenge the policies and views of the BNP, but what's with all the spurious cloak and dagger bollocks, pretending that this is all some secret fash plot to overthrow decent British society, revealed to a shocked public through the bravery of Gerry's crack espionage team, immersing themselves selflessly and at great personal risk in the company of fascist filth?

Searchlight/UAF seems to be rapidly turning into a real-life enactment of Our Man in Havana.

Now, I'm not a BNP member or supporter, despite what the binary-minded Righteous Left may have by now concluded, but I am quite prepared to "sully" my browser cache by visiting their website. It took me only a few clicks to locate this document. Not only that, I have actually read it. Like the Activists' and Organizers' Handbook which made such a shock-horror splash in the meeja the other day, much of it is practical advice about conduct in day to day campaigning and activism in a potentially hostile environment.

Worse than that, chaps, the views expressed chime very closely with those of ordinary British people. And I don't mean with the views of some stereotypical, frothing, "skinhead, tattoos and Doc Martens" Nazi sociopath who dreams of rounding all the nignogs up at gunpoint and driving them into the sea. I mean ordinary decent White folks. The people who get on quite happily with their neighbour Winston, the retired bus driver, his ex-nurse wife and their fine grown-up kids, and with that nice Mr Patel who runs the corner shop and who agrees with them in their dislike of the rough Somali youths on the estate and their grasping parents, and of the nasty criminal Pikey vandals down at the junk-strewn campsite.

Are Winston and Mr Patel British? Or their UK-born offspring? What about the Somali kids, born in the UK but living in their own little ethnic bubble, antagonistic to the surrounding Other? Possibly, possibly not, possibly partially. There is nuance here. There is a grey boundary region here (if you'll pardon the use of a colour metaphor in this fraught context). There are processes of integration, accommodation and assimilation which stretch over time, possibly generations, and which are not necessarily guaranteed a successful outcome.

There is a degree of subtlety here, of — to use that word again, nuance — which the binary-minded Left cannot grasp. While most of us real people would balk at the purist exclusivity espoused by at least some of Mr Griffin's mob, we equally reject the countervailing simplistic view of their opponents, that anyone in the world is entitled to live here and that merely being born within the purlieus of this Sceptr'd Isle ipso facto makes you as 'British' as someone like me, most of whose ancestors have probably been here since the days when you'd nip down the local Sainsbury's cave for a pound of mammoth steak, even if we have to constantly redefine British identity to accommodate you. The British are, after all, merely the tiresome substrate population of this desirable terra nullius and exist solely to make perpetual penance for their sinful past, at least until they are no longer useful and can be conveniently eliminated.



While I'm here, I'll touch on something which perhaps ought to go in a separate post, but sod it. Elsewhere on the Hate Not Hope site, we find this little piece. It transpires that "the fash" are planning to hold some kind of get-together in a boozer in 'Eckmondwike. The good guys of UAF are determined to prevent this — through peaceful dialogue and persuasion only, of course.

Edmonds [the speaker at the proposed meeing] was due to address a North Kirklees meeting at the Royal Hotel back in November 2008, but after pressure from antifascists the meeting was called off.

Because of the meeting's cancellation the North Kirklees organiser at the time, Ian Roper, was sacked by the Yorkshire regional organiser Adrian Marsden.

As The Royal is a Free House we are asking people to ring the pub and POLITELY lodge their complaint with the management.

The Royal Hotel's telephone number is xxxxx xxxxxx.

We have proven already what can be done in November.

Now, I have no inside track on either side of this argument. I follow the activities of both the BNP and the 'anti-fascists' with interest, but I am inclined to treat the pronouncements of both sides with a due measure of sceptism, working on the assumption that even if they do not always speak with yer actual forked tongue, they are most definitely inclined to be economical with the truth in the original Burkean sense of that phrase.

Whenever the UAF succeeds in preventing a BNP meeting going ahead, it will always claim to have achieved this by politely and quietly persuading or reminding the venue manager of how vile the BNP are, with the result that the manager, recoiling with shock and revulsion, cancels the booking forthwith.

Forgive me if I find this scenario less than entirely convincing where the venue is a pub or club. In over 40 years of quiet unassuming serial debauchery I have come to know a good many publicans. While very few of them conform exactly to Al Murray's pub landlord stereotype, they are invariably people of strong character, worldliness and robust good sense, most commonly exhibiting the pragmatic centre-right political worldview of the small businessman.

— "Royal Hotel."
— "Good Evening. I'm ringing on behalf of Unite Against Fascism. I understand you have a room booking on behalf of the British Heritage Party."
— "Oh, yes?"
— "Do you realize that these people are in fact the British National Party, a bunch of fascist racist Nazi scum?"
— "Really? Good God! That's terrible. Thank you for telling me. I'll cancel the booking straight away."

Possibly. But somehow the following seems just a tad more plausible.

— "Royal Hotel."
— "This is the UAF. We understand you've got a BNP meeting booked for the 23rd."
— "Yes, what of it?"
— "Well, you just might like to reconsider, Sunshine, or a squad of enraged crusties might just turn up, entirely spontaneously of course, and start trashing the place. Entirely up to you, of course. Nothing to do with us, of course, we resolutely deplore violence and intimidation. But sometimes people's natural revulsion towards the fash gets the better of them. Just thought it was only fair to let you know."

And if that's democracy then, as Ian Hislop might put it, I'm a banana.