The sausage roll road to fascism

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One of the more absurd images to emerge over the past week was the one of the topless guy liberating a tray of sausage rolls from a Greggs shop during the riots in Hull. Whilst we cannot be completely sure that it wasn’t a carefully-planned intention to arm himself with sausage rolls to wave in the face of Muslims whose religion does not permit the consumption of pork, rather in the manner of pointing kryptonite at Superman, it seems much more probable that he was just feeling a little peckish. And we have no conclusive evidence to suggest that he’d know the difference between a pork sausage roll and a vegan one anyway.

Some politicians – and not just those of the political right – have suggested that stopping the riots depends at least in part on dealing with the so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ of the protesters about immigration. I don’t really understand what those ‘legitimate concerns’ might be, but I struggle even more to comprehend the link between a concern about immigration and a daring raid on purveyors of sausage rolls (delicious though they may be). It’s true that some services in the UK are under pressure – such as housing, education, social care and health. But the last two of those would be under even more pressure if it were not for staff who have come from elsewhere in the world to work in those sectors. And in more general terms, those pressures are more to do with underfunding by successive governments – a policy which Labour apparently intends to continue – than with such increase in demand as results from migration. Deliberately creating a shortage and then finding a convenient group to scapegoat is a divide-and-rule tactic which is as old as the hills.

It's also more than a little strange that an allegedly non-racist concern about total numbers manifests itself in the form of direct and violent action against the adherents of one particular religion. Even if the original rumour about the religion and background of the alleged assailant in Southport had been true, the leap to blaming, and then seeking to punish, all adherents of that religion surely owes more to prejudice than to logic. If I recall correctly, Marx once said something along the lines of: ‘anger in the multitude is enough – just give me six in the country who understand’. It’s not something which applies only to the political ‘left’. Those out on the streets attacking immigrants don’t need to have a worked-though political philosophy; they don’t need to be fascists themselves. They merely need to express their anger, whipped up by those who would use that anger for their own ends. And even some of those doing the fomenting don’t need any sort of ideology to underpin their actions. If the UK were to descend into fascism, it wouldn’t be the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ who would end up as dictator, it would be one or other of those who offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ which they themselves have blown up in the minds of the many. Locking up the pawns who are ‘merely’ angry might be a necessary step in the short term, but it’s dealing with the symptom. The ones we should really beware of are those whose ‘solutions’ involve authoritarian rule and restrictions of freedom.

Identifying the real agenda

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It was announced earlier today that Elon Musk has endorsed Trump for the presidency of the USA and committed around $45 million a month to supporting his campaign. It underlines, obviously, the way in which American political campaigning is dominated by money. It’s not so much that votes are directly ‘bought’ in a way which could be defined as corrupt; more a case of the candidate with the biggest war chest being able to promote his or her message more comprehensively and effectively. In theory, one of the differences between politics in the UK and the US is that the UK has stricter rules on who can donate and how much candidates and parties can spend. In practice the rules are fairly easy to circumvent, and one of the later acts of the Tories in government was to dramatically increase the limits in an attempt to give the party generally funded by the richest in society a better chance of winning. And although it’s difficult to prove a clear and unambiguous quid pro quo, ennobling people looks to have been something of a money-spinner for the Tories.

But I digress. When people talk of the nascent fascism of Trump, they are often referring to his views on issues such as migration. It’s not clear to what extent Musk agrees with much of what Trump has to say on those issues. But then, neither is it certain how much Trump believes in that stuff either, or whether he really sees it as just his way of appealing to voters whose economic interests have little in common with his own. I find it hard to believe, for instance, that someone employing as many people as Musk does, with his strange attitudes towards employment rights, isn’t at least partially dependent on the immigrants who Trump says he wants to deport. His support for Trump is probably more about their shared belief about what the nature of economic relationships in society should be. Much of what Trump says tends to avoid that, but if we judge by his actions when he was president previously, he certainly believes that American oligarchs and authoritarians – such as Musk, for instance, to say nothing of himself and his family – should be the ones for whose benefit the economy should be run. It’s probably what makes Trump so fond of Putin as well – another authoritarian who runs his country for the benefit of the richest few, including himself, and has little patience with the idea that people should be allowed to choose their leaders.

It’s not just about Trump, Musk and Putin either (and one could add Farage, Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, and Fico as well as a number of prominent UK Tories to the list). The common thread that runs though what has become known as ‘populism’ might superficially look as though it’s about nationalism, opposition to ‘wokery’ (to use their prejudicial terminology) and migration, but scratch the surface and it’s really more about the key economic relationships in society. In all those countries where ‘the right’ is in the ascendency, the political discourse is often about the cultural fluff because they think that’s where the votes are, but the real danger lies in the underlying tendency towards authoritarianism, oligarchy, and increased concentration of wealth, undermining the rights of ‘lesser’ individuals in the process. Persuading people to vote against their own economic interests turns out not to be a difficult task. But we should have known that after Brexit.

Labels don't help, even if they're valid

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A noticeable trait of some Tories – Sirjake is a classic example – is to avoid referring to ‘Labour’ or the ‘Labour Party’ and talk instead about the ‘Socialists’. The word is deemed to be, in its own right, sufficient condemnation of those to whom it refers with no need for further elucidation. In the milieu of those who do this, it might work, but it betrays an underlying assumption that what the speaker considers unspeakable is also considered unspeakable by most of those listening. It is, at best, a contentious proposition. There is a similar phenomenon in operation on what is loosely called ‘the left’, where the word ‘fascist’ is often used in a similarly abusive fashion, making a similar assumption that fascism is beyond the pale for most listeners. It’s lazy – and probably ineffective.

Merriam-Webster (other dictionaries are available) tells us that fascism is defined as: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime … that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition”. An objective consideration of the political programme of parties like Reform and the modern Tory Party, to say nothing of American Trumpism or a range of European parties, will end up ticking most of those boxes, and leading to the conclusion that a resurgence of fascism is a real and present danger. But the applicability of a logically justifiable label is a wholly unreasonable, not to say counter-productive, reason for applying it. The problem is, in essence, that when we start looking at the public reaction to the elements of the definition, it becomes obvious that many of them are popular. Fascist ideology speaks to a number of deeply ingrained prejudices and biases. Using a label is a wholly ineffective way of addressing those underlying beliefs.

The commemoration of D-Day last week has been seen by some as a timely reminder of the cost of suppressing the last major outbreak of fascism in Europe, with its presentation of ‘the war’ as a battle between two ideologies, conveniently labelled freedom and fascism. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering about the validity of that characterisation. I’m too young to have been around during the war years, but during a childhood in the 1950s I certainly remember what some of the adults around me said about it. The phrase, “The only good German is a dead one” is a phrase I remember hearing a number of times, and the words ‘German’ and ‘Nazi’ were often conflated. It was only much later that I learned that not all Germans were Nazis (and, in terms of their philosophical outlook at least, not all Nazis were Germans; some were very much closer to home). The war, from that remembered perspective, was not some great ideological battle for those who lived through it and its aftermath, but a battle between two states which had fought each other in the past. The enemy was Germany, a traditional foe and competitor, not Nazism. It’s an attitude which echoes still in the stupid chant by some Ingerland fans about “two world wars and a world cup”.

The desire to see the outcome of that conflict as a triumph for good over evil, where the men in white hats defeated the ones wearing black hats, is natural and understandable, but if that outcome is more generally and simplistically understood as simply the victory of one country over another, it can all too easily leave untarnished the political philosophy which led to so many deaths. The corollary of a belief that one group or nation is superior is that other groups or nations must necessarily be seen as inferior. That in turn leads seamlessly to a belief that some have more rights than others. Pandering to such views rather than challenging them serves only to validate them, yet it’s where the official UK opposition increasingly seems to be. It’s as dangerous as simply hurling labels around.