Are we there yet? How do we know?

Tweet

 

Yesterday, Prof Richard Murphy posted an article claiming that, by any reasonable analysis, the UK now has a fascist government. He’s not the only one to have suggested something similar recently. One of the problems with the word ‘fascist’ is that is has become a term of political abuse applied to those of a general ‘right-wing’ bent which has largely stripped it of any hard meaning, such that labelling the government as such isn’t necessarily helpful. It’s very difficult to define what fascism is, as this lengthy piece demonstrates, because people who are regarded as ‘fascists’ in the past seem to have had a wide variety of different beliefs, and those beliefs weren’t fixed either.

What we can say is that there are certain common elements of states which we have historically labelled as fascist. Amongst those are a belief in the superiority of one nation or group, an authoritarian approach which seeks to subordinate law and the judiciary to the executive, over-riding parliamentary democracy, control of information, and demonisation of ‘others’. All of those are currently in evidence in the UK to an increasing extent. Another common characteristic is the ‘strong leader’ taking on the role of ‘national saviour’, but in fairness I doubt that anyone would put Boris Johnson in that category. He may harbour his own delusions here, but he isn’t an electrifying speaker and doesn’t possess any clear or consistent message to promote, even if he were capable of articulating it. He’s emerged as more of an incoherent bumbler than even his biggest enemies suspected would be the case. Perhaps the ‘strong leader’ is not such a requirement after all if the leader has the right people around him; there’s plenty of evidence that Cummings believes in the natural genetic superiority of some people (mostly himself) and that the bigger the lies, the more they’ll be believed.

It is, though, the trajectory rather than the current state which is the more important. The demonising of immigrants is nothing new, but the attacks on the judiciary and the stated objective of exempting the government from any form of accountability in the courts are new, as is the wilful contempt of international agreements. Labelling solicitors doing their jobs and protecting their clients under the laws of the land as ‘activist lawyers’ shows a disregard for the rights of individuals, as does the proposal to opt out of the human rights convention. Perhaps the most insidious of all is the way in which the public are not only increasingly inured to abrupt policy changes, usually announced outside parliament and without consultation, but also encouraged to buy in to an aggressive and punitive attitude towards those who don’t conform to whatever the latest rules are (unless those not conforming are in any way part of the government, of course).

One thing which history does teach us is that authoritarian regimes don’t always suddenly come to power overnight: there’s a process involved. And when there are a series of small changes, it becomes easier to accept each one individually and impossible to know when a point of no return has been reached. This was summed up rather well, I thought, by an unnamed Tory MP and ex-Minister who said that he has a speech resigning the Tory whip written and ready in his top drawer and that his colleagues are waiting for some sort of ‘final battle’ with Cummings adding, “But history shows there isn’t one final battle. It’s a series of capitulations.” That ‘series of capitulations’ on issues which are seemingly individually small is the biggest danger to what remains of our freedom and democracy. The only people who can halt the process at the moment are the Tory MPs in the House of Commons. It is said that there might be 20-30 Tory MPs prepared to vote against the proposal to breach international law; but with 365 Tory MP’s in the Commons, that would still mean that there are more than 320 prepared to vote in favour of international lawlessness, a fact which even traditional Conservatives now outside politics find hard to believe. Either those 320 have fully bought into the process themselves, or else they’ve already made too many capitulations to be able to stop. I’d like to believe that there are more honest and reasonable people in the Tory ranks, but – in another characteristic of an authoritarian regime – Johnson has already purged them. If a deliberate act of lawlessness isn’t enough to flush out those with reservations, it is hard to see what might be.

Debasing the currency

Tweet When words are over-used and mis-used in politics in order to either insult opponents or attempt to blacken them by associating them with certain ideas or actions, it ends up debasing the words themselves. The result is that the words become less powerful when they are really needed and relevant.

Two examples which immediately spring to mind are 'fascist' and 'racist'. Far too many have used the term 'Fascist' as little more than a term of abuse for anyone with right wing views. I'll admit to not having been able to find an entirely satisfactory definition of the term itself, although it's derived from the Italian word which Mussolini and his supporters used to describe what passed for their political philosophy, of course.

Were the Nazis also fascists? They may have shared a certain amount of their political philosophy, but I'm not convinced that 'National Socialism' and 'Fascism' are truly the same thing. And merely having been 'on the same side' in a war doesn’t make them the same thing. There's a danger of over-simplification of history.

Plaid have suffered for many years from the attempt of some in the Labour Party to associate the term with our party. Some of them seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to 'prove' some sort of link between Saunders Lewis and other early Plaid figures on the one hand and Nazi Germany on the other, as though that somehow, even if it were true, can honestly be used to taint Plaid Cymru today.

(Not all Labour people take the same line on this issue, however; I don't want to fall into the same trap of tarring everyone with the same brush. I particularly liked this analysis by Adam Higgitt).

Racist is another word which has been used as a term of political abuse - and again, sadly, there have been people in the Labour Party keen to hurl the term at Plaid, usually when it comes to issues connected with the Welsh language.

The objective of this approach to politics is to use negative labels as a substitute for debate, when we should really be debating the substance.

The problem is that this abuse of the words has debased the currency of the language of politics to such an extent that the accusation can be all too easily ignored. The election of two MEPs from the BNP to represent these islands in the EU highlights the need, surely, for more precision in the use of language in politics, and for moving away from simply hurling labels at each other.

I note already that some have taken to referring to the BNP on every occasion as fascists and racists, and I have a concern that some of this is, again, more to do with labelling and insult than hard political fact. I'm not sure whether or not they are fascists. I don't think that they have any thought through ideology at all; and I'm not convinced that being an apologist for some of the horrendous actions of the Nazis is enough to justify the use of the term.

Racists, anti-Semitists, and holocaust-deniers, however, they undoubtedly are, as their own statements on a number of occasions clearly demonstrate.

Their arguments are dangerous and need to be countered. But they need to be countered by reasoned argument and persuasion of the electors who have been or are likely to be attracted into voting for them. Using words as terms of abuse hasn't worked to date, and it's unlikely to work in future.