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Is a recession good news for the BNP?

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:13:48 +0000

Conventional wisdom suggests that the British National Party will benefit politically from a recession. Government ministers certainly seem to think so. Journalists think so. And the BNP themselves certainly think so.

With unemployment likely to hit two million by the end of the year and house prices dropping 15% in the past 12 months, most people are feeling the pinch. The government’s response to the credit crunch might have boosted its poll ratings in the short term but it could be the far-right BNP that benefits when the recession really bites.

“Economic meltdowns are one of the drivers of political revolutions, and the BNP must be ready to take advantage of the mess all of the other parties have made of the economy,” David Hannam, the BNP deputy treasurer, told a party meeting recently.

He went on to explain the party’s line of attack. “Each immigrant who entered Britain decreased job prospects for native British workers. Our freedom is linked to the financial state of the country, and in a recession it is the workers who are first and hardest hit. The truth is that in an economically declining society, the worker is hit, but even in a so-called economically growing society, it is the worker who also gets hit. Successful monopolies are a by-product of globalism, and it is monopolies that decrease the demand for workers.”

His view is backed by party leader Nick Griffin who is confidently boasting that the BNP will benefit enormously from an economic downturn.

The belief of a far-right gain is supported by the Labour MP Jon Cruddas. “I’ve got a sense of foreboding about what lies ahead,” he told the BBC. “It will make a qualitative difference in terms of the context within which they’re allowed to perpetuate their scapegoating and myth-making.”

The government, meanwhile, is worried that an economic downturn would result in increased racial tension and violence between communities and even terrorism. In a 12-page internal memo, leaked to the Conservatives two months ago, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith relayed her concern over the consequences of an economic crisis. “There is a risk of a downturn increasing the appeal of far-right extremism and racism, which presents a threat as there is evidence that grievances based on experiencing racism are one of the factors that can lead to people becoming terrorists.”

The memo added that a downturn would affect the need for migrant workers, particularly in jobs such as construction where they make up a large proportion of the workforce. “Increased public hostility to migrants” was predicted to result from heightened competition for employment.

The government is so concerned that it has recently established a new police taskforce to monitor racist violence.

Controversy

Last month the new Immigration Minister controversially weighed into the debate. Phil Woolas told The Times that immigration became an “extremely thorny” subject if people were losing their jobs.

“It’s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it’s going to get harder,” he said.

Employers should, he believes, put British people first, or they will risk fuelling racism. “In times of economic difficulties, racial stereotyping becomes stronger but also if you’ve got skills shortages you should, as a government, attempt to fill those skills shortages with your indigenous population.”

Woolas was careful to include all British people in his British first policy, highlighting the high levels of unemployment affecting the British Bangladeshi community. He claimed that it was all too easy for an employer to hire a migrant to fill a job rather than to retrain British people of all races.

While Woolas was actually addressing some tough issues, including many which have wrongly been ignored for too long, he left himself open to attack with a series of incendiary quotes which he should have known would cause offence. He promised not to allow Britain’s population to rise above 70 million and attacked “health tourism”.

“It’s a national health service – it’s not an international health service,” he said.

Woolas has not been alone in raising difficult and controversial issues. Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, also weighed into the debate last month. Speaking ahead of an address to a CBI conference, Phillips said: “After forty years in which it was impolite to speak frankly about immigration policy, we now must be able to address this fundamental aspect of economic policy without embarrassment or without fear of being labelled closet racists or open-border fantasists.

“In what is to come, the best defence against prejudice against immigrants will be to make those who resent them competitive, to give them a place in society.

“We may need to do so with the sort of special measures we’ve previously targeted at ethnic minorities. But the name of the game today is to tackle inequality, not racial special pleading.”

This was not his first foray into this terrain. He had previously stressed the importance of positive action to help white working class communities through the economic crisis. “What we are seeing is that there is a whole group of people, a large proportion of whom are white, who are going to suffer from this crisis who are going to be the people we should want to help, particularly because they come from the wrong side of town,” he said.

“We are going to have to do something special for them. We are going to have to put extra resources where young people can’t compete with migrants’ skills.

“And in some parts of the country, it is clear that what defines disadvantage won’t be black or brown, it will be white. And we will have to take positive action to help some white groups, what we might call the white underclass.”

Nothing is certain

However, there are dissenting voices to the view that the far right will necessarily gain from an economic downturn. “Although there tends to be a bit of moral panic about it, it’s never really happened in a way that, in any sense, threatens the domination of the political scene by the main parties,” Professor Colin Rallings, from Plymouth University, says.

He went on to stress that previous economic downturns had been accompanied by only short-term boosts for the right and were often geographically patchy.

Is Rawlings right? Will any boost for the far right be patchy and short-lived? Certainly recent history is on his side. The 1970s economic crisis failed to give any long-lasting boost to the National Front. Indeed, if anything, the political fortunes of the NF were already on the wane at the height of the crisis and certainly by the early 1980s, when unemployment topped three million and bank base rate was in double figures and reached over 15%, the NF hardly existed.

During the recession of the early 1990s, and despite widespread media-fuelled concern over refugees, the BNP remained a largely inconsequential political force.

A different world

There is reason to believe that events might be different this time around. Britain of today is very different from that of the late 1970s. The Cold War overshadowed British and indeed world politics. There was a vibrant left in Britain and a strong and very active trade union movement. The Second World War was still strong in public consciousness and nationalism was a dirty word.

Since then the Soviet Union has collapsed and Europe fragmented. Nationalism has become the driving ideology of the past 20 years and socialism and social democracy are experiencing an identity crisis of huge proportions. In the past year alone eight out of ten social democratic parties have been driven from power in Europe, partly to the benefit of the far right. Fascist and rightwing populist parties have been rising across western Europe and there is no reason to suggest that the same cannot happen in Britain.

Additionally, the BNP of today is quite different from the NF of the 1970s. The NF contested elections, but only in a half-hearted manner. For the NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster elections were simply an organising tool but real power was going to be gained through control of the streets and by positioning themselves as ready to answer society’s call to restore social order.

By contrast, the BNP has understood some political realities. It has publicly dropped some of its hardline policies, such as compulsory repatriation, which it knew would not be accepted by the vast majority of the population, and it has turned to local politics. As a result the BNP is positioning itself as a real and lasting challenge to the main political parties, particularly Labour.

More importantly, the political terrain has changed. Disillusionment with the mainstream parties is at an all-time high, voting at an all-time low and active participation in political parties is, in too many communities, seemingly non-existent.

It is into this disillusionment that the BNP message is resonating. Race remains the cornerstone of BNP politics but its appeal is far wider and deeper. It is precisely because of this that the BNP could benefit enormously from an economic downturn.

In Stoke-on-Trent the BNP believes it can take control of the council within two years. If there had been a mayoral contest next spring there were many, including some government ministers, who believed the BNP could win. At 6% of the local population the non-white community is tiny compared to many other towns and cities across the country. Immigration and race are not the causes of the city’s problems but simply the prism through which the BNP allows local people to understand their problems and anger.

The same is true for many other areas where the BNP is doing well. The former mining communities of Rotherham, Heanor and Nuneaton, three other areas of BNP success, have relatively small BME populations but deep-rooted structural economic problems.

Compare that to the NF of the 1970s, which drew the bulk of its support from towns and cities, such as Leicester and Bradford, which experienced the greatest influx of non-white immigrants.

There are two other issues that differentiate the present from the 1970s. The Cold War has been replaced by a world defined by the “war on terror” and just as a recession could boost the far right, so fundamentalist religious groups will prosper.

As unemployment rises and disillusionment with mainstream parties deepens, friction between new and old communities will grow. Winding this up will be the BNP and other fascist groups on one side and fundamentalist religious groups, bent on demonising other communities and religions, on the other. There is a symbiotic relationship between these extremes, with both needing the other to justify their own existence.

This could play out on the streets, as we saw so vividly in Oldham and Burnley in 2001, or through a rise in domestic terrorism. It is this fear that is gripping the Home Office. We are already beginning to see a rise in violent racism and this is only likely to accelerate as the economy nosedives.

There has also been a rise in terrorism in recent times. While every Muslim plot attracts massive media attention, less known has been the increase in attempted far-right terrorism, both in Britain and across the continent. In 2007, ten people were arrested in alleged rightwing plots in Britain. While all were stopped before they were executed, it does raise the likelihood that rightwing terrorism, be it by individuals or small groups, will continue to grow. One can only imagine the consequences of a fascist bombing campaign against Muslim targets in Britain. Likewise, while the feel good factor following the decision to award London the Olympics probably helped to defuse a backlash against the London bombs of 2005, a similar bombing campaign amid an economic downturn might have a different outcome.

In the 1970s the trade unions played a crucial role in defeating the NF and today they have once again indicated their willingness to take a lead. But today’s world, particularly in the workplace, is very different from that of 30 years ago. The unions are weaker, more workplaces are un-unionised and also fragmented.

“The workplace is different from the 1970s,” says Paul Meszaros, secretary of Bradford Trades Council. “Back then workplaces were bigger and more unionised so it was more common for Asian and white people to work alongside each other. We were able to debate, argue and eventually find common ground.

“Today, workplaces are smaller and with communities living more separate lives and in different neighbourhoods within the city there are fewer opportunities for people to come together.”

Recession might be a gift to the BNP but whether it will exploit the opportunity remains to be seen. Despite its growing sophistication the BNP still struggles to win first-past-the-post elections. It has even performed poorly in recent by-elections, including some in traditional strongholds.

How opponents of the BNP react will also determine the potential electoral boost for the far right and this is where things need to change. The criticism of Woolas and Phillips has been strong and sometimes correct but it has also highlighted two fundamental issues. Firstly, a common unwillingness to debate difficult but very real issues and secondly an acknowledgement that progressives have partly contributed to the problem.

The error of identity politics

It is easy to criticise Woolas for his comments and of course some of his remarks echo the disastrous “British jobs for British workers” approach adopted by Gordon Brown last year. However, he was trying to grapple with some difficult issues, which all too many people prefer to ignore.

Likewise, Phillips’s call for preferential treatment for white working class communities has been met by a barrage of criticism, some of it justified, some not. Phillips is totally correct in saying that a growing number of white working class people feel ignored, abandoned and unrepresented. As I myself have argued previously, the BNP is providing an identity for sections of this group.

However, accepting the existence of these sub-groups and calling for preferential treatment is part of the problem in the first place. We no longer talk of a working class without sub-dividing it along racial lines. Playing identity politics is a very dangerous game and it is now coming back to haunt us. Too much government policy and spending, locally and nationally, is directed through the prism of race, which is unwittingly helping to create this “white” identity, which is in turn being exploited by the BNP. Too many progressive people have been complicit in this, knowingly or unknowingly.

To prevent the BNP from exploiting our economic worries, class needs to replace race in popular discourse. We shouldn’t have white unemployed or black unemployed but just unemployed. We shouldn’t talk about white workers or black workers but just workers. That isn’t to say that we should ignore groups or not recognise particular hardships or discrimination, but we have to find a way to bring people along together, to get them to understand a common interest and shared future. If we don’t then how can we complain when communal groups, including the white working class, compete for scarce resources.

Similarly, we need to develop a more secular approach. One of the successes of the anti-fascist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1970s was its secularism. This was particularly found within the Asian Youth Movement, which brought together young Asian people of different religious backgrounds. While accepting the right to faith, we again need to find ways to bring people from different religious backgrounds together and this is no easy task. It is not just a question of differences between Christian and Muslim communities. In today’s Britain there is widespread suspicion and distrust between many religions, another issue that has too long been ignored.

We must bring more politics (with a small p) into anti-fascism. Just as we have been arguing for the past couple of years that simply shouting “nazi” at the BNP is no longer sufficient, so we must recognise that just calling for “Hope” over hate is also inadequate. When people are struggling economically and perhaps see little hope around them, we need to be able to address some of the underlying issues that might make them susceptible to the BNP and answer directly racist myths. Hope is a positive concept but will only resonate when people feel good about the community in which they live and positive about their own economic future.

Fairness

However, we also need to show fairness in our approach. We need to demonstrate that we are fighting for everyone, regardless of colour of skin or religious background. We must also be prepared to criticise and condemn when it is necessary. Wrong is wrong, from whichever angle or community it derives.

Trade unions are in an excellent position to take on the BNP and its economic scapegoating, but it needs a different approach. Unions need to find a more direct way to engage with their members and their families than they do at present. A letter through the post or an article in a union journal is no substitute for a workplace meeting and human dialogue.

The road ahead will not be easy. A recession will increase insecurity and so suspicion and hostility between communities. As the job market shrinks and local resources become increasingly scarce so racism and bitterness will grow. The BNP could make huge advances in the next couple of years. Whether it does will partly depend on how we – government, unions and anti-fascists – respond.

Truth truck or lie lorry?

JamieSW — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:21:00 +0000

“After months of research, we have come up with a better way of spreading the ‘Nationalist Message’ right across this country,” says the message that the British National Party has been sending out to its supporters for several weeks.

“Our very own personal advertising lorry, a ‘Truth Truck’ – brand new and custom-built, complete with a high definition special lighting system for night-time use, and a massive audio system for addressing the public. Can you imagine it?” continues the appeal in terms designed to pull hard at the purse strings of “nationalists”.

There have been personalised letters from Nick Griffin, the party chairman, headed and “last chance to help ‘Operation Truth Truck’”, imploring in underlined type: “Just imagine how you will feel, being part owner of our very own British National Party advertising lorry …”. The party website has carried a picture and online donation form for several weeks.

But behind all the excitement lurks yet another dodgy deal by the BNP to hoodwink its own members.

One appeal letter puts a figure on the cost of buying and equipping the “truth truck” of £39,550, arrived at after Griffin personally “worked very hard researching this project”. It then suggests that “we can knock £13,000 off the amount needed” by opting for a “used lorry in first class condition”. Yet there is no indication on the website appeal that the lorry will be anything other than “brand new and custom built”.

Such a compromise could be explained away as a better use of members’ hard-earned and generously given donations, though that is no excuse for pulling the wool over potential donors’ eyes long after the decision to go for a second-hand vehicle has already been taken. But the lies go further than this.

At first the excitement rubbed off onto BNP members. Posting on the members’ internet forum, one person, who claimed to have “surprised myself by not even hesitating to donate £100 towards the campaign”, said the truck would also “counter commie smear leaflets”.

One discerning poster was more cautious. “Just one thing What happened to Bodicea [sic]?” asked “the benwell hopper”. “Boudica”, as “Captain Black” was quick to correct, was a second-hand “battle bus” and the target of an appeal in 2006 for money to put it on the road. Agreeing that “a few people will be very miffed that it has never been seen by the rank and file”, Captain Black could only plead that “the failings of the Boudica hobby horse should not detract from the ambitions of this new venture”.

Others smelt a rat. Despite Griffin’s claims to have carried out “months of research” before coming up with this “new, innovative” idea, if it comes to fruition the BNP will not be the first organisation in the UK to pin its hopes on a “truth truck”.

Two years ago the anti-abortion UK LifeLeague boldly announced the “Launch of Britain’s first ever ‘Truth Truck’”. A press release on 21 April 2006 thanked supporters who “donated generously to make this project possible” and claimed this would be: “the most innovative and what will possibly be the most effective campaign in UK Pro-life history”. “Operation Truth Truck” would: “enable the pro-life message to reach the unreached across the towns and cities of Britain. These vehicles are wholly owned and operated by LifeLeague activists,” it continued.

There was a picture. And it was no coincidence that the only difference between the LifeLeague’s “truth truck” and the BNP’s one was the particular lie on the billboard, because it was the same vehicle.

The UK LifeLeague and the BNP had milked their gullible supporters twice over for the same truck.

This is not the first time the BNP has had dealings with the UK LifeLeague, and more particularly its founder and national coordinator, James Dowson. Earlier this year many BNP members were angry when they found out that the party was sending key BNP officers on management training courses in Spain. Why could the training not be held in the UK, asked irate, xenophobic party members on a popular nazi internet forum until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread.

The courses were organised by Dowson’s Belfast-based fundraising and management training business, the Midas Consultancy, which has signed a three-year consultancy contract with the BNP. Whether it was because of the BNP’s growing financial difficulties or because Griffin was reacting to criticism of his poor administrative skills, the party has handed over key organisational functions to the self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

It was Dowson who wrote the “truth truck” appeal letters in professional fundraising style. The Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year was also his work. The BNP claimed that appeal had raised £70,000, which paid for the party to move into the new Excalibur warehouse and buy “a vast array of new equipment” including “an envelope stuffing machine”, which by June had mysteriously disappeared when Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, appealed for volunteers to stuff election leaflets into envelopes by hand.

The involvement of Dowson has already upset some BNP members who do not share his extreme anti-abortion views and think he is a Catholic, which is anathema to many in the nationalist party who view the Battle of the Boyne as one of England’s greatest historical triumphs. In fact Dowson is a Protestant but has been linked to far-right Catholics in Ireland, including Justin Barrett, an anti-EU campaigner and vocal opponent of immigration, which he describes as a “genetic” problem. Back in 2001, when Searchlight first exposed Dowson, Barrett had donated £50,000 so that Dowson’s outfit could produce anti-abortion hate CDs and videos to distribute in schools and churches in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. His tattooed arms are evidence of his extremist hate connections.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Dowson’s professional “begging letters”, as one disillusioned party member described them, have not been universally welcomed in the BNP. Some see their “tone of desperation” as indicative of the BNP’s “very serious financial trouble”, according to the blogsite set up in support of Colin Auty’s failed attempt to challenge Griffin for the party leadership.

One member is quoted saying: “These bloody letters are an embarrassment, I’ll not pay another penny so he can go and waste it or lose another blimp”, in a reference to the BNP’s helium balloon that slipped its moorings in June because, Darby suggested, David Shapcote failed to secure it properly. The BNP later blamed the loss on a faulty rope.

The letters themselves may have been professional, but Dowson fell down in compiling the mailing lists. Naturally he needed to dispatch the letters to a much wider audience than the BNP’s members, who have little left to give after constant appeals at branch meetings and to support election campaigns. However Searchlight has received a stream of complaints from anti-fascist trade unionists and members of the Jewish community who have received them.

The website appeal for the “truth truck” shows it adorned with the BNP’s ubiquitous election picture of Nick Cass and his family alongside the slogan “Decent people vote British National Party”. The picture, which adorned election leaflets and newspaper advertisements all over the country in this year’s May elections and several by-elections, concealed Cass’s less than decent “tree of life” tattoo.

The symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide and, under Hitler, was used to represent a project that encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans.

A lying picture for a lying appeal. How appropriate.

Bradford BNP on the brink

JamieSW — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:35:10 +0000

One of the British National Party’s most important branches is on the verge of collapse. Electoral defeat, demoralisation and personal infighting has caused the Bradford branch of the BNP to splinter.

It is a far cry from the heady days of 2004 when the BNP gained four councillors in the city and just missed out on several more. That year also saw the branch recruit more members than any other in the country.

Since then it has all been downhill for the BNP. In 2006 the BNP lost three councillors, while gaining only one. The party’s share of the vote dropped substantially in the 2007 local elections and these disappointing results proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

There had been deep divisions and suspicions within the BNP branch for several years. The revelation that the local organiser, Andy Sykes, was working for Bradford TUC and Searchlight rocked the party, caused several key activists to drop out and created an atmosphere of paranoia.

There was particular animosity between James Lewthwaite and Paul Cromie. Both became councillors in Bradford South but there was where the connection ended. Their relationship soured as Lewthwaite became close to Angela Clarke, the Keighley councillor who was detested by Cromie and Mark Collett, the party’s national head of publicity.

Cromie was the chairman of Bradford BNP and Lewthwaite was leader of its councillor group, but they both led quite separate groups within the local party.

In February 2006 Angela Clarke walked out of Bradford BNP after Collett publicly abused her at a BNP meeting. At the time she was dating Warren Bennett, the party’s head of security, who was soon to have his own fallout with the party leadership.

Cromie’s relationship with Lewthwaite worsened, with Cromie repeatedly and quite publicly blaming his colleague for the party’s decline in the city. On several occasions he called on the party leadership to discipline or even expel Lewthwaite.

The BNP in Keighley never recovered from Clarke’s resignation. It lost the subsequent by-election and in the most recent council elections slipped to third place in the ward.

Darryn Manby, another Bradford South activist, became the local organiser, supposedly in conjunction with Nick Cass, the Yorkshire regional organiser, who had taken on direct responsibility for the ward. In June 2006 Cass confidently boasted that the BNP was going to put forward a complete slate of 30 candidates across the city and win seven seats.

It never happened and the BNP slipped back further. Cass disap-peared from view and Manby accused Collett of “gross incompetence” in a dispute over leaflet designs and subsequently resigned as organiser. He went on to say that Collett was “arrogant and interfering” as the argument, which included accusations about funding, prompted resentment across the wider membership.

A new branch committee was formed in June, with Neil Craig as organiser, Alec Edwards as treasurer, Andrew Clarke as secretary, David Taylor as leaflet and design coordinator and Les Nakonecznyi as sales and publications coordinator.

Cromie was not impressed and refused to get involved. He was furious that Lewthwaite had been appointed group development organiser, and as a result Cromie and his wife Lynda, since May 2007 also a Queensbury councillor, began operating indepen-dently of the branch.

The new branch secretary was full of hope that this new committee-led structure would overcome the problems of the past. “The new system is all about a transparent and accountable leadership,” he told members, “a recognised team of six individuals, each with different skills, working for the collective good of the party as we strive to expand membership and increase the size of the BNP vote.”

The BNP operation in Keighley, meanwhile, collapsed. Chris Kirby had taken over the branch and made it clear that he saw it as quite separate than Bradford. But he did not have the stomach for the fight. After a serious falling out with Ian Dawson, then the BNP’s national group support officer, which included refusing to attend a reconciliatory meeting called on the instructions of party leader Nick Griffin, Kirby walked out.

Despite Clarke’s fine words the committee failed, with several people resigning after just one meeting. Frank Brammah pulled out as organiser for Bradford North and Clarke, demoralised at the failure of the local party to work together, quit as secretary.

Craig remains as organiser but has little to organise. The Cromies continue to operate independently and Lewthwaite, who is no longer a councillor, meddles behind the scenes.

As Searchlight watches from the sidelines, it is important to note that these internal disputes are a con-sequence of political defeat. As we have seen in Oldham, Blackburn and now Sandwell, electoral decline is quickly followed by internal unrest.

In Europe, Where's the Hate?

JamieSW — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:58:48 +0000

Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d’Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet’s small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor’s approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.

In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: “No Mosque,” “Christian Hill” and “Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!”

Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present. It is probably not the dynamic you have heard most about. The most popular one making the rounds this side of the Atlantic involves hordes of Muslims, rabid with anti-Semitic and misogynistic views, running amok as they bomb, bully and outbreed their clueless liberal hosts in a bid to build a caliphate.

“Do you have a child back in England?” an elderly Los Angelena asked a British reporter on a recent National Review cruise.

“No,” he said.

“You’d better start,” she replied. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”

Nor is it by any means the only dynamic. There are a handful of nihilistic young Muslims keen to bomb and destroy and a far larger number sufficiently disaffected that they are prepared to riot. There are also many Europeans keen to see equality and meaningful integration, defending civil liberties and opposing wars against predominantly Muslim lands.

But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”—that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning—but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.

For fascism—and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations—has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe. Its advocates not only run in elections but win them. They control local councils and sit in parliaments. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10 percent of the vote. In Norway it is 22 percent; in Switzerland, 29 percent. In Italy and Austria they have been in government; in Switzerland, where the anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party is the largest party, they still are.

This is not new. From Austria to Antwerp, Italy to France, fascists have been performing well at the polls for more than a decade. Nor are they shy about their bigotry. France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen has described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”; Austria’s Jörg Haider once thanked a group of Austrian World War II veterans, including former SS officers, for “stick[ing] to their convictions despite the greatest opposition.” But the attacks of 9/11, the bombings in Spain and Britain and the riots in France gave the hard right new traction. The polarizing effects of terrorism facilitated the journey of hard-right agendas from the margins to the mainstream. Islamophobia became de rigueur. Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that “we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples.”

In September 2006, British novelist Martin Amis told the Times of London: “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan…. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Far from being the principal purveyors of racial animus in Europe, Muslims are its principal targets. Between 2000 and 2005 officially reported racist violence rose 71 percent in Denmark, 34 percent in France and 21 percent in Ireland. With few governments collecting data on racial crime victims, it has been left to NGOs to record the sharp rise in attacks on Muslims, those believed to be Muslims and Muslim targets.

None of this means anti-Semitism and jihadism don’t exist among Muslim communities in Europe. But it does provide a context for both. Muslims are a relatively tiny percentage of European citizens—there is a higher proportion of Asians in Utah than Muslims in Italy—and are overwhelmingly concentrated among the poor. More than 40 percent of Bangladeshi men in Britain under the age of 25 are unemployed. All of this excuses nothing but explains a great deal. According to a Pew Research Center survey, the principal concerns of Muslims in France, Germany and Spain are unemployment and Islamic extremism. Integrating into a society that won’t employ you, educate you or house you adequately is no easy feat. Participating in a political culture that scapegoats you is also tough. Attacked as Muslims at home and abroad, they defend themselves as Muslims. Every respected report in Britain has shown a direct link between the war in Iraq and recruitment to Islamist movements. And so the symbiosis of Islamophobes and Islamists is complete, with each thriving on polarization and prejudice: picking at scabs that might have healed, until the blood runs freely.

The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim; they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb—it is simply suffering from one of its oldest viruses harbored among its most established ethnic populations.