[page 24]
Hanging on the Tories' coat-tails
THE
By Bob Wade
THE RECENT furore over fascist in-
filtration of the Tory Party is not an
isolated incident in the Conservatives'
post war history. Because they have
been prepared to use the politics of
racism to acheive their ends, they have
always had the nuisance of the fascist
madmen hanging around their coat
tails. But it would be wrong to inter-
pret this, as some elements in the labour movement have proclaimed,
that the Panorama episode alongside the increased police powers witnessed
in the miners' strike means that the Tory party is somehow 'moving towards fascism'.
It is certainly true that the Tories, as representatives of the capitalist class use racism in an attempt to split and divide the working class. For capitalism, the question of immigration has a double role. Primarily, as with the Irish immigrants at the turn of the century, the Jewish workers from Eastern Europe in the 1920's and 30's, and as with black and Asian workers after World War Two, immigrant workers are looked upon as a source of cheap labour. But on arrival they immediately become scapegoats for all the ills of capitalism.
The post war capitalists scoured the remnants of the old Empire for immigrant labour in the 1950s and '60s. Recruits were needed for the dirty and unsociable public sector jobs necessary to service the booming economy. Indeed, amongst those looking for cheap labour for the National Health Service was none other than the then Minister of Health for the Tory government of the early 1960s; Enoch Powell!
However, as soon as the Asian and West Indian workers arrived, having been promised a land of milk and honey, they instead found slum housing, low wages and blatant discrimination whipped up by the Tory press.
The Tories were quick to cash in on this atmosphere, an atmosphere created largely by their own propaganda. Sections of the Tory Party, especially amongst the backwoodsmen with all their old imperialist prejudices, were quick to throw in the card of racism.
The small fascist sectlets, which had no basis of support within British society immediately clung to these racist elements. The miniscule fascist
Photo: Militant
Extreme right-wing Tory MP at a Monday Club meeting.
groups dropped their sparodic bombing of synagogues and looked to the 'political arena', some infiltrating the Tory Party, others heading racist campaigns outside the Tory party. The most notorious chapter of this period was in Smethwick during the 1964 election campaign. With little opposition from the right wing Labour leaders of the time, the racists won the seat for their candidate, Peter Grittiths The Tory leadership gave the Smethwick Tories only the mildest of rebukes-after all, their tactics had inflicted enormous damage in what should have been a safe Labour seat.
While the Labour leaders learnt little from the Smethwick debacle, right wing Tories ruthlessly pursued this issue, backed up by the propaganda of the capitalist press. With the first fissures appearing in the economy, the bosses were keen to throw up the policies of the scapegoat in the path of the British labour movement.
At the forefront of this task was Enoch Powell, at the time a Tory front bench spokesman. In 1968 he talked darkly of "alien cultures" and "rivers
23
of blood" following race riots. The
reactionary press and Tory backben-
chers heralded Powell as a great
visionary.
Of course history has proved Powell
totally and utterly wrong. The work-
ing. class in Britain, given the coun-
try's long history of an influx of im-
migrant workers and a strong united
labour movement, has always over-
come the attempts of the ruling class
to whip up racist and sectarian feelings
amongst backward sections of the
workers.
With the election of the Heath
government in 1970, Powell was ad-
monished and quietly ushered into the
wings. However, with every blow suffered by Heath during the mighty
trade union struggles in the early '70s, so the backwoodsmen of the Tory party, based around the Monday Club,
began joint activities with the racist and fascist groups outside the Tory party, recently united in the National Front. The right wing Tories were not merely concerned with racism, but pushed the spectrum further out into anti-Common Market campaigns and futile attempts to hit at the organised working class. Perhaps the most pathetic episode was the setting up of the so-called United Association of Professional Engineers, a supposed rival to the AUEW.
Campaigns such as these amounted to no more than a pin prick on the labour movement. But more ominous- Ly the rantings of the reactionaries began to find an echo amongst the ruling class after the victory of the Labour government in 1974.
Frustrated at the impotence of the Heath government to deal with the unions, and now faced with a Labour government under enormous pressure from below to carry out reforms, sections of the ruling class actually debated the possibility of a military coup in the pages of The Times.
However, the ruling class settled back into their leather bound chairs in the top London clubs as it became clear that the Callaghan/Healey leadership represented no danger to the interests of the capitalist class.
The reactionary right also changed their tactics. With disillusionment setting in amongst workers with the Callaghan government, which had began to follow a policy of watered down monetarism, the National Front were pushed to the fore. With the activities of the NF continually played up by the media, many of the sectarian
[page 25]
MIR June 1984; Fascis ts
groups on the fringes of the Labour movement put forward the perspective of an immediate turn towards fascism in Britain. This idea was decisively rejected by the Marxist tendency represented by the Militant and the MIR at the time.
But despite a few isolated successes for the fascists in decaying inner city areas, by the late 1970s the steamroller of the labour movement had begun to lumber forward and the fascists were swept from the streets. Where ever the NF marched, whether in London, Birmingham, Cardift or Glasgow, they were met with massive counter demonstrations.
The campaign against racism came from below. Mass rallies against the NF, counter demonstrations and antiracist campaigns at shop floor level, put pressure on the leadership to act. The labour moment flexed its muscles and within two to three years the fascists were swept aside.
Primarily through the labour movement campaign, but also with the arrival of the Thatcher government, the fascist groups have all but collapsed. In any event, fascism in the traditional form of jackbooted, uniformed thugs has no appeal to the British working class. The rising tide of the class struggle and the shift to the left in the trade unions and Labour Party, cut the ground from the feet of these poisonous vermin. The National Front has split and factionalised in squabbling Nazi sects. Many individual fascists have collapsed into the Tory Party. Those cliques which remain outside will tend to degenerate into terrorist gangs. The moves towards terrorism on the one hand, and the 'infiltration' of the Tory party on the other shows the total incapability of fascism to gain any mass basis of support in society today.
But the presence of an ever increasing number of former members of fascist groups on the right of the Tory Party is a serious warning to the labour movement. The attempts of Thatcher and the apparatus of the Tory Party to cover up this fact are significant. There may be a few expulsions of fascists to appease public opinion, as the Tories have done over the years. But the Tories have no intention of conducting a serious purge of these reactionary louts, partly because they have support amongst a significant layer of the Party activists, and partly
because their services may be needed in the future. The fascists will be used
as auxiliaries against the working class. But, after the experience ot
Hitler and Mussolini, and more recently the experience of Chile, Argentina,
Greece and Pakistan, the ruling class will think twice before handing over
CONSERVATIVE CLUB
EJOBS
FOR
WHITES
HARROGANT KMENTSER
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CALETIE E DESE
HERALD, FRANESHO BARTHA
THIRST & BEDALE 1.30.
MRUS DOCASTES
Because the Tories, as representatives of the ruling class, have been prepared to use the policies of racism, they have had the Fascist madmen hanging around their periphery.
direct power to the fascist madmen.
The mass of working people, with their long standing democratic traditions and the abhorrence of dictatorships engrained on their memories from the horrors of fascism in the 1930s and the Second World War, would not tolerate such a development without a struggle.
Socialists must understand what fascism is. It is wrong, as some in the labour movement have done, to wildly denounce this or that policy or this or that regime as "fascist" without a deeper analysis. This is not just a pedantic argument, it is not. just a question of being theoretically correct. To prematurely and continuously proclaim the arrival of fascism can have a demoralising effect on the
labour movement. More importantly, it is vital the labour movement understands its own strength, and recognise where the real threat of reaction could come from.
Fascism is a manifestation of reaction that can take hold after a decisive defeat for the labour movement, based around hysterical elements within the middle classes, who draw in support from the lumpen proletariat and (where they exist) the peasantry. It is a system of reaction that can gain mass support amongst society. As such the labour movement-given fascism's widespread support amongst the masses-can be weeded out at street level and totally atomised. But on the other hand, the capitalist class do not have full control over the
[page 26]
Photo: Militant
Photo:
The battle of Lewisham, 1977. By the late '70s the labour movement began to mobilise and swept the fascists from the streets.
regime.
In the 1930s, as the revolutionary wave swept across Europe, the capitalist class were prepared to take the gamble of handing over power to the fascist gangsters in central Europe. They hoped it would act as a bulwark against Stalinist Russia, which, despite all the horrors of repression was still looked upon as the "mother of the revolution' by the mass of workers and the gains of the planned economy could be seen.
The capitalists' gamble proved a disaster. They were dragged into a war on the side of Stalinist Russia. The war left once mighty nations such as Britain totally impoverished; Germany divided into two and Stalinism left immeasurably stronger. In Eastern Europe, capitalism and landlordism were banished forever.
It is a lesson the capitalist class will never forget. Yet that does not mean they have dismissed dictatorial methods. In the postwar period, when the capitalist class have been faced with crisis, they have looked towards Bonapartism-the destruction of democratic rights to varying degrees, enforced by strict state control, usually in the form of a military dictatorship, but under control of the capitalist class. This has been the method of control favoured by the capitalists in the countries of Latin America and Southern Europe in the past.
The ruthlessness with which the ruling class can enforce this regime depends on the strength of the work-
ing class. The Thatcher government is leaning towards a form of 'parliamentary bonapartism' at present-the banning of trade unions at GCHQ, heavy financial penalties for secondary picketing, the police methods used in the miners strike. The severity of these measures are finely balanced against the strength of the working class-for example, the ruling class backed off taking the Yorkshire miners to court because they knew they would unleash a whirlwind of solidarity and change the course of the miners' strike.
The trade union movement is still too strong for the Tories to implement full dictatorial powers-but it is towards these methods that the Tories, and the capitalist class, are looking as the economic crisis deepens and they face an enraged working class. While they may denounce the fascists in the current infiltration scare, the 'democrats' of the Tory party are quite prepared to use dictatorial methods themselves. Indeed, the current row over the fascists has deflected attention from the vicious reactionaries ensconsed in the heirachy of the party.
The so-called 'Salisbury Group' is typical of this new Tory breed. Named after the Marquis of Salisbury, who resigned from parliament in protest at the passing of the 1866 Reform Act which effectively enfranchised the male working class, its leading lights include Roger Scruton, of The Times, Peregrine Worsthorne, of The Telegraph, and George Gale of the Dai-
25
ly Express. Scruton, in the group's launching document, wrote that democracy "can be disgarded without detriment to the civil well being as the Conservatives conceive it." Worsthorne has said that "authority, should be the by-word-not freedom. What makes these reactionaries more dangerous is that they have access to the mass media through which their propaganda can seep. These views of 'democraev' are not only the property of the right wing. Prominent wets such as Sir Ian Gilmour share this 'detatched' view of democratic rights. His book, Inside Right, encapulates the Tory attitude to democracy: "Conservatives do not worship democracy. For them majority rule is a device... Majorities do not always see where their best interests lie and then act upon their understanding. For Conservatives therefore, democracy is a means to an end and not an end in itself... And if it is leading to an end that is undesireable or inconsistent with itself, then there is a theoretical case for ending it."
As British capitalism plunges deeper into crisis, and if the labour movement does not take decisive action, it is around these elements that the ideas of reaction could conglomorate, possibly using the monarchy as a figure head—a 'saviour' for the nation, placed 'above' society. This Royalist Bonapartist tendency would gain its recruits from the middle class, driven to a frenzy by the inability of society to solve the crushing problems they face. The fascist gangs that existed would be drawn into this grouping-while the ruling class would have no intention of allowing the fascists to take power, they would be used as auxiliaries • to a would-be bonapartist dictatorship, to • be unleashed like wild dogs on the labour movement, breaking up meetings, attacking trade unionists etc. similar to the way they were used in Latin America, Spain and Italy.
It is towards these methods that sections of the Tory party and the capitalist class will look as they see their profit system plunge deeper into crisis and their aims of driving down workers' living standards-to satisfy the economic demands of an ailing capitalist
system-repeatedly frustrated by an aroused labour movement. However, such a method of dictatorial rule could only occur after a decisive, massive defeat for the organised strength of the working class. The British labour movement is still one of the strongest sections of the working class in the world. It must ensure the frustrated dreams of the Tory middle class reactionaries never become a grim reality.
[page 27]
MIR June 1984; Economic notes