Nobody likes to be called a racist. And calling someone out as a racist is probably not going to win them over or encourage them to consider alternative views. But the thirty percent of Britons who describe themselves as holding negative
views towards non-Brits or British minorities, however, force us to confront some uncomfortable thoughts: what if apparently tolerant Britain is full of racists? And if so, who are these racists? A typical answer by liberal and left-wing writers is to write off
racism as an elite phenomenon that simply contaminates vulnerable
sections of the masses. In Bloody Nasty People (2012),
Daniel Trilling's
insightful account of the British far right (organised throughout
much of the '90s and '00s around the locus of the British National
Party), the story is told from a variant of this position:
While
the BNP attracted a layer of working-class support, it kept some
roots in the middle classes, the traditional bedrock of fascism.
Griffin was the privately educated son of a businessman; party
members included company directors, computing engineers, bankers and
estate agents. The genesis of the English Defence League indicates
similar foundations... The origin of this group, which was conceived
of in a £500,000 apartment, and shaped by a group of anti-Muslim
ideologues including a director of a City investment fund and a
property developer, suggest a more complex picture.1
The model used here of a middle-class
"genesis" followed by a particular method of working-class
"attraction" works in a flat, linear way to show what
happened to BNP and EDL support over time. However, it leaves the
social dynamic which explains why working-class support could be
rallied to fascistic ideas unexplored. This is partly because the
metaphor of "middle-class" political actors and their
"working-class" audience/supporters - who hit approval
buzzers via means of poll ratings and votes - only works at a very
high level of abstraction. It removes the processes through which
discursive elements - say, nationalism, economic protectionism, or
anti-immigrant sentiment - are articulated into a "common
sense" worldview. In other words, it ignores the way ideas are
changed by their use in different contexts - and how working-class
use of ideas that originate in other settings will inevitably change
how those ideas work, what concerns they appear to address, and what other
ideas they come articulated with. A working-class racist ideology is
not that same as a middle-class one. More than this, the two rarely
exist in splendid isolation from one another, but exist in
conflict. Racism is not a monolithic phenomenon but is in fact
usually highly internally explosive.
As a demonstration of this point take
UKIP, whose leadership and membership is, much more than the BNP ever
was, a party of the professions: founded by an LSE professor (Alan
Sked); led by a former commodities broker (Nigel Farage); their
support base being initially rural, elderly, and well-off. Yet, as
Robert Ford and Matthew J. Goodwin show in their exhaustive book
Revolt on the Right, UKIP's
growth as a party has been fuelled by their ability to invade
working-class constituencies and build support among poorer voters.
The social and economic transformations of the last thirty years have
hit
particular groups in British society very hard: older, less skilled
and less well educated working-class voters. These are the groups we
call the 'left behind' in modern Britain... as Britain has been
transformed, the relentless growth of the highly educated middle
classes has changed the strategic calculus [of the mainstream
parties]. Both Labour and the Conservatives now regard winning
support from middle-class swing voters as more important than
appealing to these struggling left behind voters... The emergence of
UKIP changes the game...2
Two things are
striking here: first, the explanation of working-class support for
UKIP - i.e. that a liberal, cosmopolitan elite is being challenged by
a conservative and 'left behind' mass - is based on largely the same
assumptions made by the right themselves: Bruno Megret, "a key
Front National strategist", was responsible for recasting the
BNP's rhetoric and image during the 2000s in terms of a conflict, in
his own words, between "nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between
identity and internationalism."3
This is odd enough for an account that purports to critique
popular support for the radical right (be it UKIP or the BNP).
Second, it frames both the "working class" and "middle
class" as relatively stratified social actors with discrete
political opinions based upon some identifiable social and economic
interests. If UKIP attracts a good deal of "working-class
support" it must be because UKIP is coming to represent the real
(or at least apparent) self-interest of the working class. On the
other hand, Trilling's strategy of viewing support for the radical or
extreme or even fascist right as emanating from declasse,
ex-working-class or lower-middle-class voters who cannot be assumed
to represent the interests of some "authentic" proletariat
simply won't do either. This leads to an interminable cycle of
attributing views to classes in a static, expressive way. Both are in
a sense victims of class determinism: they see class interest as
emanating from some material or ideal conditions and attempt to make
ideas and ideologies hang on those interests, in one or other
direction.
Trilling
does however provide an excellent example of what happens to
relatively homogeneous communities when placed under extreme market
pressures. Becontree in Barking and Dagenham is an estate of 100,000
people, with some 27,000 homes built to house workers at the local
Ford factory. It is the largest of its kind in the world and was at
one point entirely council owned. Yet when the Thatcher government
introduced the Right to Buy schemes in which council-housing started
being sold-off; when Ford began mechanising or internationalising
production; and when the Big Bang of finance and property speculation
in the nearby City, leading to rising house prices, kicked in, people
started selling up. Private landlords scooped up family homes,
divided them up very cheaply into flats, and rented them out to as
many people as they could fit in them. The urban poor - often
immigrants - in the process of being shipped out of the centre of
London due to spiralling housing costs, ended up moving out to places
like Becontree, where a newly-minted rental sector awaited them in
the form of the privatised homes that had once been the preserve of
privileged Ford workers. Thus the social and ethnic composition of
the estate radically altered under financial pressure and
privatisation at the very same time as employment in the local
factory was dwindling. Racial tensions rose. This area became a prime
stomping ground of BNP "community activism" and in 2010 BNP
leader Nick Griffin contested the seat for Barking and Dagenham. His
party was defeated not by the Labour establishment but by local and
national anti-fascist social movements.
Processes
of this kind have been theorized by the French philosopher Etienne
Balibar, who describes in his essay 'Class Racism' the way in which
the working class, which is fundamentally "heterogeneous and
fluctuating" since new workers must constantly join it or leave
it for higher social ranks, attempts to protect itself from the
instabilities of capital processes by making of itself "a
'closed' body".4
In long-standing industries notions of social heredity are invented
on the part of working-class communities. Fierce commitments to industry or to union or indeed nation are turned into
transcendent principles that structure daily life and give it
meaning. Precisely because of the threat posed to social and material
stability by capitalist creative destruction, factors that promote
social cohesion are privileged. Not only does the working class exist
in a contradictory relationship - a relationship of tension and
struggle - with other classes "externally"; it is also
constituted "internally" by contradictory identifications.
Yet
again, however, Balibar's theory of class racism can only grasp the
detail of racist thinking - its complex origin and its synthesis of
different prejudicial, 'biologizing' or 'ethnicizing' elements - up
to a certain point: it conceives of class ideologies as being
all-too-whole, almost pre-packaged as they "interpellate"
individuals into a discourse that entirely precedes their own involvement. In this conception, the working class doesn't so much
construct its own racial discourse as enter into one that pre-exists
it. He takes a trans-historical and decontextualised view of racism
as emerging necessarily
where there is both "an unbridgeable gap between state and
nation" and "endlessly re-emerging class antagonisms."5
However, were there not, in Third World liberation movements, many
examples of nationalisms that emerged in the context of a faltering
state and endlessly re-emerging class antagonisms that precisely did
not result in racism?
Nationalism is conceived solely as an enemy of the class struggle -
and racism is the "internal excess" which follows from it.
Racism
is not a single phenomenon that we can isolate in an abstract way
from its position of enunciation. Balibar is right to draw a
connection between nationalism and racism, though not even
ruling-class nationalism is always explicitly racist. The presence of
nationalism in public discourse is, in the advanced West, very often
a sign of a reactionary current: it would be absurd for the
Conservative Party to rename itself the British
Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats to come out as the United
Kingdom Liberal
Democratic Party. They assume that we don't need to be told; that we
are all confident enough to not need reminding of their origin. Not
so the British
National Party or the UK
Independence Party. See also that peculiar cultural phantom the
"white working
class". As specific class fractions experience the vulnerability
of a "de-centring" process of immigration and economic and
social decline, the implicit is made explicit. What we all implicitly
assumed before - that the ruling class is white and British - emerges
in discourse; indeed ethno-national identity comes to overdetermine
all other elements in the position of enunciation. Ethnicity is
fetishized, fixed as the unifying characteristic of the group.
What
is it that ultimately allows a variety of different outlooks to be
unified under a single party banner? The answer is not, and cannot
be, class. UKIP is not popular because racist ideas are inherently
popular with either working- or middle-class voters. UKIP supporters
differ in a variety of ways from their leadership. Indeed, as
Owen Jones has argued, much of UKIP's popular base has views that
are diametrically opposed to the long-term, libertarian goals of the
leadership. Yet simply telling them that Nigel Farage was privately
educated won't make any difference. What is happening between
leadership, membership, and popular base here can only be described
according to a theory of "articulation". This means that,
through impermanent, contingent connections forged between different
ideological elements, a social bloc is developing under the banner
of UKIP. This social bloc has inherited imperial ideas about deserved
British eminence and its generosity to the outside world; Thatcherite
ideas about the ethnic and national superiority of the British and of
the supreme suppleness and lasting political depth of the British Union; economic-corporatist concerns about working-class
prosperity from the 1950s; and libertarian or anti-state social
theories from the hard Tory Right. It doesn't take much to see that
this set of articulations between very different, even opposed,
ideological elements will exist in a state of internal tension and
conflict.
From this
perspective, ideological elements have no class basis as such. They
can be adapted through a process of articulation - through building
connections between different ideas - in order to form a social bloc.
This is why working-class and middle-class racism do not appear in
the same way: racism is adapted to suit its context. Yet it must also
be articulated with other ideas - national sovereignty; economic
prosperity; the virtues of the community - if it is to form a
coherent, pan-societal bloc. That very process of articulation rests,
however, on a series of internal tensions which can be negatively
exploited by its enemies. Whatever careful balancing act is currently being achieved by UKIP, it can almost certainly be unbalanced by carefully placed blows. Yet, if we would like some more progressive
formula of politics to inherit the ground UKIP eventually vacates,
there must be a positive,
progressive articulation ready to take its place rather than one that
simply attacks the right - and
the masses - for their racism.
2
Ford & Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for
the Radical Right in Britain, 2014
Kindle location: 491-500
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