The juxtaposition is extremely powerful. On the one hand the BBC would not broadcast an appeal for innocent Palestinian civilians killed or bombed out of their homes and their infrastructure pounded into rubble; and on the other the leader of Britain’s fascist party is invited on to the BBC’s main current affairs debate programme and given a platform to spout his poisonous – and Islamophobic – agenda. A humanitarian cause snubbed, but a fascist invited into the mainstream.

The BBC’s approach to these controversies is a mess – completely the wrong way round.

Macintyre has also exposed the cant behind the pseudo-defence that because of the BNP’s election success in June there was no choice but to invite the far-right onto the programme. Macintyre, who used to be a producer on Question Time, has shown that the proposal to invite the BNP onto Question Time was around before the party won two seats in the Euro-election.  As he says of Griffin’s appearance last week, “for the team behind the original plan it was a triumph, the culmination of highly effective lobbying…”

Some may benefit from a brief warm glow that all is right in the world because the leader of the racist BNP was a poor TV performer, but I think this offers only a complacent dead end. Reports about alleged squabbles within the BNP do not offer any hope for working out how to defeat them and the racism they feed on and promote.  The BNP has gained from Question Time and trying to pretend that this is not the case will do no one any good.

The damage that has been done by the decision to legitimise the BNP by asking them to appear on Question Time is a huge boost in the party’s profile and a message sent to the public that the BNP is a legitimate party.

As James Macintyre rightly says, Question Time was misused last week.

However it is worth visiting Comment is Free and having a read of Ken Livingstone’s article there, which was published a short while ago.

Ken writes:

Nick Griffin’s performance on Question Time was appallingly bad, but that is beside the point. The BBC has been shamed by this circus. Worse, the corporation has now established the principle that Griffin and his party are legitimate participants in the corporation’s flagship political debate programme and in politics. They have given him a mainstream platform to promote his openly Islamophobic views that will encourage racism towards British Muslim Asians and give succour to violent thugs. It is a further opening of the door to the legitimisation of the BNP.

Ken’s point is not confined to the BBC:

Defeating the far right requires the basic principle that every single concession given to them does not deter them or reduce their base; it gives them greater confidence to come back for more. This applies to the mainstream political parties as much as to the media. Politicians must also stop giving ground on race and immigration, or winding up such stories as those concerning the Muslim veil that encourage Islamophobia, or denigrating multicultural life.

Read the whole thing and take part in the discussion here.

When Gordon Brown announced the government’s plans to change the law on the allocation of social housing yesterday he must have known that he would reopen the debate on race and waiting lists, an issue the fascist British National party has long sought to exploit. Indeed it is something that has been used by rightwing politicians in local politics for many years, as anyone who has heard the arguments for “sons and daughters” housing will know.

The difficulties people encounter in getting a good affordable home are nothing to do with immigration. It is a myth that should not be indulged. There is a strand of argument that says the way to beat the BNP is to occupy some of its territory, steal their clothes. In fact every time mainstream political parties adopt this course the opposite happens – its territory is legitimised. If instead of trying to demolish their lies and distortions we give ground to the BNP, it will prosper. Pandering to the BNP or the lies that it has promoted and exploited does not weaken it. It strengthens its arguments and creates a vicious circle that allows the far right to come back for yet more concessions.

Brown’s relaunch document, Building Britain’s Future (pdf), says the government will “change the current rules for allocating council and other social housing, enabling local authorities to give more priority to local people and those who have spent a long time on a waiting list”. This section of the government’s programme sends a signal to those who have swallowed the argument that “local people” are being forced out of social rented housing by migrants, asylum seekers and others, that the government accepts there is a problem.

We have been through this at least once before, when Margaret Hodge set out a similar case two years ago. Yet as we saw in Barking and Dagenham, the far right’s arguments about the recipients of social rented housing are a lie. The BNP campaigned in that borough on the claim that newcomers to the area, notably Africans, were being given preferential treatment on council waiting lists. The truth was different. The majority of Africans and other ethnic minority communities in Barking were living in private accommodation they paid for themselves. Most newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers are in fact barred from gaining access to social housing. The BNP continually seeks to racialise the housing debate, as Jon Cruddas has put it. The government should not permit it to succeed by conceding a false case.

We now face the prospect of an endless series of arguments over what the government’s proposal means in practice, which will only give more space for racist myths to be bandied around. It will also raise real practical issues. At what point, for example, will the length of time someone has been waiting for a home give them preference over someone in greater housing need?

It is indeed the case that hundreds of thousands of people in Britain – black, Asian and white alike – are disadvantaged because of the absence of decent affordable housing. But this was not caused by migration. It is because first the Tory governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major decimated the supply of new cheap homes; and then Labour squandered the opportunity of the 1997 election victory to press ahead with new house building. Labour failed to release the resources local authorities needed to build new homes and ignored households that desperately needed new cheap homes for rent. In the latter years of the Labour government there has been a recognition that too few homes are being built and greater resources are being committed to building cheap rented homes. But it will take many more homes and much more progress to roll back the deep disaffection and anger that exists over the failure to solve people’s housing needs.

None of these circumstances are the fault of Britain’s ethnic minority populations, whether longstanding or recent arrivals – it is the fault of politicians.

It seems the government has learned little from the debacle over its disastrous slogan “British jobs for British workers”. Labour needs to start learning the lesson that defeating fascism cannot be done by first conceding to it.

This article first appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is Free 30 June 2009. ]]> http://www.simonfletcher.info/pandering-to-the-fascists-on-housing/feed/ 0 http://www.simonfletcher.info/london-must-resist-the-far-right-threat/ http://www.simonfletcher.info/london-must-resist-the-far-right-threat/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:30:20 +0000 admin http://www.simonfletcher.info/?p=102

The recession poses a question for London. Does the capital respond by deepening links with the rest of the world – importantly with the dynamic economies of Asia – or does it turn inward, responding to the nationalistic diversions by making concessions to them? Only the former offers a way forward; but that means facing down the latter.

London’s position as one of the world’s great cities is built on its relationship with the international economy. The city would be unrecognisable without successive generations of migrants constantly changing it for the better. Hundreds of thousands of London jobs depend on London’s international connections. In 2007, for example, the GLA estimated that over 700,000 jobs were either in foreign firms or employed in the tourist industry.

The new editor of the Evening Standard, Geordie Greig, struck the right note last week with his mission statement for the paper, saying it will “celebrate metropolitan life” and aim “to make a real contribution to this city and to play a welcome role in the lives of Londoners, whoever they are, whatever their background, wherever they were born”.

Whether the recession will turn into a depression is not yet clear, but the British National party will seek to exploit either scenario. The far right BNP already has one member elected on the London Assembly. They have made gains in London local government, notably in Barking and Dagenham, and were narrowly stopped from winning a seat in a recent Bexley byelection.

The BNP now aims to win a London seat in the European parliament. Yet the European elections will undoubtedly see mainstream politicians competing with each other to send “dog whistle” signals on race and immigration. The shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve’s speech in London last week was just such an attack on multiculturalism and “political correctness”.

Playing this game just makes more space for the BNP’s false arguments, instead of standing up to them. The BNP’s campaign in Barking and Dagenham, for example, was based on the lie that newcomers to the borough including Africans were being given preferential treatment in housing. In fact, the majority of Africans and other ethnic minority communities in Barking were living in private accommodation they paid for themselves.

Refuting racist propaganda rather than conceding to it is essential for the prosperity of our major cities. Every parochial, nationalistic, racist obstacle to London’s international position is a threat to Londoners’ jobs and future prosperity. Our cities must be able to draw on the talents of every individual, unhindered by discrimination. Investors from abroad must be certain that there is an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding.

Ken Livingstone’s administration worked to enhance London’s connection to the global economy, establishing offices in the powerhouses of the Asian economies and promoting London abroad in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

But there is no indication that Boris Johnson gets this at all.

After an election in which he campaigned against the priority given to London’s promotion abroad he abolished the £5.5m London Unlimited organisation, the body responsible for the international promotion of London as a destination for business, visitors and study. He slashed another £1.5m out of the budget of the tourism agency, Visit London. In November he was forced to reverse £750,000 of this cut. He was forced into a u-turn over his plan to shut London’s offices abroad.

His oafish “ping pong speech” at the hand-over of the Olympic flag may have been seen as a joke here, but it did nothing to help London’s interests in China.

Last week in a leaked letter London’s biggest retailers sharply criticised him for failing to promote London effectively in the teeth of the recession. Calls the same week for more effective branding of London are a further sign that London is losing its leading international edge.

In circumstances where the BNP will aim to take ruthless advantage of a severe economic downturn, London is now in a dangerous scenario. The mayor has adopted the wrong approach for jobs and investment in terms of London’s relations with the rest of the world; and he has no grasp of the need to wage an unrelenting argument for policies that will deepen London’s international links in order to pull the capital through.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs already depend on London’s overseas ties. London’s future prosperity – as with the British economy – depends on deepening these contacts, in particular those parts of the global economy that are the most dynamic, such as India and China. The BNP’s solution – racism – rejects the outside world in favour of narrow-minded ignorance; London needs the exact opposite policy.

This article first appeared here on Guardian Comment is Free, 10.03.09 ]]> http://www.simonfletcher.info/london-must-resist-the-far-right-threat/feed/ 0