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By Jason Michael

WHEN NIGEL LAWSON said in the House of Lords that there is a “real danger that undesirable, but very often understandable, insurrectionary forces will feel they cannot trust the British parliament” if a hard Brexit is avoided, and that as a result “a very ugly situation could well arise,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Generally speaking, the mood across Britain’s populist hard-right has been darkening since June 2016 – and that’s a temperature shift that has continued to cool even after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a right-wing activist eight days before the Brexit referendum. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union has emboldened the British far-right, and from the start this has been a process marked by xenophobia, racism, hatred, and murder. Let us not then make the mistake of thinking that Brexit is anything less than a revolutionary moment for the right, every bit as much as the election of Donald Trump was in the United States. Insurrectionary forces have pushed on the door of democracy and it has opened for them.

Imbecilic characters like Nigel Farage, Steven Wolfe, and Mike Hookem have contributed to the popular image of UKIP as a political joke, a monster raving loony outfit of misfits on the extreme edge of British political life. But this is a mistake. Albeit small and at present incapable of securing seats in the Commons under the Westminster majoritarian model, the UK Independence Party has a growing constituency. Analysis of the 2015 general election indicates that between 2010 and 2015 – that is before Brexit – UKIP increased its share of the vote by 9.5 per cent, winning 12.6 per cent of the vote with 3.9 million people voting for the party. Steven Ayres, a former Economics and Development Consultant with the United Nations, points to a more concerning trend; that while it failed to come second in any constituency in 2010, it came second in 120 Westminster constituencies just five years later. The political right is gaining ground.

UKIP, in fairness, is not the far-right. While racist opinions are well known in the party, the leadership has been careful to distance itself from the racism of the British National Party and the English Defence League. But this does not mean UKIP is not a populist party and a threat to democracy.  At first, it is not the social thinking of UKIP that poses a problem, it is its economic thinking. This is a libertarian party, advocating what some libertarians describe as anarcho-capitalism; that is the maximum amount of freedom to the markets with the least amount of government regulation and interference. It is a party for the rich advancing a political agenda that will only ever benefit the rich at the cost of taxation, public spending, and welfare. This economic vision is what links UKIP to the right of the Republican Party in the US and to Trump.

Alone, libertarianism is what it is. The “billionaire class” – as a socio-economic class – will always seek to look after its own interests. In healthier democracies, which the United Kingdom certainly is not, this is generally balanced by the combined weight of the centre and the left. In Britain, however, even the mainstream political left – the Labour Party (or the “pink socialists” as John Mclean described it) – has veered to the right in a quixotic effort to reclaim votes from the right and even the far-right. The result of this, from the creation of Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” has been a progressive slide to the right across the whole of English politics. That today Labour, the Conservatives, and UKIP are preaching the same gospel of curbs on immigration and “independence” from Europe illustrates this slide to the right. Britain has no effective counterbalance to the right.

What we have, then, is an entire political system dancing to the tune being played by a relatively small number of economic libertarians. The issue that this creates is obvious; as the larger parties continue to chase the right, the right gains – in the eyes of the electorate – legitimacy. It is perceived to be the leader in the field – which it is, and so gains more votes. YouGov’s most recent poll on the European parliamentary elections shows Farage’s Brexit Party sitting pretty with a five-point lead on the Conservatives, making it England’s favourite at 27 per cent.

Our concerns don’t end here. UKIP has welcomed into its fold a number of highly influential “alt-right” – that is the racist far-right – social media personalities from the Twitter and YouTube platforms. With a combined following of 1.16 million on Twitter and 3 million on YouTube, Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan (AKA “Count Dankula”), and Carl Benjamin (AKA “Sargon of Akkad”) represent on social media the advance guard of anti-socialist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic opinion in the UK. Like in the United States, the British alt-right studiously avoids the labels of ‘racism’ and ‘far-right’ by framing their racism and far-right politics as “free speech” and by hiding behind quasi-intellectual arguments, rapidly changing terminologies, and a barrage of dog-whistles and loaded memes – but make no bones about it, this is the racist far-right.

Alarmingly, this fusion of libertarianism and the social media front of the far-right was exactly the pony on which Donald Trump rode to victory in the States. The construction of a libertarian-to-alt-right tunnel was a central feature of Steve Bannon’s strategy, and so this move by UKIP – at the very least – can be seen as an emulation of that strategy. It is straight from the Robert Mercer/Steve Bannon playbook, and has proven its effectiveness at the highest level of international politics. Worst case scenario, as may be supported by the continued contact between English libertarians and Bannon, this move may point to an actual connection between its US architects and UKIP.

Recent events in the United States and in the United Kingdom have shown us that libertarian parties like UKIP and Farage’s Brexit Party do not have to be led by smart people. Both the Conservatives and Labour have demonstrated that governance and careful statesmanship are things of the past. The UK has – politically speaking – spun into a perfect storm of instability and anger. Brexit has proven beyond all doubt that the politics of fear-mongering, jingoism, and faux patriotism do well in times of chaos and uncertainty – but we knew this; this has happened before in one Latin American country after another, in Italy, in Spain, and in Germany. The parallels between Brexit Britain and Weimar Germany are sobering, and it should come as no surprise that the right is experiencing a surge.

Even without smart people, with enough financial backing from the anarcho-capitalists of the international billionaire class, and with the right people working the system of social media, there is no reason why UKIP or the Brexit Party cannot rise to power in Britain. All over the UK, as Nigel Lawson noted, people are losing faith in parliament, in democracy. It is “understandable” that, stuck in this predicament, people will look for a strongman – and that is exactly where we are headed.

The economic philosophy of the libertarians, as UKIP has long understood, does not win elections. Ordinary voters are not interested in economic arguments. They are even less impressed with men in suits who remind them too much of “the establishment.” Successful libertarian parties quickly adopt populist arguments; they single out scapegoats, they manufacture fake narratives, and they offer easy and deceitful answers to complex problems. This was precisely what UKIP and the Leave campaign did during the Brexit referendum campaign – and they won. Thus, without a coherent and appealing narrative of its own, UKIP has turned to the alt-right – which does have an appealing narrative of xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and hate.

As happened in the United States, as happened in Weimar German, the tail will always wag the dog. Relying on the racist rhetoric of the alt-right, Britain’s libertarians will be pulled quickly down the rabbit hole, taking them from the economic right to the racist far-right. The introduction of alt-right influencers to UKIP will act as the same gateway for libertarianism in the UK to the far-right as it did in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and as it did in the US in the run-up to the election of Trump – bringing us to what we must fear the most, a powerful and appealing racist narrative, coupled with the desire for strongman politics, in the midst of social and economic chaos. What we are looking at in this development is the advent of true fascism and tyranny in the United Kingdom. These are the insurrectionary forces the British establishment now fears, and these forces are riding to power with a winning political formula.

It is clear that we – in both the centre and the left – can no longer afford to be complacent. UKIP and the Brexit Party are not the joke we thought they were. Fronted, as they are by bampots and idiots, the libertarian parties know exactly what they are doing. In fact, with the exception of the SNP, Sinn Féin, and Plaid Cymru, these may be the only people in British politics who know what they are about. They have a plan, they have the funds and the right strategy, and they have powerful friends. We can all see the storm clouds gathering and we know that time is running out. With Labour and the Conservatives polling today at a combined 37 per cent and Farage’s Brexit Party and UKIP holding 34 per cent – and growing, it is clear the writing is on the wall. The old normal is giving way to something worse.

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How Ukip normalised far-right politics

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5 thoughts on “Britain’s Gathering Alt-Right Storm”

  1. Jason

    This raises the really scary issue for Scotland. How does independence happen in a rampant extreme right wing England…and how would Scotland itself survive an extremist England.

    YES needs to stop thinking (& behaving) like the comfortable world of 2014 will continue That is long gone and likely never to return…THIS IS YOUR NEW NORMAL.

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    1. Cont.

      It has been horrifying to watch as the generation who were warned of the dangers of this future allow it to come to be in a single lifetime.

      Mistakenly people are constantly looking for that one trigger point…as if there was a single causal moment that could be rectified. To me that is a massive error. If you want to prevent this you have to know what you are fighting and it will take being brutally honest (as we all may be complicit at some level).

      The more I think about it, I realise this is systemic. Hence, THERE IS NO ONE POINT….its a long sequence back to a deep reality. YES now needs to address Independence in a UK returning to its long trend extreme right-wing normal.

      – Brexit is not it…it is a symptom…but it is the event forces are using to drive this dark future
      – GFC is not it – it was just the moment the broken compact between the middle classes and the lower classes truely became evident
      – New Labour – this only built on the political abandonment of the working classes and poor
      – Right to buy – it only played into the desire to be the landed gentry…but it enforced the “othering”
      – Thatcherism – the moment the middle sold-out the post war compact with the working class for a bag of beans. Only they couldn’t see the chipping away of the social state due to the inertia of its benefits….the middle class thought they would get both.
      – Thatcher’s brutality on Scotland/Wales – This was England re-mining its shrinking empire. Scotland no longer as a home nation…but Scotland the colony resource.
      – NI troubles – This was the moment the mainland population knowingly accepted propaganda and turned their back on evidence and critical thinking as one of their own community is othered and demonised…to me this is the first big manifestation of the population’s Stockholm syndrome.
      – Commonwealth Immigrants Act – the moment England became scared of the repercussions of empire. They needed the labour but rejected the equality of their empire.
      – Post WW2. The end of Empire and the population starts to swallow the big lie of their victory (that England won). There rejection of facts they themselves witnessed for a collective illusion.
      – PRE WW2. At some point the world will actually address how globally widespread extreme right wing ideology was. These horrific ideologies underpinned and justified Empires and colonisation. England as the pre-eminent empire its likely these were so totally engrained they became unnoticed like air. In that light, it would be no aberration that there is a picture of the royals giving the nazi salute.
      – Acts of Union. Lets be real this was not a union, it was the beginning of the globalisation of English Rent seeking….that was never ending.
      – English Revolution – England’s revolution was no French revolution….it was never about the populace…it was one wealth fighting the established wealth.

      When you look at the long arc, it becomes, obvious England did not have an Enlightenment, its almost as if the English are a population suffering Stockholm syndrome with an unwavering devotion to their landed gentry ‘captors’. They swallow the stories and myths that aggrandize their rent seeking landlords, and barrack for the economy that feeds their gentry’s veracious appetites.

      There are only 2 recent breaks in the power of England’s self delusion.
      – Post WW2 social state…that was payment due not charity.
      – Indyref….An engaged population who educated themselves

      Scotland, this current chance won’t last forever…and I fear this window is closing fast.

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  2. The comparison between Brexit UK and Weimar Germany certainly should stop the reader in their tracks!
    “The Weimar Republic is of great significance to historians and history students alike. It demonstrates how democracy can fail when it is too ambitious and when internal forces work against it.The Weimar Republic describes the political system of Germany from late 1918 (the end of World War I) to 1933 (the rise of Nazism). The Weimar Republic began as a bold political experiment. It was initiated by ambitious reformers who hoped to create a modern liberal democracy in a nation that had known only militarism and authoritarian monarchy. Together they drafted and adopted one of the world’s most democratic and progressive constitutions. The first years of the Weimar Republic were unsettled and tumultuous, largely due to Germany’s international isolation and economic exhaustion. In the mid-1920s, Germany moved into a more prosperous period dubbed the ‘Golden Age of Weimar’, marked by economic recovery, social renewal and cultural innovation. Much of this prosperity, however, was propped up by foreign loans, while the Weimar government remained weak and unstable. The Great Depression of the early 1930s brought the Weimar dream crashing to earth. By late 1933, Weimar democracy had given way to Nazi totalitarianism.”
    Which caused WW2.
    This Brexit Uk thing seems to be turning against half (or more) of this country ! For goodness sake. We are talking about character disorders here. Alt-right et al = those who are single-minded, self-centred, selfish, arrogant, hatred-in-sighting, narcissistic, hostile bullies, who get great enjoyment out of others’ misfortune and have no care for (and no intention of helping) the health of their own humankind, animal welfare, environment, or planet.
    Surely there are more of us in the UK who are broad-minded, considerate, empathic, self-effacing, peacemakers, caring and loving who do care about the health of our own humankind, animal welfare, environment, or planet. Come on!

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  4. That is a very depressing synopsis. Much of my family now resides in Alba and I may join them and campaign for Scottish Independence. England is doomed to become a fascist little nation off the coast of Europe.

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