The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #121472 Message #2682706
Posted By: Fred McCormick
18-Jul-09 - 05:49 AM
Thread Name: Folk Against Fascism
Subject: RE: Folk Against Fascism
Joe. Over here we have something called the Monster Raving Loony Party. No-one would in a million years call them a serious political party. Yet they stand in elections and they get votes.
I argue that the BNP is not a serious political party because their entire stance is based on kneejerk reactions, rather than serious thought out policies. Here's just one example among many; up to about 1960, we had something called national service, where every male was conscripted into the armed forces for two years. You had similar in the USA, but I can't remember what they called it. It was eventually wound up because it had become redundant to the needs of modern warfare. Plus, it was an expensive drain on national resources.
Even so, a lot of people thought NS was a good idea. They claimed it built character, discipline and all that stuff. The fact that the country was crawling with teddy boys and knife fights might have suggested otherwise, but never mind.
The BNP plan to reintroduce NS. As far as I can see, they have given no consideration to the costing implications involved in employing millions of conscripts for two years, nor have they stopped to wonder just what these conscripts would do. Always assuming of course that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are ancient history by then, and these jokers haven't started any new ones.
That's what I mean when I say the BNP is not a serious political party. They have no serious policies or systematic thought out strategies.
Equally, they are short on serious rhetoric. EG., the Daily Telegraph recently asked Nick Griffin what they would do with so called home grown aliens, whom they couldn't deport because they had no other country to go to. Griffin said "Oh, I don't know. Drop them out of a plane over Africa". Then there was his brilliant idea of sinking boatloads of illegal migrants and throwing them life rafts. Whether he would drop the rafts before or after they'd sunk the boats he didn't say. But that's not serious politics. It's the sort of uninformed barroom gossip you can hear in practically any pub in the land on a Saturday night.
For the matter of that, no serious party would consider harbouring the assemblage of thugs and skinheads which make up such a large proportion of the hard core of the membership of the BNP.
No, the BNP are a serious threat, not because they are a serious political party, but precisely because they are not a serious political party.
Beyond that, I agree totally with your estimation of the "f**k this shit brigade". I actually feel sorry for most of the people who vote BNP. They do so because the Labour Party is nowadays a crumbling effigy of its former self and because neither of the other two parties can offer them a reasonable alternative.
They do so because they see a world where their local industries have collapsed, and in many cases where their local communities have gone the same way. They do so because they can't get jobs and they can't get houses, and they see, or think they see, an avalanche of foreign workers taking their jobs and undercutting their wages. And they see a parliament stuffed with careerist politicians on the take.
Yes, we need serious arguments. We need to show people that migrant workers don't pose a menace to their own well being; that far right governments invariably end up repressing thir own people; and that however bad the present national and poltical malaise may be, voting BNP is like taking strychnine for a common cold. It doesn't solve anything and it will leave you in a far worse state than you were before.