Friday, 3 May 2013
What do we want? Xenophobia!
Nothing gets politico stamp collector's juices flowing like the ups and downs of the fringe parties and UKIP's undoubted success at the polls yesterday will no doubt have the desired effect. But UKIP having their fifteen minutes of fame is not the rebirth of fascism or (unfortunately) part of the death throes of capitalism. It is a sure sign that, rightly or wrongly, many people in this country have deep misgivings about immigration and our future in Europe. UKIP is no longer the preserve of bitter and twisted old blokes living in bungalows on the South Coast and can now claim a much wider support. More important than the local authority elections was the result of the South Shields by-election. Labour may have had a comfortable victory, and I'm unsure whether to laugh or cry at the Lib-Dems getting just half the vote of the BNP, but certainly UKIP's strong second place points to a lot of working class people seeing their problems, not as class problems, but as individual trials and tribulations brought about by foreigners. Now that is bad news.
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I am not sure that UKIP stand for xenophobia, or racism for that matter. Perhaps they represent a strand in Classical Liberalism or Conservatism that has traditionally appealed to large sections of the working people, together with a vague respect for culture and traditions, not unlike the respect for Levellers and Diggers and other traditional ancestors of working class revolutionaries. The working class Tory has been with us for a long time, and is not created by the Mail or Express. Perhaps UKIP have caught a nerve which is rather sore having seen multiculturalism eclipse traditional working class lifestyles, with the race card played mercilessly against a class that has an honourable tradition of opposing racism.Who knows? Perhaps it is too early to sound my own trumpet - that a rejection of the left and its elitism is not such a bad thing. And that recognising that old style anarchist hostility to governments as providers of benefit might be a way forward. I cannot see much attractiveness in the left, and understand why the Monster Loonies beat TUSC in our area. Go to a left meeting or demo - oh cripes, Palestine, save the bloody planet, no platform for this or that. Sod it. No discussion, just silence the opposition. And along comes UKIP here as did the Tea Party in the US. Call them racists, call them fascists,clowns or whatever, but some people are talking and listening.Austerity, but no big demos here, just photos of Greeks and others yelling and shouting. We have a chance to break out of the straight jacket, consider alternatives. Christ, I mentioned that fracking and other ways of exploiting fossil fuel might be a chance to empower the working/manufacturing class - an idea. Screams of abuse from the left, you dirty neo con shill blah de blah. We need to start thinking and anarchists need to question their commitment to the left.As for me, whose dad was a lorry dirver and mum a maid (lower than a butler!) I look for wisdom in the class not the intellectuals who represent it.
Flash in the pan. UKIP will be gone in 5 years.
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