Edition Politik

Contemporary Right-Wing Strategies and Practices in Europe

Maik Fielitz, Laura Lotte Laloire, Maik Fielitz, Laura Lotte Laloire

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783732837205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Fascisme et totalitarisme

In Europe, the far right is gaining momentum on the streets and in parliaments. By taking a close look at contemporary practices and strategies of far-right actors, the present volume explores this right-ward shift of European publics and politics. It assembles analyses of changing mobilization patterns and their effects on the local, national and transnational level.International experts, among them Tamir Bar-On, Liz Fekete, Matthew Kott, and Graham Macklin, scrutinize new forms of coalition building, mainstreaming and transnationalization tendencies as aspects of diversified far-right politics in Europe.

… Within

Patterns of Far-Right and Anti-Muslim Mobilization in the United Kingdom

Graham Macklin

Far-right and anti-Muslim politics in Britain have become increasingly fragmented. The British National Party (BNP), once the leading far-right party, has largely collapsed. During the 2010 general election, the BNP polled only 1.9 percent of the vote¹ and was overshadowed by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a far-right, anti-immigration populist party unencumbered by the BNP’s debilitating historical baggage. Thereafter, BNP leadership descended into demoralization, bitter recrimination and factional rivalry, which hastened the departure of its activist base; the collapse of its membership ultimately led to the expulsion of its chairman, Nick Griffin, as the party further continued its descent to political irrelevance. The BNP now appears “finished”² as a political force, its “quest for legitimacy”³ at an end.

While the limited local electoral challenge of the BNP has been extinguished, that posed by the populist far-right politics of UKIP has fared little better. Despite polling 12.9 percent in the 2015 general election⁴, UKIP failed to make a meaningful national breakthrough, although this was arguably due to the vagaries of the British electoral system rather than a lack of support. Leading figures have since publicly been at loggerheads with one another while the party itself has seemingly lost momentum, sometimes struggling to be heard during the ‘Brexit’ campaign dominated by mainstream Conservative Party⁵ voices.⁶

Within this overarching context of far-right political failure, the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Muslim street-based movement, which, since 2009, has campaigned against ‘militant Islam’, has also stagnated and fragmented.⁷ While many activists were motivated by a belief that they were on the “front line”⁸ in a ‘clash of civilizations’, the organization went into decline from 2011 onwards, due in part to a combination of infighting and hardline policing strategies which took much of the ‘buzz’ out of its demonstrations.⁹ The group suffered a grievous blow in October 2013 when its founder, Tommy Robinson, resigned, claiming that street demonstrations were “no longer productive” and that “fringe elements” had increasingly gained a foothold within the group.¹⁰ His departure, motivated also by his own on-going legal difficulties, stalled what little momentum the EDL had recouped in the aftermath of the killing of Lee Rigby, a serving soldier murdered outside Woolwich barracks, London, by two Islamist terrorists.¹¹ The killing generated an unparalleled, though brief, spike in the number of protests staged by far-right groups across Britain.

FRAGMENTED MOBILIZATION: STRENGTH OR WEAKNESS?

Electoral collapse and movement decline have produced an increasingly complex and diverse constellation of far-right, anti-minority and anti-Muslim groups whose organizational structures and patterns of activism are continuing to evolve. Though the EDL continues to exist, it has been joined on the anti-Muslim hinterland by a kaleidoscopic array of like-minded groupuscules. Many of these ‘groups’ are in fact little more than flags of convenience for disparate clusters of activists, structurally disenfranchised by the fragmentation of the EDL but still networked through the dense web of personal and social media ties that underpins the anti-Muslim protest movement.¹² They enable activists from different groups, localities and tendencies to come together as ‘affiliates’ under a common ‘banner’, often just for a one-off protest in a particular geographical location or on a particular issue. Such temporary and permeable ‘structures’ blur the lines of activity between groups, especially at the grassroots where demonstrators from one group are often interchangeable with those from another.

Within a fragmented scene, the porous and polyvalent nature of anti-Muslim mobilization – wherein ‘group’ loyalties and identities are less fixed – has helped obviate the organizational entropy engulfing political parties such as the BNP, whose regimented, sectarian boundaries preclude co-operation between ostensibly like-minded groups; this has resulted in that party continuing to wither. While political mobilization within the anti-Muslim scene has continued to devolve downwards to a local level (though the remnants of the EDL still hold the occasional ‘national’ demonstration), its organizational evolution suggests a continued inner coherence and resilience to the movement.

Despite this broader organizational fragmentation, the various anti-Muslim groups continue functioning as a ‘network of networks’ – a microcosm of the wider transnational ‘counter-jihad’¹³ movement of which they form a part. This evolution towards more decentralized organizational activity enables the activists who comprise this ‘scene’ to continue mobilizing on a regular basis. Indeed, while large ‘set-piece’ demonstrations might be increasingly hard for activists to stage, small, local demonstrations involving handfuls of militants are held week after week across Britain. These have been disruptive and, moreover, financially draining for local authorities and police forces, who spend vast sums of public money policing them in an ‘age of austerity’.

One consequence of the changing structural dynamics of the anti-Muslim movement set in motion by the EDL’s disintegration as a ‘national’ organization has been the development of an increasingly militant ‘local’ scene, which, as one recent report observed, is becoming increasingly violent.¹⁴ The North West Infidels (NWI) and the South East Alliance (SEA) are, at present, the two most structurally viable organizations to have emerged from the profusion of groups spawned by the decaying EDL. Notably, in seeking to establish themselves, both groups have sought to ‘outbid’¹⁵ others within the wider anti-Muslim milieu with whom they are in competition for limited financial and human resources. This competition has fueled processes of ideological radicalization, leading both groups to (re)define themselves as ostensibly far-right groupuscules. Tactically, both groups have also pursued increasingly confrontational strategies with political opponents, staging provocative and increasingly violent demonstrations in towns such as Liverpool¹⁶ and Dover.¹⁷

This increased militancy of these ‘infidel’ groups has provided the broader context for the revitalization of older violent grouplets, including the National Front and British Movement, founded in 1967 and 1968, respectively.¹⁸ It has also generated groups such as National Action, a small, youth-focused, National Socialist group which has come under official scrutiny for holding ‘self-defense’ training camps in the Brecon Beacons.¹⁹ Its activists have engaged in ever-more provocative antics, including one protest in Newcastle ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, during which they displayed banners reading “#HITLERWAS​RIGHT”.²⁰ The group’s own demonstrations have been vastly outnumbered, yet the broader societal impact of their militancy is reflected in the jailing of one activist on its periphery for an attempted racist murder.²¹

TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS

While far-right and anti-Muslim campaigns are often localized in their focus – mobilization converging upon specific towns such as Rotherham²² and Rochdale²³ over ‘Muslim grooming’ or, increasingly, the arrival of Syrian refugees – the gro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Titelseite
• Impressum
• Content: Trouble …
• … To Begin With
• … At The Ballot Box
• … On The Street
• … Over Cultural Hegemony
• … Underground
• … Within
• List of Contributors