Anti-fascism

It brings together the Anti Nazi League, the National Assembly Against Racism, Labour MPs, the TUC, and the general secretaries of Unison, the TGWU, the GMB, the PCS and the CWU. Billy Hayes is the treasurer of the organisation and Ken Livingstone the chair. Every day more names come flooding in. There is tremendous relief throughout the labour movement that the organisation has been set up, because there is serious concern about the threat posed by the Nazi BNP in the forthcoming June elections.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Assessing the level and threat of racism in Britain today uncannily summons up those famous opening words of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

'I had dropped into the only community of any size in western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.' So wrote George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia on the six months he was to spend in revolutionary Spain.

Witness to revolution

The BNP won a total of 13 seats, seven of them in Burnley alone. In Sunderland none of its candidates were elected but the party won over 13,000 votes.

Eighteen months on from the race riots they sparked, Britain's Nazis--the British National Party (BNP)--are exploiting an increase in racial tension. To add to their council seats in Burnley, Blackburn and Halifax, they are planning to stand over 200 candidates in May's local elections, four times the number they stood last year (when 16 candidates got more than 10 percent of the vote). The BNP believe they are poised to follow in the footsteps of their European counterparts such as Le Pen, Fini and Haider.

Two contradictory moods are sweeping Britain. There is the enormous movement against the war on Iraq. Not only has there been the biggest anti-war demonstration the country has ever seen, but the global anti-capitalist mood that emerged after Seattle has been getting a wide echo within the movement, feeding into the first real political student movement for years and creating a wide sense of solidarity with the firefighters' strikes at the end of last year.

By now you are probably sick of the hype surrounding the queen's golden jubilee. Even before the royal beano began, newspaper columnists talked of a country united. Many have evoked the celebrations that took place during the queen's silver jubilee in 1977. But the country was never united. One 7-inch single helped piss on the queen's parade.

Fascism in the year 2002 does not come in a black shirt with a pencil moustache--it comes in a designer suit. It is not going to call openly for the extermination of the Jews and will try to cultivate maximum respectability. Neither is it going to goosestep down your high street complete with swastika flag. This seems to throw many liberal journalists and academics into confusion. For them if someone does not correspond to their image of fascism they cannot be a Nazi.

One of the fascinating things about the present period is how it brings up old issues in a new form. Take the debate which erupted last month among the French revolutionary left about how to react after Le Pen came second in the first round of the presidential election, and knocked out the Socialist Party prime minister Jospin. It was very much a rerun of the arguments over the Popular Front between revolutionaries, Communist Party supporters and social democrats back in the 1930s.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.' The Irish poet WB Yeats wrote those words in the wake of the First World War. Today the sense of political crisis across Europe, while not as great as then, is growing weekly as support for the parties of the centre cracks and politics polarises to the left and right.