Britain's Fascist Resurgence

I would like to see a society in which patriotism and pride of race were at the forefront and where African, Asian and other alien cultures were completely rejected. I would like to see real manhood and womanhood once again valued and the current trend to unisex reversed. I would like to see greater emphasis on physical health and fitness, and a much greater organization of the young to stop them drifting into street corners, drugs and degeneration. --Mr. Tyndall, founder and chairman,   The National Front.

THE MAN who spoke those words is the leader of the National Front, Britain's fastest growing political party and a party which is successfully challenging the Liberals for third place on Britain's political rostrum. The National Front is a modern-day Nazi party, an avowedly racist and nationalist organization whose structure, tactics and goals all recall Hitler's National Socialism. Its surprising progress in recent local elections and by-elections is alarming Britain's political establishment, and provoking violent nationwide debate and confrontation.

The Front's links to its Nazi predecessor are being clearly drawn through Britain's current political turbulence. The economic climate fostering the rise of contemporary fascism is similar to the worsening economy of Germany in the late '20s. The racist and nationalist propaganda of the Front recall all too readily Hitler's anti-semitism, his genocide of the 'inferior' Slavic population, and his plans for a Greater Germany. The Front's plans for the state control of capitalist industry are cruelly reminiscent of the German state machine which provided concentration camps of cheap labor to a regulated German industry.

In an interview published in the London Times on August 30, 1977, Tyndall expounded upon his party's ideological foundation, and elaborated upon the Front's social and economic platforms. He advanced National Front programs for social and economic reform, education, foreign affairs and immigration in the harshest and most violent terms. If his language was nothing else, it was decisive, and for a nation heading downwards amidst a melee of impotent, if not economically disabling, government interventions, that decisiveness in itself is becoming increasingly attractive.

In ideological terms, Tyndall describes his party as both nationalist and racist. Front members are fervently patriotic believers in British and western cultural superiority, and like their Nazi predecessors, have imagined a conscious Communist-led conspiracy intent upon undermining it. Front members are also overtly racist, and Tyndall describes himself as an "unashamed white supremacist." He believes that whites are "intellectually, although not physically or morally, superior to blacks," and advocates the compulsory repatriation of Britain's four million colored immigrants.

Tyndall is a firm believer in the work ethic, in competition and in production for profit. In terms of social and economic policy, this philosophy translates itself into social irresponsibility and regulated capitalist industry. Tyndall professes a doctrine of social obligation only for the physically incapacitated. For all other victims of structural unemployment or poverty, Tyndall allows only "the stiff breeze of compulsion to work, and hardship if they don't."

Economically, the Front advocates as did the Nazis, a program for national self-sufficiency. They propose to ban all imported goods, and to grow 75 per cent of Britain's foodstuffs in Britain. Like their Nazi predecessors, they also advocate a state-controlled, monopoly capitalist economy.

Nor does the Front distance itself from National Socialism in its educational or foreign policies. Its education program consists of the "compulsory direction of students away from the social sciences and classics towards technology." In foreign affairs, the Front advocates the reincorporation of the Irish Republic into the United Kingdom, British withdrawal from the EEC and NATO, the re-creation of the Commonwealth as the British Empire, and the British led re-introduction of nationalism into Europe.

TYNDALL'S DANGEROUS but decisive rhetoric might even be humorous were it not for his party's rapidly rising popularity. The Front has won up to 12.5 per cent of the vote in Britain's recent local and by-elections. In Birmingham, Stechford, the Front polled 8.2 per cent, finishing ahead of the Liberals' 8.0 per cent. In London's May municipal elections, the Front attracted over 117,000 supporters, or 5.3 per cent of the electorate.

Even more frightening is the verdict reached by a University of Essex survey which concluded that the "National Front is now England's fourth party, and more significantly, is the only party whose support is increasing." The same study also examined the Front's sources of support. It found that the Front's political base is similar to the one which eventually lifted Hitler's Nazis to power. Specifically, it concluded that the Front draws its support disproportionately from "the working class, the poorly educated and the young."

The explanation for the Front's ongoing surge at the polls is twofold. Most immediately, the high profile it has assumed through its extreme and violent tactics has focused attention on itself. The bloody marches it has organized through non-white districts and its extreme racist propaganda have kept the Front on the front pages of Britain's daily newspapers.

More fundamentally, however, Britain's high unemployment rate and inflationary economy is creating a growing reservoir of the dangerously disillusioned and the increasingly desperate. The National Front is thriving specifically on the frustrations, the angers and the hardships that are the human consequences of Britain's economic decline.

As the Front's support grows, Britain's established politicians, labor leaders and churchmen are growing increasingly alarmed. They have begun to organize counter-demonstrations and counter-propaganda efforts linking the National Front with Nazism. As they do so, racial violence intensifies, and the British economy continues to stagger.

At best, their counter-propaganda efforts will discredit and slow down the rise of the Front. But the fundamental problem of an economic failure and its disastrous human consequences will remain. The reversal of this economic failure, and of its dehumanizing consequences remains the real problem for Britain. Ultimately, it will only be resolved through the supersession of the cyclical capitalist economy, which recurrently exposes society to economic breakdown, and concurrently exposes it to the fascist threat.