What happened in Britain that in that once great democracy, one-fifth of the electorate would consider voting for the BNP, a genuine fascist party?
Shannon Love on The Collapse of the British Liberal Order
liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
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The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives).
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The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.
Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap.
So who lost Britain? The Labour Party, once home to the working class.
Labour wanted mass immigration to make Britain more multicultural says former Labour advisor
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
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He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
Melanie Phillips writes The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us
There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.
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Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather's eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen - and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters.
David Pryce Jones on Nick Griffin, the BNP leader
Griffin is far from a Hitler or Mussolini, far even from suitably streamlined European fascists of today like Jorg Haidar or Jean-Marie Le Pen. Overweight, he waddles. His face seems designed to be incapable of smiling, and he has no humour, no powers of persuasion, no gift for repartee. This glum figure is undoubtedly a racist, an anti-Semite, an ignoramus, and a liar about the unsavory things he has done and said on his way towards the top of the BNP.
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Griffin has only one point to make, namely that immigration is out of control and British people no longer feel that this is their country.
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Nobody seems to have worked out that mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. British people see immigrants receiving benefits, housing, and the rest of it on a scale that is neither deserved nor available to them. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have created this confusion and taken every measure to pretend either that it is not happening or that it doesn't matter.
Mike McNally on Britain's New Star on the Far, Far Right
The BNP speaks to the white working classes, a constituency which feels increasingly alienated, neglected, and abandoned by a “New” Labour party which once drew the bulk of its support from those same people. In broad terms, these are people who feel left behind by the pace of social and economic change. They are concerned about the erosion of what they see as their British identity under a government obsessed with promoting multiculturalism. More pressingly, they feel under pressure from mass immigration [3], angered by the continuing transfer of political power away from their elected leaders and into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats of the European Union, concerned by rising crime, and alarmed by the spread of Islamic extremism.
Labour long ago lost the big battles of economic ideas to the Conservatives, but Britain’s cultural establishment has succeeded in making left-wing and “progressive” views on immigration, Europe, and crime the orthodoxy of the ruling classes, despite their unpopularity at the ballot box. (A former Labour advisor recently revealed how Tony Blair and his ministers encouraged mass immigration to socially engineer a “multicultural” Britain and “rub the right’s noses in diversity.”)