Unite the Right?

Aren’t podcasts a marvellous thing? No longer confined to live broadcast media channels I now listen to pods as I drive into work in the wee hours of the morning. Today it was the turn of Adam Fleming’s long-form production, ‘Anti-Social’ which purports to take both sides of an issue, examine it critically and dispassionately, and draw no overall conclusions about right or wrong. But, of course, being a product of the BBC, for all he tries ‘young Adam’ (as Andrew Neil used to call him) can’t help but show a little more sympathy for one view than another.

This morning the theme was counter protests and the champion for their cause was Maxine Bowler – community activist and independent socialist - who has a long history of left-wing agitation over the last few decades. Organisation like the Anti-Nazi League, which became Unite against Fascism, which became the Anti-Racism Alliance… you get the picture. (Judean people’s front?) The one thing they all have backing them? The Socialist Worker Party.

When you hear accusations of rent-a-crowd demonstrations, you can be sure people are referring to the guiding principle of the SWP which is to protest about absolutely everything and defend the rights of absolutely everybody, except those with whom they disagree. Ms Bower did not disappoint in this respect. Setting herself and her cause as moral guardians against the disgusting ‘far right’ she naturally invoked the Battle of Cable Street as a starting point for all right-thinking people to come together and fight the terrors of Nazism, even though the real battle was between counter protesters and the police and did almost nothing to deter Mosely and his blackshirts and in fact actually aided their recruitment.

Let me see, Nazism; a creed which brooks no dissent, tolerates no departure from ‘the rules’ which it alone sets, and defends itself intellectually against inferior thinking. Nazism; a movement with fearsome powers of organisation and the ability to mobilise its warriors against ‘them’, the others, who don’t agree with the kind and cuddly tenets of Marxism. Nazism; the short form for the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany. Hmmm…

In a way it was quite funny listening to Maxine ‘othering’ the right even as she railed against them ‘othering’ immigrants groups; insisting that the far right organising online was an affront to democracy itself, even as she proudly related the long history of socialism’s mobilisation of the easily led; deploring the horrible racism of the far right while defending the right of keffiyeh-clad, armed and masked ‘protesters’ to demand the eradication of Jews. In fact she even managed to defend Hamas and the left with its long history of antisemitism by insisting that they were not ‘antisemetic’_[sic] at all.

The other side, incidentally, didn’t appear to get any real right to reply, being largely represented by an old-time copper – Andrew Trotter, ex of the Met. – who did his level best to not take sides at all. A few professorial commentators made sociological observations about stuff, but there really wasn’t anybody to balance out the good old-fashioned anti-British invective of the left. It’s good to know that the BBC has not shifted one inch since Orwell.