European fascism began on 23 March 1919, when Mussolini and 145 followers founded the first fascist party. In the 80 years since, the practice of fascism has varied in time and place. One element, however, has remained constant. All fascist parties are criminal conspiracies. Their leaders dream of committing great crimes when they attain power, they incite others to crime and they are criminals themselves.
You might expect recognition of the criminality of fascism to be a matter of course – what with 1939 and all that – and suspect that the BBC, more than most organisations, should have an idea of the nature of the beast. The corporation has been as keen as its rivals to enjoy the benefits of the Hitler boom (“ratings double when we do Nazi documentaries”, a producer told me recently). It has given us The Nazis – a warning from history (twice) and has just finished rerunning The World at War. The BBC also broadcast highlights from the Holocaust Memorial Day in January and allowed us to gawp as the politicians who persecute today’s refugees nodded sympathetically while John Simpson, his grave voice close to cracking, described the fate of the refugees of the 1940s.
No one can accuse the corporation of cowardice in the fight against the fascists who were defeated in 1945. But when presented with existing fascists in their own time and place, its ferocious interviewers become kittens, and insistence on precision in language, the first requirement of intellectually honest reporting, fades faster than breath on a window pane.
The British National Party is a fascist party of the neo-Nazi variety. To say as much is not to parrot the propaganda of its opponents but merely to repeat a provable fact.
Yet as towns burns and citizens are terrorised, the BBC bans its journalists from describing fascists as “fascists”. Rod Liddle, the editor of the Today programme, switched from a convivial, easy tone to motor-mouth rant as soon as I mentioned the forbidden word. “I would never allow the word ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ to be used,” he cried. “Never. I would stop ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ appearing on air as far as I could. It obscures as much as it reveals.”
I don’t want to be accused of obscurantism, but the label “neo-Nazi” has its shorthand uses when:
1. Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, is animated by the national socialist belief that a Jewish conspiracy controls the media (among much else) and provides “us with an endless diet of pro-multicultural, pro-homosexual trash”;
2. Griffin found himself in the lonely position of attacking David Irving from the right when the old fraud conceded that Holocaust denial could not be absolute because the Nazis had killed at least a few Jews;
3. the BNP has warm relations with international Nazism and counts among its friends the Ku Klux Klan; William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, a pornographic fantasy that inspired the Oklahoma bombing; and Gunter Deckert, the neo-Nazi leader of the German National Democratic Party;
4. Griffin’s racism, like Hitler’s, was bred by the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and racial hierarchy;
5. the party, in common with many European fascist movements, has decided to play down Nazism in public and present a reasonable, camera-friendly face in the expectation that the British media will not ask too many rough questions.
That last hope has not been dashed. Griffin’s first big interview after the party’s successes in Oldham and Burnley (triumphs that can be measured in votes cast, riots provoked and injuries sustained) was with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. In the worst day’s work of his career, the interviewer, who will happily tear democratic politicians to pieces, failed to lay a finger on a Nazi crackpot.
Griffin was allowed to get away with claiming that the BNP had mellowed and no longer believed in the compulsory deportation of British citizens whose colour he disliked. This is a lie, designed to spin media dolts. Searchlight, the fascist monitoring group, points out that the small print of BNP policy says it believes in first creating an apartheid state which separates races, then encouraging “voluntary repatriation” and then considering “forcible repatriation” if non-whites refuse to be driven from their homes.
Paxman did not seem to know that Griffin was a criminal. He didn’t ask about his conviction for inciting racial hatred or his deputy’s conviction for attempting to plant bombs and beating the living daylights out of a Jewish schoolteacher, or about the BNP officials and supporters imprisoned for fire-bombings and bottle attacks. I assumed that Newsnight was so bound into the tight circle of establishment journalism that its producers didn’t know that Searchlight could supply the above information in an instant. However, Searchlight told me that Newsnight researchers had called before the interview but decided not to use the material they gathered as the basis for vulgar questions.
Paxman preferred to ape a doe-eyed teenager who is thrown into agonies by the realisation that there are nasty men out there. I advise you to pour a stiff drink before reading on.
Paxman (with a beseeching look in his eye): Mr Griffin, let me ask you a simple question: if one of your children fell in love with a Muslim or an Asian, what would you do?
Griffin (firm but fair): I would be very unhappy about it because I do see two very different lives with their own heritage and their own culture being destroyed.
Paxman (turning into Barbara Cartland): Do you think that’s a greater consideration than the fact that they might be in love?
Griffin (with a polite nod to multiculturalism): When you are talking about human beings you have got to take many things into consideration, of course. But I do know that many Asian parents would be just as upset as I would be.
Paxman: I’m not talking to you about Asian parents, I’m talking to you about you.
Griffin: Well, I’m just telling you that a decision to stay with your own people is a very strong human instinct . . .
Paxman: Would you allow a child of yours to marry someone of a different race?
Griffin (like any other long-suffering parent): Well, children are children and adults are adults and they do what they want.
The Today programme’s attempts to cover native Nazism was little better than this lamentably sentimental response to racial violence. Its editor’s ban on plain speaking meant that James Naughtie insisted on air that the BNP was “allegedly fascist”. Today found the guts to mention Griffin’s previous conviction, and for that it deserves a pat on the head, but the presenters remained silent about the past of National Front thugs they invited on to the show, including one with convictions for gun-running. Nor did they mention the BNP’s neo-Nazi ideology or links to fascists abroad. How could Naughtie and John Humphrys talk about such unpleasantnesses when recital of the evidence would inevitably lead to listeners reaching the taboo conclusion that the party was Nazi? Far better, the programme-makers thought, to present both sides of the story and allow the BBC to pose as the “truth lying somewhere in between”.
Naughtie crashed into this traditional BBC category error of confusing impartiality with fact with the noisiest thump. He announced that the Anti-Nazi League, whose members have never bombed anyone, was “at the other extreme” to the BNP. The responses of the two organisations to the BBC belie the idea that they are in any way comparable. Julie Waterson, the national organiser of the Anti-Nazi League, has been shocked into gloomy contempt by the gullibility and shallowness of the corporation’s journalists. “They never cut to the quick,” she says. The BNP, meanwhile, has been delighted by Griffin’s appearances on the Today show and praises the programme’s “integrity, commitment to free speech and respect for the white race” on its website.
Waterson wonders how Griffin can so easily get the better of interrogators with the fearsome reputations of Paxman and Humphrys. The answer, I suspect, lies in the confusions of English class prejudice. The stereotypical fascist of official media imagination is some tattoo-covered proletarian Neanderthal whose beer-belly grazes the ground and whose lips go numb as he tries to read the Sun. Many Jews who have moved in high society will tell you that this portrait is a fantasy and they encounter the greatest anti-Semitism from the aristocracy. Fascist thought and fascist parties have always had an appeal to the refined and petit bourgeois, from T S Eliot to Lord Haw-Haw and Sir Oswald Mosley to the young Philip Larkin.
Griffin is not quite an aristo, but he is a Cambridge graduate from a wealthy Suffolk family. His father attended National Front meetings, his sister was an NF candidate and his mother helps run his party. Like any other upper-middle-class child of the media age, Griffin is more than capable of putting on a pleasant manner and handling the grandees of the BBC.
He can get the broadcasting attention his tiny party needs by appearing respectable in public, while maintaining hard-core support with complicit winks to the arsonists and Paki-bashers, and discreet links with international race-terror groups.
The discovery that BNP leaders are fit to put on air has delighted producers. Searchlight describes a BBC journalist who let out an “I didn’t expect what I found” in a tone of pleased surprise after meeting Tony Lecomber. Lecomber doubtless looks smart in a suit. But he is also a convicted bomber and a man who left a Jewish teacher covered in bruises from head to toe when he dared to peel a BNP sticker off a London Underground station wall.
The classiness of modern fascism appeals to the dominant ideology of the modern media elite. To succeed, one must have “edge” and be “a bit of a reb”. Liddle plays the part of the hungry young exec, tired with stuffy traditions and determined to shake up the old town, with brio.
He told the New Statesman last week that he had no time for the “illiberal liberal left”, which wanted to censor “strong opinions” from the right. He was sure that he would “fuck up” if the BBC tried to turn him into a tired old suit counting beans in “some middle-management” job. His mission was to be a radical contrarian.
The Today programme rejects the “no platform for fascists” demand of the Anti-Nazi League. Producers were prepared to go to great lengths and some expense to drive Griffin from his Welsh home to Burnley. They wanted to broadcast a confrontation with Shahid Malik, the member of Labour’s National Executive Committee who was beaten up by the cops for trying to stop a riot. When Malik refused to meet Griffin and provide what would have been good – or at least sensational – radio, frantic offers of a phone debate followed.
Many radical journalists are uncomfortable with censorship. The arguments for banning fascists are well meant: there are laws against inciting racial hatred and Griffin’s very presence on the airwaves teaches blacks and Asians that neo-Nazism is now semi-respectable. (Many will have been menaced by the presentation of the BNP as an authentic representative of the white working class when, outside the Lancashire mill towns, the party’s performance in the election was derisory.) For all that, censorship always favours the powerful in the end and limits are the destroyer of originality.
But it’s not quite good enough for Today and Newsnight to strike a radical pose with the daring assertion that there are no no-go areas and leave it at that. Radicalism in journalism, as elsewhere, is hard work and the BBC has been reluctant to get its head down.
Instead of investigating, it presents the impression of radicalism rather than the thing itself. Its programme-makers can appear daring by inviting neo-Nazis on air. But they evade the responsibility to dig up evidence against them (good journalism is expensive) and spare the corporation’s nervous lawyers the worries that might follow a genuine confrontation.
Their indulgence of Griffin is malign because it undermines better journalists on under-resourced local papers whose editors are intimidated into taking seriously absurd threats of libel actions from a BNP with no reputation to lose.
The phoniness of BBC radicalism is best exemplified by Liddle’s condemnation of the “illiberal liberal left” while censoring his staff. George Orwell, a genuinely radical journalist, said: “To see what is in front of your nose is a constant struggle.” H L Mencken, another, said: “The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony.”
Neither lived to see a BBC where it takes potentially career-destroying defiance of the editors to state the incontestable, and a heroic effort of will to report the bleeding obvious.
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