The far Right trades on racism and xenophobia, but it also draws on an intellectual tradition that can't be dismissed, says Steve Fuller
Does the British National Party represent the 21st-century face of National Socialism? If, as everyone expects, the far Right makes significant gains in this week's English local elections, this question should focus the minds of historians, social scientists and, not least, university administrators. After all, the BNP's core constituency comes from the same white working class that has also been the target of higher education's widening participation schemes.
A week after Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, revealed the popularity of the BNP in her East London constituency, a YouGov survey found that most Britons supported the party's policies and that backing slipped only a mere 17 per cent once respondents were told that the BNP espoused them. The only BNP policies singled out as truly abhorrent were prioritised treatment of whites in welfare matters and resettlement of recent immigrants in their countries of origin. But otherwise the respondents supported the BNP's desire for a political economy that would insulate Britain from events elsewhere in the world.
This result is striking given that all three major parties have been trying to outdo each other in their openness to the consequences of globalised liberalism - the free transit of people, products and capital. Moreover, while recognising the need for universal healthcare, education and domestic security, Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats alike have been reluctant to call for additional public revenue or to discriminate among its beneficiaries. The BNP would do both. It is truly a "nationalist" and a "socialist" party. This perhaps explains why Norman Tebbit, the Tories' party chairman under Margaret Thatcher, could not see anything "right wing" in the BNP's 2005 campaign manifesto.
That document is usefully read alongside the Nazi party's 1920 manifesto.
Two common themes stand out - one a spin on Marx, the other on Darwin.
First, those who have worked to build the nation are entitled to reap the lion's share of its collective benefits. Second, the state cannot maintain social order if it does not have a clear sense of who is and who is not fit to live within its borders. Reflecting the tenor of our times, the BNP manifesto stresses Darwinist themes over Marxist ones. But then so did the Nazi manifesto, once the German economy worsened and the far Right's own political situation improved.
The BNP's reliance on Darwinism serves as an uncomfortable reminder of an important source of support for the welfare state, namely, a geographical sense of biological enclosure. For Darwin, two species arise from a common population reproducing in long-term segregation from each other. From this standpoint, a race is a proto-species. Although the history of the welfare state is usually told from Bismarck's standpoint - that is, as a stopgap against revolutionary socialism - most examples were originally motivated by Darwinian concerns for the maintenance of biologically homogeneous populations, as arguably existed in, say, Scandinavia at the turn of the past century.
The BNP manifesto is charitably read as saying that every nation should be encouraged to establish a welfare state within its own borders but that the UK's welfare provision should not be abused by emigres from nations that have failed to provide for their own. This would certainly explain the party's call to double Britain's foreign aid budget, including a generous resettlement scheme for recent immigrants. These costs, it argues, would be outweighed by the prospective benefits, not least ecological sustainability, linguistic preservation and global multiculturalism.
But perhaps the BNP's most sophisticated welfare-based appeal turns on the likely impact of a genetically diverse (that is, racially mixed) society on provision for the National Health Service. Here, the party envisages either massive tax increases to cover a host of historically "non-British"
ailments or, more likely in these liberal times, the devolution of healthcare to private providers. This would in turn disadvantage the native working-class population, most of which is white.
Those (including myself) who look with sorrow at the passing of the welfare state need to confront the fact that major aspects of its legacy live on in the BNP. Indeed, it appeals to much of the concept's original constituency that remains alienated by the mad political rush to the liberal centre. It is worth recalling that William Beveridge was doing more than conferring a spurious sense of rigour when he called the discipline underwriting the British welfare state "social biology". Equally, more than a vote-getting ploy was behind the inclusion of "socialist" in the Nazi party's name.
The give-and-take of democratic elections, which give prominence to questions of who pays and who benefits, has always pushed socialist politics towards "biologising" people by focusing on actual human populations rather than on an abstract sense of humanity. The BNP may continue to trade on racism and xenophobia, but it also plays to that intellectual tradition, which academics would be foolish to ignore in the coming years.
Steve Fuller is professor of sociology at Warwick University. His latest book is The New Sociological Imagination , published by Sage, £21.99.