A couple of interesting pieces, the first from a professor of history @ Oxford https://theconversation.com/no-this-isnt-the-1930s-but-yes-this-is-fascism-68867
The spread of fascism in the 1920s was significantly aided by the fact that liberals and mainstream conservatives failed to take it seriously. Instead, they accommodated and normalised it.
The centre right is doing the same today. Brexit, Trump and the far right ascendant across Europe indicate that talk of a right-wing revolutionary moment is not exaggerated. And the French presidential election could be next on the calendar.
The shock felt by status-quo liberals and the anguish experienced on the left are matched only by the satisfaction of those on the extreme right that finally they are winning. The so-called “mature” liberal democracies have long managed to marginalise them. They have long seen themselves as vilified for speaking the common man’s unpalatable truths to out-of-touch elites. Now their champions are taking the political mainstream by storm.
The signs are there if you look for them. EPA
And amid the disbelief, heartbreak, and protest, centre-right politicians and commentators seek to normalise and reassure. They dismiss “whingers” and “moaners”. They tell us to “get over it” and brush off talk of a new fascism as unfounded scaremongering.
Even among historians, apparently – as the conservative British writer Niall Ferguson condescended to tell Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis – analogies with the 1930s are made only by the easily confused.
The circumstances of society, the economy and geopolitics are so different, we are told, that today’s right-wing populism cannot be called a fascistic revival. The mainstream centre right assures us that all will be well in the wake of Trump’s election. It did the same after the UK’s EU referendum, even as hate crime figures skyrocketed. Conservative politicians continue to insist that the real news is about the wonderful opportunities ahead.
But that is precisely where the real analogy with Europe in the 1920s and 1930s lies. The circumstances of 2016 are indeed very different to those against which militarised party shock troops fought street battles, and monarchists looked for a strong man to capture popular grievances and save them from Bolshevik revolution.
But historical circumstances, like individuals, are always unique and unrepeatable. The point of comparison is not to suggest that we are living though the 1930s redux. It is to recognise the very strong family resemblance in ideas shared by the early 20th century far right and its mimics today.
Mussolini in 1922. Wikimedia Commons
Discussion of fascism suffers from an excess of definition. That often, ironically, allows far-right groups and their apologists to disavow the label because of some tick-box characteristic which they can be said to lack. But just as we can usefully talk about socialism as a recognisable political tradition without assuming that all socialisms since the 1840s have been cut from one mould, so we can speak of a recognisably fascist style of politics in Europe, the US, Russia and elsewhere. It is united by its espousal of a set of core ideas.
The theatrical machismo, the man or woman “of the people” image, and the deliberately provocative, demagogic sloganeering that impatiently sweeps aside rational, evidence-based argument and the rule-bound negotiation of different perspectives – the substance of democracy, in other words – is only the outward form that this style of politics takes.
More important are its characteristic memes. Fascism brings a masculinist, xenophobic nationalism that claims to “put the people first” while turning them against one another. That is complemented by anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-intellectualism. It denounces global capitalism, blaming ordinary people’s woes on an alien “plutocracy” in a language that is both implicitly anti-Semitic and explicitly anti-immigrant, while offering no real alternative economics. In the US, that was perfectly exemplified in Trump’s closing campaign ad.
Trump’s view of the world.
A view of the world is presented that is centred on fears of “national suicide” and civilisational decline, in which whites are demographically overwhelmed by “inferior” peoples, minorities and immigrants. Today, this is the French far-right’s paranoid fantasy of le grand remplacement. Geopolitics are defined by latent religio-racial war. In the 1930s, this meant a death struggle with communism. Today, it looks to, and feeds abundantly on, Islamist extremism and Islamic State, abusively identified with “Islam” as a whole.
This is a new fascism, or at least near-fascism, and the centre right is dangerously underestimating its potential, exactly as it did 80 years ago. Then, it was conservative anti-communists who believed they could tame and control the extremist fringe. Now, it is mainstream conservatives, facing little electoral challenge from a left in disarray. They fear the drift of their own voters to more muscular, anti-immigrant demagogues on the right. They accordingly espouse the right’s priorities and accommodate its hate speech. They reassure everyone that they have things under control even as the post-Cold War neoliberal order, like the war-damaged bourgeois golden age last century, sinks under them.
The risk, at least for the West, is not a new world war, but merely a poisoned public life, a democracy reduced to the tyranny of tiny majorities who find emotional satisfaction in a violent, resentful rhetoric while their narrowly-elected leaders strip away their rights and persecute their neighbours. That might be quite bad enough.
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And a second from an academic in immigration at Sussex https://theconversation.com/the-hug...n-migrants-unfettered-access-to-britain-66077
The future of immigration from the European Union into Britain is likely to dominate the kind of deal Britain gets after Brexit. In a survey conducted in mid-October by Survation for ITV news about the post-Brexit future, 56% of respondents were more concerned about immigration than they were about maintaining trade benefits.
To understand why Britain became so opposed to migration from the EU, it’s key to understand a decision made by the Labour government in 2004, which has had lasting political repercussions.
In May 2004, the EU welcomed ten new member states – the majority from Central and Eastern Europe – in what was the largest expansion in the history of European integration. The UK was one of only three member states, alongside Sweden and Ireland, to open its labour market to these new EU citizens immediately.
At the time, Labour’s decision was largely uncontroversial and met with bipartisan support in parliament. Yet this was to be perhaps Tony Blair’s greatest unintended legacy and ultimately a contributor to his party’s electoral defeat in years to come.
Although ten countries became EU member states in 2004, attention focused on the “A8 countries”. These were Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
While the number of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe into the UK was predicted to be in the region of 5,000 to 13,000 on the assumption that other member states would also open their labour markets, most didn’t. And the flows turned out to be over 20 times the upper end of this estimate.
In 2004 and 2005, 129,000 migrants from the A8 countries entered Britain, according to research by migration researcher John Salt that takes into account various ways of measuring immigration.
Tide turns against free movement
Labour’s wider managed migration programme was expansive, a package of reforms designed to expand labour migration routes and above all embrace the positive economic benefits of immigration from around the world. But these reforms paled in significance to this single decision, with 112,000 A8 nationals entering the UK in 2007 alone.
Labour’s decision ignited the debate on whether free movement was a wholly positive thing. Since then Britain has had 12 years of public debates on welfare shopping, job displacement and social dumping – the exploitation of cheap labour. UKIP successfully intertwined immigration and EU membership in its appeal to the British electorate. And the Conservative-led coalition government’s framing of immigration as a problem paved the way for a public less enthused with free mobility.
Come June 23 2016, the British public decided by a slim majority that the benefits of EU membership did not outweigh the costs, and for many the perceived cost of free movement was the deciding factor.
What led to the decision
So why did the Labour government take such a politically risky decision back in 2004? For a decision which had such large ramifications both politically and on Britain’s population, there was a surprising lack of debate. There were two reasons for this. First, the government had assumed that other member states would open their labour markets and so diffuse migration flows. Second, the decision was perceived and framed among the British political elite as a geopolitical matter rather than one focused on immigration.
While Britain confirmed the decision in late 2002, most other member states did not make the decision until early 2004. The UK economy was booming at this time, leading to demand for workers. Conversely, other states such as Germany were suffering from economic stagnation and high levels of unemployment.
In Germany, Austria, France and Italy, months of public debate led to the imposition of transitional controls, largely because of fears over job displacement, and in turn pressure from trade unions. Despite the early rhetoric of embracing free movement from these “old states”, at the eleventh hour, 12 out of 15 of them imposed restrictions to varying degrees, with Germany and Austria imposing the maximum seven-year period. This meant that citizens of the new member states had to wait until 2011 until they could freely work in Germany and Austria.
Given the complexity of migration flows, it’s not possible to say definitively whether more people migrated to the UK from the A8 countries than would have done had more EU member states opened their labour markets in 2004, but this wouldn’t be an unfair assumption.
Managing migration and building allies
The decision was certainly presented as part of the British government’s wider managed migration policy – and within this framework, it made logical sense.
Yet the decision was also conversely part of the wider control agenda to reduce irregular immigration. Visa restrictions for citizens from Eastern European countries had been lifted in 2001, so de facto labour mobility was already taking place. Given that the UK would have no power to deport the new EU citizens, the government’s view was that it would be better to make sure the workers who came did so legally, allowing the government to focus on deporting illegal immigrants.
Yet the main rationale for this decision had very little to do with immigration per se, but rather diplomacy. Britain was a keen supporter and indeed a “driver” of accession of Central and Eastern European countries into the EU from early on, with Margaret Thatcher setting the precedent. This was principally due to trading ties and a foreign policy interest in forging alliances with these states at the EU level.
The benefit of hindsight
So one of the largest immigration flows to Britain was not altogether an immigration policy. In retrospect, if the government had known just how large this wave of migration would be, it would have undoubtedly made a different decision, as Jack Straw, the former home secretary, admitted in 2013.
The decision to allow citizens of the A8 countries free movement to come to the UK was fiscally sound but politically costly. The unexpectedly large migration from Central and Eastern Europe lent the impression that Labour could not control the borders. This is an issue which continues to dog the Labour party and contributed to electoral defeats in 2010 and 2015.
Poles and other Central and Eastern European citizens have enriched the UK culturally and economically. Nonetheless, such large and rapid immigration alerted the public to the implications of free movement, and in turn the apparent costs of membership of the EU.
