The far right wants to be above the law

Donald Trump and Lee Anderson demand impunity for their thugs

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage meeting at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference [Cpac] CREDIT: Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour

Fake outrage accompanies fake news. As soon as you use the term “far right” to describe the thugs who threaten us and the politicians who egg them on, you are denounced.

 “This is NOT just far right thuggery,” declared the, frankly, far-right academic Matthew Goodwin. The rioters who rampaged across Britain were expressing genuine “concerns over legal and illegal immigration”. 

However grotesque the special pleading sounded as asylum seekers and worshippers in mosques went in fear of their lives, the demand that we define our terms should be taken seriously.

After all, if you believe that democracy is under threat from the far right, you ought to be able to say what the far right is.

The violence in the UK has brought one defining feature of the far-right into clear view: the belief that it is above the law. While it demands vicious punishments for migrants, the far right believes that its supporters must be free to attack Muslims, asylum seekers, and the police, and never face the consequences of their crimes. 

The demand for impunity is central to far-right politics in the United States. Donald Trump and the Republican Party that so pathetically obeys him showed us who they were when they endorsed an attempt to overthrow the results of a legitimate election and incited their supporters to storm Congress.

A refusal to accept the rules of democracy has always been a defining feature of far-right politics (and of far-left politics come to that).

If Trump returns to power, and he still may do, we will see a second defining feature as the demand for impunity, comes into play.  Trump has promised he will wipe out 900 or so convictions for violence, obstructing Congress and seditious conspiracy on 6 January 2021. Apparently, crimes aren’t crimes if they are committed in the name of the far-right leader. 

Trump’s mass pardoning of offenders will in effect declare a violent assault on the institutions of the American republic legal because the attack was done in his name.

He will also prepare the ground for new crimes by his supporters. As J Jamie Raskin, a clear-eyed Democratic congressman from Maryland,  noted, “he wants to pardon the shock troops of January 6, so he will have this roving band of people willing to commit political violence and insurrection for him – how dangerous is that?”

Trump's British allies are not so different. They too want to justify  violent men, not least because the violent men vote Reform. 

The latest polling shows that about 2-3 percent of the electorate - about one million people - want Nigel Farage and his Reform party to offer a far-right prospectus of street violence against asylum seekers, migrants and Muslims.

Farage knows his core vote. He gave credence to the outright lie that a recently arrived Muslim immigrant had murdered children in Southport: 

“I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us,” he said. “Something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country.”

Farage was not actually repeating the lie that led to attacks on mosques, police stations, hotels housing refugees, and in one symbolic illustration of the fascistic hatred of knowledge, a library. You don’t pin a slippery Nige down that easily. Farage was “just asking questions,”  just wondering, just fanning the flames and then smartly stepping back when the heat became too intense. 

If this is not exactly the same as Donald Trump urging his supporters to insurrection, when it comes to the demand for impunity, Reform in the UK and Republicans in the US are at one.

Men who are normally all for law and order, revolt when it is applied to their supporters.

Speaking on GB News the Reform MP Lee Anderson said that the rioters were just British working class lads. We shouldn’t read anything into their attempts to burn worshippers at a mosque alive.

“This far right excuse used by Keir Starmer… He doesn’t know what to do, He’s completely clueless, so he blames the far right.” All that happened was, “young lads going out, had one too many, got involved with the wrong crowd.” 

They shouldn’t be prosecuted, Anderson continued, as the former tough guy suddenly became all cuddly and bleeding heart.

Instead of bringing them to justice, Starmer needed “to sit down with them, talk to them, find out what the problem is rather than banging them away.”

Anderson is not a minor figure. When he was prime minister Rishi Sunak brought him to the heart of his government by making him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.  He was meant to connect the Tory leadership to working-class conservatism.  Anderson then rewarded Sunak by defecting to Farage’s outfit.

His career shows another reason why the use of “far right”  provokes such pearl clutching. The boundaries between “respectable” conservatism and extremism broke down in 2016 with Trump’s election victory and Brexit. Respectable conservatives do not like being reminded of that fact.

As we wait for them to face up to what they have become, the rest of us can wonder where the police fit into the schemes of the far right movements of the 21st century.