Phillips on the BNP’s victories

Melanie Phillips warns against the BNP once again, evidently not seeing how her argument contradicts itself:

Nevertheless, [the BNP] have been able to seize their opportunity—and not just because of the expenses scandal. No, the rot in our culture that has let in the BNP goes far, far deeper than that. It is because it has turned attachment to national identity itself into a crime. Anyone who objects to multi-culturalism is called a bigot; anyone who wants to curb immigration is called a racist; anyone who objects to the Islamisation of Britain is called an Islamophobe; anyone who wants to leave the EU and regain the power of national self-government is called a xenophobe; anyone, in short, who wants to retain Britain’s national identity rooted in the shared particulars of religion, law, history, traditions and culture and its powers as a self-governing nation finds themselves ostracised as a pariah.

Yes, and she expects Britain to be able to retain its “national identity rooted in the shared particulars of religion, law, history, traditions and culture and its powers as a self-governing nation” while turning into an nonwhite, largely Muslim society. All it has to do is reject multiculturalism. She remains ensconced in the liberal/neocon assimilationist fantasy.

Also, my jaw is again on the floor reading her because while she treats immigration as central in the wrongs of the present regime, she has never once said that Britain should reduce immigration by even one immigrant per year. Her own absolute silence on the immigration issue (which included refusing to reply to and rudely cutting off readers who asked her why she was silent about it) has strongly conveyed the message that she herself believes it would be racist to reduce immigration. How can she blast the establishment for ignoring immigration when she has been quite deliberately ignoring it for all these years?

Phillips gets away with this rank contradiction and hypocrisy, because, in uber PC, suicidal Britain, she is as close to a conservative nationalist as anyone in the mainstream media.

She continues:

Voters have been told in effect that there is nothing standing between national suicide on the one hand and racism on the other. If you don’t want the former, you are automatically branded with the latter. And so the BNP have been able to make hay. What’s more, the BNP have had a further devastating impact upon public discourse. Because they do indeed stand for beliefs that are beyond the pale, they toxify everything they touch. So because they take up causes such as the loss of immigration controls, EU membership or the Islamisation of Britain, this makes such causes radioactive. Mainstream politicians are terrified that if they touch them, they will instantly be tarred as ‘BNP- lite’….

Evidently Phillips is describing herself, since she never touches the issue, except to complain with supreme hypocrisy that establishment politicians aren’t touching the issue. As for making the national issues radioactive, evidently the BNP has made them radioactive to Phillips herself. But why should the fact that a group I don’t like supports a particular cause, make me not support that cause, if I think it’s a good cause? Her argument in an appeal to mindless cowardice.

Besides, it’s also manifestly untrue. The fact that BNP is associated with immigration restriction and withdrawal from the EU has not resulted in people rejecting those issues.

She continues:

The willed loss of control of this country’s borders, the blind eye to Islamisation, the refusal to allow the people to vote against the Lisbon treaty and the surrender of self-government to the EU—these are the things that have brought the BNP electoral success. If the shocked MPs now address those issues properly, the BNP will shrivel and die. But if MPs continue to regard such concerns as intrinsically illegitimate and as evidence that the public are themselves simply a bunch of racists, then the BNP will continue to grow. It’s as simple as that.

Based on Phillips’s own logic, shouldn’t she WELCOME the BNP’s success, since she is saying that it is only the shock of BNP victories that has the potential to stir the mainstream parties out of their smug leftism and get them to attend to their proper duty of protecting society?

Which, by the way, has been my argument all along, as someone hoping for maximum possible BNP success in the polls. No one expects the BNP—which currently has zero seats in the British parliament—to become the ruling party in the country. The hope is that the BNP by winning mainstream recognition will help change the mainstream stand on the national issues,

However, I don’t dismiss Philip M.’s argument yesterday, that if the mainstream parties in response to BNP electoral success make any move to adopt pro-national issues, it will be a lie. The proper goal,, then, is not to change the mainstream parties, but to destroy them.

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Mark Jaws writes:

I can somewhat understand Melanie Phillips tortured view of the BNP. For a prominent Jewish person in any way to embrace a group or political party with a current or previous track record of anti-Semitism may be akin to a black person being labeled an Uncle Tom. And even I find it somewhat distasteful that the BNP excludes from its ranks fully assimilated, Union Jack-loving, non-British ethnics. It equates to a “Whites Only” policy which alienates many otherwise sympathetic British traditionalists. I am still rooting for the BNP to assume a much greater role in British political affairs, but it needs to find the right balance of being assertively pro-white without being explicitly anti-nonwhite.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2009 10:21 AM | Send