The rise of the Far-Right in the UK, and other worrying correlations

There has been something percolating through my mind about the link between scapegoating and the rise of the Far Right that has been bugging me. Something was telling me that there was something going on that I had missed.

So I spent some time searching the news to see what it was that people were saying, and suddenly there it was. The Rise of Islam as a terror threat. A manufactured scapegoat.

This scapegoat has all the things that people worry about : they abuse girls (cf. http://www.sikhanswers.com/modern-youth-issues/what-is-the-reality-of-muslim-men-sexually-grooming-non-muslim-young-girls/*), they are over here stealing our jobs, and they want to usurp our legal system with Sharia law (cf.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587215/Sharia-Law-enshrined-British-legal-lawyers-guidelines-drawing-documents-according-Islamic-rules.html ), and of course, they are terrorists.

There is more, of course. Islam is getting widely blamed for everything. The rhetoric is of course, depressingly familiar. It was, nearly 100 years ago when similar rhetoric began in a book named “Mein Kampf” by a little-known painter and rally organizer.

Here, of course, we have a genuine fear of the people. The economy is oppressed because the wealthy have legged it with all the money (cf. The economic crash following the treatise of Versailles), and the government is doing a neat trick of shifting the blame. It’s not our fault, say “The Government”, it’s the European laws on -insert name of thing here-. The anti-EU sentiment grows when figures are released about how much we pay to be members. Thus, everyone in the “EU” is in some way to blame for our economic state.

The fall of jobs in the UK is Europes fault. In a round-about way. The crash, caused by the bankers, meant that no-one had money. So the supply chain broke. Orders from Europe dried up, and without orders, there’s no work, without work there’s no money, so businesses go to the wall, or go under. When people loose their jobs, there’s less money, so other people lose their jobs because no-one is buying/needing their stuff.

We then have trust in the police being undermined, through both their own over-action, and their own inaction. Hillsborough being reinvestigated, and though police has changed in the decade since then, it still marrs the police today. Then there’s the fiasco at the Wedding of the Prince and Princess, and plebgate, and mis-filing of rapes, and let us not forget the uncontrollable riots, that the police were frankly powerless against.

Against this back-drop, the Government is forcing more and more people into poverty in a way that is not, in any way equitable. The rich are hardly being touched, and the poor are being taxed and forced out of their already over-priced houses (which they are paying a mortgage on, which is too high, to banks who caused them to loose their jobs in the first place).

The increasing poverty has to be blamed somewhere. None of the major parties have managed to offer a solution that seems to change the lives of people *now*.

Thus, people turn to the scapegoat, the immigrants. A scapegoat put front and center by the Conservative party, mostly so that people are looking the other way while they remove other freedoms, benefits, and institutions.

The reason is that for most people on the ground, for most hard-working people, the reality is that some immigrant has their job, or their friends job. Or someone they knew. Though the problem is that immigrant generally means, black person. They are easy to spot, are not like “us” (those who think in terms of pink being “us). It is the same way that Muslims are easy to spot, they dress differently, and the time when people are most likely to see them is when they are being served by them in a shop, or see them stocking selves. That is, doing work when they don’t have one.

There is only one party that’s promising to change this situation. To reduce immigration, and to put tighter controls on how long people can stay, and to keep better tabs on immigrants, and that is UKIP.

For people, this becomes then an easy correlation. The other policies of UKIP (like removing paid holiday, maternity leave, and contract security) is really of no relevance. The conditions that people on such low wages are already living under are essentially the same. 0 hour contracts mean if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, and your not entitled to holiday, and you can forget materinity. You are unlikely to be aware, or even, are unwilling to claim benefit because you don’t like the idea that you are “scrounging”, so you muddle by on what your wages can produce. What UKIP is actually offering is the hope of a job, when what you desperately need is more money.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch. Scapegoat someone, and tell people that that someone is the reason they don’t have a decent life. Deomonise the people who are struggling as “scroungers”, so that they feel ashamed that they have fallen on hard times, and that the money that is meant to be there to help them get back on their feet is never claimed.

It all adds up to a simple solution. Vote UKIP, things can’t get worse for you, and with the immegrants gone, at least you’ll have a job.

~BX

*This is intentionally not a news site. The problem is when you google for it, you find that there is more opinion than there is fact.

Ps: Note that the language in this article is chosen for it’s polemical use. Images of “us” and “them” are constructs, and do not really exist, nor does race, nor separating people based on a skin-colour. These are all just forms of scapegoating.

The author does not support any policies of UKIP, nor does it think that UKIP is, in and of itself, a fascist party. The author is simply offering the correlation between historic events and the current climate. This is only, of course, a simple correlation, as there are many factors not covered in this post.

pps; The links in this post are intentionally not hyperlinks.