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Far-right parties on the rise across Europe.
That's a headline we've all read many times in the past decade, is now really different? There are many clips around the internet of the race riots in France, with this Reddit thread showing a compilation of some. It's hard to gauge how serious the riots are, or if it's relatively isolated to a few blocks in a couple cities and these compilations make the situation appear worse than it actually is. The words of Eric Zemmour paint a dire picture:
The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroskepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:
I do not agree with Mark Leonard that far-right relations with the EU are an example of the centrification of the far-right, it rather represents a change in strategy.
I've seen it asked here, what would be the pathway for political or cultural victory of the radical right? This is it- these energies being transformed into a positive and ambitious political project that surfs the wave of globalization and European integration. In hindsight it seems like such a bad strategy for the far right to advocate stepping away from a project like this, and the failure of Brexit to produce any meaningful change is, along with Trumpism, proof of the failure of petty nationalistic populism. If you blame the EU for immigration you don't leave the EU, you go for European parliament.
Journalists have spent many years hand-wringing over the Euroskepticism being influenced by right-wing politics, but I think they will find the prospect of the EU being reformed by a pro-EU radical right to be much more worrisome- and effective at bringing real change.
Edit: Police Unions are also describing the situation as dire:
The fundamental issue that the EU had in England was that it lacked legitimacy. What's more, it never attempted to build any legitimacy, it always held the England in disdain. Therfore English populists (and the far right) would rage against a government that they felt was imposed on them. Notably, pro EU people in England don't express themselves in favour of the EU, but against England. You would find it difficult to find one who could name the European commissioner.
Continentals don't have that issue. The EU was started, for Germany, to allow themselves back into the European community, for France, to rebuild and continue the French power in Europe stretching back centuries, and for the Netherlands, Belgium, etc, to stop (excessive) domination by another country.
It makes sense that European populism and far right movements would fit more neatly into the European Union.
This is dubious - there was a 2/3 supermajority for membership in the 1975 referendum, and zero sign of meaningful public support for changing this until UKIP get 16% of the vote on a 38% turnout in the 2004 European Parliament elections. Eurosceptic parties do embarassingly badly in Westminster elections until 2015, by which time UKIP have learned that they need to headline a populist domestic programme - Brexit is relegated to an appendix in their <a href = "https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ukipdev/pages/1103/attachments/original/1429295050/UKIPManifesto2015.pdf"manifesto.
This is simply false. It is true that "I see myself as more British than English" is the best predictor of remain-voting (better than age or education) and that the patriotic section of the pro-EU movement used British rather than English symbols. But the anti-patriotism wing of the British left is anti-British (mostly anti-Empire) at least as much as it is anti-English. The only people who are noisily anti-English in British politics are the SNP.
The main reason why pro-EU people in the UK are pro-EU is that we believe (correctly) that EU membership is in the national interest - Dominic Cummings' focus groups confirmed this. Our support for the EU is a fundamentally pro-British position. (And therefore, indirectly, pro-English). There is a minority of fanatical pro-Europeans who would support EU membership if it wasn't in the national interest - they express this support by waving the EU flag and singing the Ode to Joy, not through being anti-English (which, as I have said, would just make them look like angry Scots).
The driving force behind right-populism in the UK is (similarly to other countries) a combination of:
General Boomer nostalgia
Vibes-based beefs about the economy, which mostly appeal to a generation of pensioners who are nevertheless enjoying an unprecedented level of affluence in retirement.
Opposition to Muslim immigration, which has very little to do with the EU.
The fact that this expressed itself through opposition to the EU, rather than opposition to the UK domestic policies which caused the problems, is a mistake on the part of right-populist voters - the Brexit we are getting is, as promised by the Johnson wing of the Tories, leading to increases in non-EU legal migration and is also leading to increases in illegal migration. And the Brexit-supporting faction of the Conservative party that supported Johnson, although not Johnson himself, are committed to the "Thatcherite" domestic-policy agenda that is what the people beefing about the economy are beefing against. So the interesting question is why the nascent right-populist movement in the UK self-sabotaged by focussing on Brexit. The question of why right-populists in the rest of the EU are not making the same mistake is easy - because they can see what happened in the UK.
Some of this is bottom-up (the age group that is most susceptible to right-populism is also the cohort group that has always been the most anti-EU, going back to the 1975 referendum). But a lot of it is top-down:
Pre-Farage, Euroscepticism is mostly a libertarian-adjacent project which although deeply unpopular with the voters, is well-funded and backed to the hilt by powerful foreign-owned media. So the right-populist movement that looks most likely to deliver Brexit and then cuck (i.e. UKIP vs the BNP/EDL/English Democrats) is the one that gets the cash and favourable media coverage. And even the existence of this movement is somewhat contingent - if Margaret Thatcher's senile dementia progresses differently then the bizarre idea that the true Thatcherite position on the EU is the direct opposite of Margaret Thatcher's approach to the EEC as Prime Minister may not get off the ground.
Cameron promises the Brexit referendum because of internal Conservative party politics, not because of any public pressure for it. (Remember how pathetic UKIP are in Westminster elections). FWIW Cummings says that promising the referendum did not help the Tories in the 2015 election, mostly because the promise was not believed.
If you look at the leave campaign messaging, both Vote Leave (Cummings) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for Muslim immigration a core part of their campaign. Vote Leave mostly do this using the "Turkey is joining the EU" lie - which only sticks because Cameron personally supported Turkish EU membership back in the pre-Erdogan era when it was a live political issue. Farage focusses on the 2015 Mediterranean migrant crisis (which was technically Merkel's fault, not the EUs, but the politics didn't reflect this) - which is taking advantage of a piece of good luck. But critically, neither campaign makes migration of EU citizens a core issue, because opposing the immigration of hard-working law-abiding culturally-Christian immigrants was not a vote winner.
The EEC and the EU are not the same thing. 2004 was the year Blair opened the borders to Eastern Europe which had a major effect on the lives of the English working class.
Does a 38% turnout not indicate a lack of legitimacy?
I'm not sure i've ever met anybody who is pratriotic and Pro-EU.
I would argue new labour were fairly anti-English.
Agreed, up until the the EU allowed millions of people to march in through schengen.
First of all, the reputation of the Poles and other Eastern Europeans as hard working the is completely overblown and is a good indication that they have never worked in industry in England. Anecdotally, the major difference between a Polish forklift driver and an English one is the Polish ones don't look back when they're reversing. And when you get to the other Europeans (Romanians, Bulgarians, etc), trying to get any work out of them at all is difficult, often they will pretend they don't speak English, even when you have had a conversation with them before.
Second of all, law abiding? ehhhh, maybe. They don't tend to commit too much violent crime, and most of it is "mutual combat".
Third of all, White working class people don't care if the people who are replacing them are culturally Christian.
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