In 1989, when the 'foulard' controversy first arose in France, the bicentennial celebrations of the revolution provided a political, intellectual and moral context for those who wanted to suppress the wearing of the Muslim headscarf. Ernest Cheniere, the headmaster who precipitated the row by expelling three Muslim girls for refusing to remove the garment, justified his decision in terms of a need to defend the republican principle of laïcité, the separation of civil and religious affairs. These girls were not poor students, not did they have disciplinary issues. They simply insisted on wearing their headscarfs. But according to Cheniere, this was a form of proselytism inimical to the Republican tradition, consecrated in a 1905 law establishing the separation of church and state. In fact, he later claimed, the wearing of such garments was part of an "insidious jihad". Sizeable sections of the left intelligenstia supported his claim, as when philosophers writing in the left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur asserted that since the school was the foundation of the Republic, the destruction of the school (by admitting the wearing of religious garments) would undermine the values upon which the nation was built.

The Conseil d'Etat ruled against Cheniere and there were numerous legal challenges. But Cheniere was not just any headmaster. He was a headmaster with political ambitions that went beyond who did what with the petty cash tin. In 1994, as an elected deputy for the department of Oise, representing the right-wing Raillement pour la Republique, he raised the issue again, launching a bill to ban all 'ostentatious' religious clothing. This failed at the time, but it is notable that such was the language used to justify later restrictions aimed at Muslims. In 2003, after Chirac had been elected in a presidential contest between himself and Jean Marie Le Pen, it was Socialist deputy Jack Lang who would bring it up again. Sarkozy was the interior minister at the time. A committee was convened to consider banning conspicuous religious garments in the schools.

The feminist writer Joan Wallach Scott, discussing the affair in The Politics of the Veil, notes that it was at this point that the media focused on the story of two girls, the Levy sisters, who had converted to Islam and chose to wear the hijab. What was interesting was that they were under no social pressure to convert. Their parents were atheists, and the father didn't approve of their conversion. But, seeing the hysterical media response, he suggested that his children might decide for themselves if they wanted to abandon their faith. He expressed astonishment at the attitude of the 'Ayatollahs of secularism' who wanted to boss his kids about. That this was the chosen symbol for the media campaign was telling. It would seem to indicate something about the complexities of faith, and of identity. It would seem to tell against the simplistic wisdom according to which the 'foulard' (or 'le voile' as it was increasingly called) is imposed by a patriarchical family. It certainly doesn't support the spurious racist conspiracy theory that Islamist troublemakers are simply using the garment to create "Muslim ghettos" and advance a state of conflict with "the West". But that isn't how it was received, and the ensuing debate corroborated the ultimate decision to ban the headscarf in French schools - a net loss for personal liberty, and for secularism at that, which was cheered as much by the far left as by the far right. It didn't maintain the state's neutrality as regards religion; it essentially said that Islam is incompatible with the Republic. It increased the state's interference in personal affairs. The justification for such interference was that the headscarf was too conspicuous a symbol of Islam, and therefore a kind of proselytism - not just for Islam, it was claimed, but for jihad. As Scott puts it, the garments are seen as "enemy flags" in the Republic.

This kind of 'laïcité' is therefore a curiosity. A particularistic universalism; an aspect of exclusionary nationalism that supposed internationalist embrace; a form of reaction and authoritarianism that some revolutionaries are willing to support; a harrassment of women of colour that so-called feminists endorse, etc etc. That it takes as its cue the legacy of Jules Ferry and the Third Republic - the high tide of French colonialism, the civilizing mission and kulturkampf in Northern Africa - is to be expected. Today's civilising mission is directed just as much against the indigenes.

It's worth noting that as this discussion has been reheated again and again, some British liberals and conservatives have looked across the Channel with envy. That such low politics, such vileness and stupidity, could be expressed in such grandiose language is a prospect that leaves these people breathless. Thus, from the liberals, Tories and 'decents' to the most reactionary elements in British politics, Sarkozy's broadside against the burqa has been a ralling cry over the last week or so. Now, Sarkozy was only last year on speaking terms with the Roman patriarch and floating the idea of "laïcité positive" in which religion might re-enter the public sphere. He was talking about his Christianity and his godliness as though he were the American that he obviously wants to be. But he is also someone who made his name with inflammatory attacks on Muslims in the banlieues back in 2005, which he promised to "karsherise". He knows perfectly well that from Le Pen to the left-republicans, there is a broad coalition of French voters that is deeply hostile to Islam. So, here he is baiting the burqa. And here we are, surrounded by the dim and the devious who cheer him on. And, as a speaker at the recent launch of 'Kafa' - a campaign against Islamophobia - noted, such racism toward Muslims is the cutting edge behind which every other form of racism follows. Islamophobia is correlated in the polls to other kinds of prejudice such as hostility toward asylum seekers and 'economic migrants'. The BNP are certainly using it in this way, and their supporters and voters largely seem to get this. The people who don't get it, or don't want to get it, are those who think you can flirt with 'progressive' Muslim-bashing today and not wake up with a more racist and fundamentally nasty society tomorrow.

Oh, I know, this is so last week. It's over already. The twittering has stopped, the protesters have been beaten into retreat, the Youtube videos aren't being uploaded at the same frequency. This week is all about celebrities turned zombie. Still, indulge me for a moment. This image of Ahmadi the pious populist, I think, arises in part from a certain spectacle positioning. After all, the corporate media find it difficult to construe someone as an enemy without also implying that they are some kind of 'commie', one of those heretics who rejects the sacred wisdom of property rights, free markets etc. The election commentary, with its condescending subtexts about Ahmadinejad's ability to win over the ignorant poor by tossing sacks of potatoes their way, surely reflected this. And anyway, it is not within the media's repertoire to explain the underlying divisions in Iran's ruling bloc, or to give anything but a crayola account of the class politics of elections. Partly, I suspect, such crude plot devices is what drove Juan Cole to dismiss the issue of class in his own analysis. Some belated analysis worth paying attention to, then, includes this discussion of labour under Ahmadinejad; this discussion of privatization and accumulation in Iran; and this useful discussion of the elections from the Middle East Research and Information Project.

The main point that arises, I think, is that the division that has been posited between a kind of socially conservative resource populism on the one hand, and a socially liberal austerity programme on the other, is not adequate. The more that comes out about the elections, the more it is clear that they exposed a raging war in the ruling class over political ascendancy and property, with relatively minor differences on other matters exaggerated. The second point is that the right-wing bloc behind Ahmadinejad has tended to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify the most naked transfer of wealth from the public sphere to capital, particularly to more influential players in the bazaari class and state-affiliated capitalists. They shake their fists at Washington just as they're about to go further toward neoliberalism than even the IMF proposed. And they justify it by referring to the need to break the sanctions imposed by Washington. This policy is obviously designed not to enrich the poor or sustain them in the long term, or strengthen their bargaining power as workers, but specifically to reduce their long-term wealth and purchasing power by redirecting a larger portion of socially produced wealth to a specific sector of the capitalist class. Ehsani et al are far too soft on Mousavi in their discussion (Ehsani called Mousavi's programme 'social democratic' on a mailing list, which I think is about as credible as Hamid Dabashi's claim that the man was a hardline socialist). This appears to stem from their assessment that the faction backing Ahmadinejad are uniquely dangerous and authoritarian, posing far greater dangers to democracy and labour than even the crooked neoliberals supported by Rafsanjani. Their tone may be unduly alarmist, and their approach to the elections is not one I share, but it is hard to argue with the overall analysis.

Every now and again, I hear about a new website offering free e-books. You will forgive me for the fact that, without fail, I first scour the site anxiously to see if someone has uploaded my book. This is pure vanity on my part. No one would waste their time, and if they did I should likely have the person flayed and generously doused in salt and vinegar before forcing them to appear on Britain's Got Talent. Well, I'd probably meditate on that image before telling myself to get a grip. In fact, I should be flattered, not pathetically worried about whatever marginal (and probably non-existent) loss of sales resulted. But this thought arises because of the growing profile of devices like 'Kindle' and other pda-like e-book-reading technology. We are told, somewhat pontifically, that the age of the printed book is over. That soon a great portion of our current consumption of wood-producing florae will be finished, resolved and absolved, by a technological fix. I look forward to any innovation that will reduce the clutter about my house, never kind the carbon footprint. But I remain sceptical nonetheless.

Here's the explanandum and explanans. I find myself buying a copy of a book that I know I can read for free as an e-book on, say, Gutenberg or any number of less august websites. This despite the fact that I have decent computer, and a pda device as well. I can re-format the text if I like, add pictures at a stretch, save it as a word document or convert it to pdf. There's a vast array of free open-source software that will enable me, provided I will invest a small amount of time and effort, to do more or less what I like with a document. Yet, I still go and get the Penguin classics edition of Pride and Prejudice rather than take a few moments to download, perfectly legally, a text file of the whole work. Why? John Sutherland has pointed out that the printed novel or book has some technological advantage that e-books and equivalents can't emulate (as yet). Just for example, you can use your opposible thumb to flick back and forth between pages. You can write notes in pencil where you feel like it, underline if you want to, fold page corners to mark a place - all in a very easy, manageable and physically satisfying way. Now, I know you're going to say that these functions can be replicated or simulated in the e-book reader format - true, but far more burdensomely. With a printed book, you can insert yourself anywhere in the text in a split second. You can dip in and out, use the index, find a page number in very speedy systems of reference that actually don't work very well with reader technologies. The tactile aspects of reading which we take for granted just don't seem to be assimilable to the current in-your-face interfaces.

There is also a sense in which the e-book reader profanes what was holy. Once, however much a book was mass produced, and was as commodified as a packet of biscuits or a VHS cassette, all one had to do to bless it with the seal of the author's pure presence and authenticity was to get him to sign it. (I have repeated this operation a few times, and you'd be surprised by how many people are called 'eBay', 'Seventeenpoundsisabitsteep' and 'Justfuckingsignityoutwat' - all Tibetan names, apparently.) Now, I suppose, they'll simply superimpose a scan of the author's signature on a limited range of the downloadable e-books and punt them for 2% more. If that happens, I'm just going to call it a day, loves. Without that occasion for intercourse with the Ordinary People, I'm lost, and so are they. Anyway, the point is, that isn't going to happen, because e-books are mostly crap.

The attempt to drown the protests in rivers of blood have reportedly led to a "massacre" in Baharestan Square, outside the Iranian majles, today. Tens of thousands of basiji reportedly surrounded hundreds of protesters in this small square, and battered them, then opened fire on them. It's not just basiji - multiple reports indicate that young men without uniforms were given batons and let loose. How much of this is true is obviously impossible to tell, but given that dozens have been killed so far, the worst would not be surprising. The regime probably believes it has this situation locked up, for now. And maybe it does: who would dare to guess that protesters will continue to keep putting themselves through this? But the fact of having to resort to this level of brutality is indicative of a state in deep crisis. Police have been nicking protesters and parading them on television with confessions blaming the Western media for leading them astray. This would imply that the Iranian state has roughly the same idea as US neoconservatives - that democracy and protest is somehow the a cultural peculiarity of the 'West', which can only be imposed on Iran from without.

Various statements of solidarity with the protesters are being circulated. The NPA are pledging to join protests to show solidarity with the people and travailleurs of Iran. On the anti-imperialism front, I would draw attention to this statement by Venezuelan socialists. There also is an intervention by Slavoj Zizek, which has been circulated by Iranian academics, and is published here. I don't need to restate my scepticism about Zizek's broader politics, nor do I agree with every last word or emphasis. However, I do think it makes some very important points, perhaps the most important of which is that anyone on the left who doesn't see an emancipatory dimension in the protests is politically defunct. The bloodless lack of enthusiasm for what is manifestly a democratic movement in some of the commentary reflects not anti-imperialist sensibilities so much as political timidity. The key here is universality: these protesters are no different from those who have been beaten or killed in Genoa, in London, in LA, in Athens, and everywhere that the state is challenged by a democratic movement and responds in this way. Their case for solidarity is not diminished by the fact that they live in a society that has been threatened by imperialism. On the contrary, it means we ought to redouble our efforts.

The dilemma faced by commentators of all kinds, not just bloggers, on the Iranian protests can be summarised by a single, annoying portmanteau word: instapunditry. The pressure to take a view prematurely in such a situation can only produce a series of stock responses, either based on CNN filtered news, or speculation from various samizdat-style websites, or material provided by the Iranian media itself. And after all, while these protests had precedent in previous student and workers rebellions, the sheer scale of upheaval had no precedent in the entire history of Islamic Republic. How to relate to that?

It has been possible to be both eloquent and consistent only be relying on an analysis made for a different situation that seems to fit. Thus, right-wing bloggers have tended to interpret the events in terms of the 'colour revolution', involving a relatively smooth transfer of power from a weakened, no longer hegemonic ruling bloc, to a pro-US faction. symbolised by a striking advertising symbol - the purple finger, the green fingers, etc. A few left-wing commentators look at it the same way, but simply reverse the value significations. It is a handy ready-made template, and if it were an accurate reading, then the protesters would have been little more than useful idiots for a comprador elite. But there is little evidence that anything like this is happening. The most we have seen is some bizarre rumours about Israel trying to promote a 'twitter revolution' (probably put about by Twitter, you know). Similarly, prefabricated ideas about Ahmadinejad representing the uneducated poor and Mousavi representing the articulate middle class, have been ubiquitous on all sides. And just the same, they have turned out to be wrong.

The difficulty is amplified by the fact that there doesn't appear to be a clear left-wing pole in this conflict. To try and find that pole, there has been a tendency to feed stereotypes about Ahmadinejad being a firm anti-imperialist and populist, neither of which really bear scrutiny. On the other hand, some have interpreted the reformists and Mousavi in particular as having far more left-wing credentials than they really do. Thus, in a typically interesting and fruitful discussion, Hamid Dabashi claims that Mousavi is universally known as a "hardcore socialist". He is not a socialist, of course. Even when he was on the 'Islamic Left', it would have been a stretch to call him a socialist. Then, he favoured nationalisation and redistribution of wealth, neither of which he supports now. (Of course, back then Mousavi was also co-responsible for quite brutal purges of the left from the government and public institutions, which he may now regret.) But this background is important for mapping out one dimension of the dispute. Since the early 1990s, the 'Islamic Left' that Mousavi represented has tended to retreat to various forms of social liberalism. The catastrophic experience of the Iran-Iraq war, followed by the collapse of the USSR, formed the background to this shift. They also faced increasing difficulty as many of their candidates were struck off the elections lists, and they lost control of the majles to a conservative-centrist coalition. As such, they drifted into the 'reformist' camp, de-emphasised economic statism, and focused more on questions of human rights and democracy. What remains of the Iranian left is almost certainly in the reform movement today.

Another problem with interpretation is that domestic social conflicts interact in a very complex way with imperialist pressure. Thus, even during Rafsanjani's 'pragmatic' reign which sought to improve relations with Europe and the US and expand international trade, Clinton imposed an economic embargo, starting with partial sanctions in 1993, and then a full embargo including on oil production in 1995. Why did he do this? It seems it was partly due to pressure from the pro-Israeli right, which wanted a much more aggresive response to, eg, Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas. This strengthened the position of the Iranian hard right who, because of their basis in the bazaar merchants, weren't particularly interested in opening up to international trade anyway. Even Khatami couldn't get the sanctions released, despite overtures to the US. Not because there weren't forces in American ruling circles interested in talking, but because the stubborn fact is that Iran is not about to abandon its geopolitical interests and those matter far more to the US than any internal liberalisation in Iran.

None of the current elite factions are going to deliver Iran to the US as a client regime, and there would be no popular basis for it - this, by the way, is one reason why they haven't been able to impose a 'colour revolution', and why Bush had to resort to violent forms of interference, sponsoring terror groups and bombings and so on. So, it can't just be assumed that a reformist success would necessarily be in the interests of the US - it depends how those interests are construed, and what the reigning strategy is. For example, it really seems at this point as if both the US right-wing and the Israeli leadership would much rather deal with Ahmadinejad, the better to expedite the case for war. This suggests, not that Ahmadinejad is an effective anti-imperialist, but that he and the conservative leadership backing him are actually rather poor defenders of the country. For the realpolitikers around Obama, I suspect regional stability is more important at the moment than either candidate.

In short, just as the neocons and their 'decent' allies are likely to be disappointed by the result of these protests, especially if they manage a decisive win, so there's no reason for leftists to panic at the prospect of the CIA taking control of the situation and engineering another client-state.

I don't know if this is unprecedented, exactly, but I suspect the intensity of infighting among Iran's rulers is novel. Aside from the arrests of reformists, we have the open targeting of even quite establishment figures, members of the Rafsanjani family and so on. Now, the conservative majles speaker Larijani has said that 'most' Iranians think the election result was fixed. He has been condemning the protesters, but there are now reports that he's expressing 'concern' over the crackdowns. And he is being attacked in what would ordinarily be sympathetic right-wing papers. We've had Montazeri, apparently one of those who exerted a humanising influence on Iran's penal system in the 1980s, denouncing the election results and the attacks on the protesters. We've had Khatami attacking the 'hardliners' and condemning the government for outlawing protests. I don't encourage anyone to put their faith in any of these individuals, but the fact of the shift is significant and bears consideration. The protesters didn't just take advantage of a split; they stuck a big crowbar in it, and pushed. The neocons are trying to take credit for this on the bizarre assumption that the destruction of Iraq belatedly prompted a liberation movement in Iran. A sharp piece by Justin Raimondo points out that it is far more likely that "the Obama effect" (actually, the effect of the US facing defeat in Iraq) allowed Iran's system to open up a bit more, and enabled the establishment to air its differences a bit more openly.

If it was just a split in the ruling class, those who expected the movement to fizzle out would have been right. But so far, despite some premature indications from commentators, there is no sign that they are right. Yesterday's protests apparently spread well beyond Tehran, with this footage purportedly coming from the southern city of Kerman. Despite the ongoing violence of the state, the protesters kept coming out, in new places. Given the extreme brutality of the basiji, it is amazing that the protesters didn't just stop turning out. But it may be that the repressive strategy is blowing back on the state. For, after the murder of Neda Soltani, and the reaction against it, Mousavi seems to feel more confident to make his move. He and other 'reformers' are backing protests over this, apparently despite a government ban - quite unlike previous occasions where they have backed down and allowed protesters to brave the basij militias alone. He now says he is trying to organise a general strike, and is getting some interesting advice from people responding to his Facebook message. But if the protesters had followed his advice and stopped turning out when rallies were declared banned, he would not now be in a position to talk about a general strike. Unconfirmed reports on The Guardian have suggested that 30% of workers in Iran are already striking - which, if true, would be a phenomenal rebuke to the government, which threatened that anyone who didn't turn up for work would be fired. Try sacking 30% of the workforce.

With the protesters, or with the state? The charge of some on the left is that by backing the protesters, one is de facto drafted into the camp of the crooked neoliberals behind Mousavi's campaign. Moreover, it is claimed, since there has been no proof as yet of an electoral fraud, it is also to support a movement that rejects the popular will. Such is the gist of the post that appears immediately below this one and, though I don't think the manner of putting this argument reflects well on those who are making it, this does need to be discussed. We admit that there can be no conclusive verdict on fraud in the Iranian elections short of a full and impartial investigation conducted by the Islamic Republic itself. That such an investigation is not forthcoming, and that the only concession in this direction was prompted by the protests, suggests that the interests of veracity in this matter are best served by the popular revolts we have seen. And if we decline to join those who are absolutely convinced that fraud was perpetrated, until matters become far more clear than they presently are, we equally refuse to align with those who take the contrary position as an article of faith.

The truth is, almost everything we are hearing on this topic from either side of the argument is hearsay and speculation. We are told that a poll predicted the results, though it seems it didn't, and was at any rate taken before the campaign had really begun. We are told that secret pre-election polling by the Iranian government predicted a massive win for Mousavi, though we have no way of telling how true this is, any more than we can verify the document circulating that purports to be a letter to Khamenei from the interior ministry confirming Mousavi's win. We are told that many of the regional results are hard to credit, but also that any statistical analysis at this point is inconclusive. A preliminary analysis by a team led by Iranian historian Ali Ansari for Chatham House suggests that in two provinces, the supposed turnout was higher than 100%. The report asserts that to believe the results we have to make improbable assumptions about Ahmadinejad's support. In many areas, he gained not only all conservative votes, all new votes, and all centrist votes but additionally almost half of previously reformist voters. Again, highly suggestive (and I do recommend a thorough reading of the document), but not conclusive proof. One could go on - secret polls, open polls, documents, pre-election violence, alleged irregularities, etc. Plenty of grounds for concern, nothing conclusive. Still, uncertain about the status of the recent elections, we are surely quite capable of discerning the grievances that led people - perhaps an overwhelming majority, we don't know - to support the Mousavi candidacy, and which now leads them to risk their physical integrity by taking to the streets even after veiled threats from Khamenei.

What do the protesters want? We know what Mousavi wants. There is no doubt that Mousavi stands for neoliberal economic policies, while also offering some political liberalisation to inspire progressive supporters. Mousavi, who bore substantial political responsibility for pushing through the nationalisation programme in the 1980s, now supports further privatization, and is in favour of constitutional amendments to make this easier. We also know that while Ahmadinejad initially expressed reservations about the agenda of liberalising state enterprises, one of his major planks of reform during his term was the proposal to privatise 80% of state assets, half of the shares of which were to be distributed through the stock market, and half to be distributed to those with low incomes. According to Kaveh Ehsani, despite the decision to distribute shares to the poor, the likely result is the radical reconstitution of wealth and political power on the Russian model post-1990. In 2007, under Ahmadinejad, the scale of privatization reached a record high, with total sales of $5bn. So, the main difference between the candidates on this question has been over the nature and pace of the reforms. It is also true that Mousavi wants to rein in the expansionary spending policies that have characterised Ahmadinejad's government, in a bid to cut inflation. It has been a complaint of some analysts that Ahmadinejad's spending amounts to 'bribery', and of his internal critics that it was unsustainable splurging that led to stagnant growth and such high inflation rates that any benefit to the poor from such spending was immediately negated. In truth, what Ahmadinejad's development projects have entailed mainly enriching those sectors of Iranian capital most closely imbricated with the state. His opponents think it more pragmatic to divert those oil profits into developing a more sizeable private sector. That is the basis of this division.

Ahmadinejad's clientelism obviously is not genuine defence of working class interests, nor has it been particularly effective as palliation. Apart from the fact that the suppression of trade unionism does tend to somewhat diminish the bargaining power of labour a bit, the redistribution hasn't really benefited Ahmadinejad's supposed supporters in the rural poor whose incomes have stagnated. Absolute poverty has not declined under Ahmadinejad, although it did under previous administrations - even under the neoliberal Khatami - while relative poverty has certainly increased. (It's possible that a slight change in inequality in 2007 favours Ahmadinejad's regime, but equally possible that the change is nothing to do with Ahmadinejad's policies, any more than the problems caused by high oil prices are necessarily his fault). Overall, there is little to suggest that workers or even the very poor have a deep material interest in electing Ahmadinejad, any more than his opponent.

Does this mean that the protesters, or those who voted for Mousavi, wanted a neoliberal strategy rather than the conservative 'populism' of Ahmadinejad? Does that range of options exhaust the range of popular opinion? There has been an assumption thus far that Ahmadinejad does well among the poor and working classes, while Mousavi's supporters are 'middle class'. But one begins to see a problem with such terms as soon as you investigate what is meant by 'middle class'. According to this analyst, 46% of the Iranian population is now middle class - but he defines "the middle class as being in a household with at least $10 per person per day expenditures (PPP dollars) and with at least a basic education (primary)." Now, if this reflects the common way in which the term is used, then marxists should be saying that what is actually happening is that large sectors of the working class backed the Mousavi camp. Indeed, we have already seen the most politicised and organised sectors in the trade union movement also back the protesters (they declined for obvious reasons to back any one candidate). So, at the very least, the lazy assumptions about the class basis of the vote and of the protests merit re-examination. In fact, the same analyst argues that a substantial layer of this supposed middle class vote comprises young unemployed people. If you're unemployed, by my book, you probably shouldn't be called 'middle class'. As far as this layer goes, we're talking about young, educated workers who are suffering in the economy and who lack the democratic right to do anything about their situation. They see no future from themselves in the current set-up. That is certainly a class grievance, but it can hardly be reduced to a petulant middle class cultural complaint - it's not the Gucci crowd, because you can't buy Guccis on $10 a day. While we appreciate the scepticism that some people entertain about these protests, and understand the reasons for this, the condescending claims and gratuitously nasty language about them does not bear examination. It actually redounds to the massive discredit of those using such rhetoric when the protesters are being murdered in the streets, with far less money and social power to their being than any of those who are deriding them as yuppies.

Further, from all that we are able to glean about the protests and their demands, the focus is overwhelmingly on changing the undemocratic nature of the Iranian state, going much further in their demands than Mousavi or his elite backers are prepared to go - abolishing the apparatus of repression, stopping the death penalty, stopping political imprisonments, democratising the state, abolishing the Council of Guardians. All these are the demands that we have seen repeated during this period, and none of them were adocated by Mousavi. The idea that the protests are just a flash mob for the crooked neoliberal sector of the elite is unsustainable. The question of whether, in practise, all these protests do is strengthen one faction of the ruling class will be decided to a large extent by the protesters themselves. There is a huge generational shift underlying these protests, and that means that even if the present wave were to fizzle out - which I don't think is likely - it is likely to recur in even more militant forms. So, the question is whether the protesters can take the independence in ideas and action that they have already exhibited and turn it into lasting movement. It is true that the left should have no illusions about this. There is no necessary reason why such a movement will take on a leftist hue. It hasn't so far. Only by engaging in the movement could the left hope to shift it in that direction. Far more important, however, is that the democratic demands and the bravery of those pushing for such changes, are worthy of support and solidarity in themselves. It isn't good enough to say that because Mousavi is a neoliberal, therefore the protests deserve no support. It isn't good enough to sniffily denounce the 'western left' on behalf of the supposedly univocal figure of the Iranian worker, the poor, or - as in the post below - Muslims. Especially since Muslims, the Iranian working class, many poor Iranians, can not be counted on as allies of either Ahmadinejad or the Iranian state.

Now, you might be thinking, "bigotry in Belfast? Well, I never!" True, the attacks on Romanians earlier this week come after years of assaults and intimidation of Chinese workers which reached a bloody crescendo in 2003 and 2004. And it follows attacks on Polish workers earlier this year, in which Unionist politicians tried to cover up the extent of what was happening. Actually, Unionist politicians like Sammy Wilson - one of the few people in the world who really does have a face like a well-smacked arse - have been openly encouraging discrimination against migrant workers. But I do consider it significant that the attackers were chanting BNP and Combat-18 slogans as they did this. Not because there's a powerful Nazi organisation in Ulster, but it does look as if Northern Ireland's disproportionate number of violent young bigots have been heartened by the recent success of fascism in the mainland. Eamonn McCann, noting the lack of BNP presence in the areas affected, suggests that the attackers are "invoking an established brand rather than acting at the instigation of an organisation". (Mind you, it seems the BNP have just established their national call centre in Dundonald, and presumably intend to try and build a little family of fascists in the area: can't you just hear the pitter-patter of tiny goosesteeps?)

Over at Splintered Sunrise, I see that the UDA boss is ventilating over the BNP's malevolent influence, desperately trying to deflect any blame that might be placed on his right-wing paramilitary outfit: "It seems that what is exercising Hard Bap is the possibility that the UDA’s good name might be besmirched by commentators linking it with the BNP. Which sort of says something about Nick Griffin’s push for respectability." This won't fly, of course. Studies have shown that 90% of racist crime in Northern Ireland takes place in Loyalist areas. It may not be that the UDA are actually encouraging such attacks, but there is a powerful continuity in the methods of violence and intimidation, and the bigotry underwriting them. Moreover, it seems that some other things don't change either: most of Northern Ireland's minorities consider the Police Service of Northern Ireland (née RUC) to be institutionally racist. Well, of course it is. It is the still largely unreconstructed authority of an occupying power that has spent decades terrorising Catholic estates. On top of that, the Crown Prosecution Service only seems to try a fraction of the reported cases of racist violence. So, if you're being driven out of your home by some jumped up Rangers fans with an admiration for the fascist way of doing things, you can't rely on the police, and you can't rely on the courts. And as for the Assembly, they've done fuck all about it for years, despite having pledged to do so. (The lack of consideration given to migrants in policymaking is discussed in this lengthy and useful report [pdf]). The efforts of solidarity campaigners is all that is coming down the pipeline.

McCann argues that the root of this is more than a deflection of older forms of sectarian violence, though, and I think this is crucial:

It is not to excuse the assaults to point to the fact that the Protestant working class, and its young people in particular, have been the main losers from change in Northern Ireland. It's not that they have taken a hit that their equivalents on the Catholic side have not also suffered. Whatever your religion, the poorer you are here the more likely you are to have not benefited at all from the agreement hailed around the world as ushering in a peace based on mutual tolerance. It's no accident that the Real IRA draws its support almost exclusively from the least well-off in the Catholic community.

The snarling young men who forced the Romanian families out have the additional grievance that the Protestant community's sense of itself as living in "their" state has been shattered by the developments symbolised by Sinn Féin sitting snugly in government with the DUP. That none of them can remember the glory days of untrammelled unionist rule matters little. They feel – and it's a feeling they know is endorsed and welcomed by many nationalists – that Catholics are on the way up, Protestants on the way down.

I know that complaint very well. One used to hear quite a bit (from Protestants) in the 1990s, that while once it was the Catholics who were being victimised, now it's the poor Prods. The neoliberal consensus reinforces this sense of grievance by reducing the sphere of legitimate arguments about public spending and resources to sectarian ones: not, will we close this hospital, but will this hospital be closed in a Protestant, or a Catholic area. This entails McCann's conclusion that, while it is necessary to confront these thugs - physically, if it comes to that - it is also essential to build the kind of radical anti-neoliberal left that has just done so splendidly well in the south of Ireland.

It was a commonplace in the build-up to the elections that Ahmadinejad would hold the working class vote. This had been the case in 2005, and it was assumed it would be the case in 2009. The reason given was that Ahmadinejad had supported the working class with various benefits paid for from oil profits. And of course he is himself a working class kid made good, as it were: the son of a blacksmith who got himself a PhD, joined the right-wing in the revolution, and eventually became president. Finally, it was inferred that the workers were socially conservative and had little time for middle class people who wanted more liberal legislation. This picture, while touching on important truths, is also rather patronising in its assumption that the workers only care about bread and butter issues and that they tend toward sullen bigotry when it comes to issues of democracy and womens' rights.

The electoral coalition around Mousavi, by contrast, was seen to be middle-class, based disproportionately among professionals and students, with the loot provided by ruling class interests. (As one dyspeptic analyst called it, the "Gucci crowd" in alliance with Iranian capitalists). Mousavi was pushing an austerity agenda, with privatization and counter-inflationary measures at its core. To broaden his appeal, therefore, he touched on the progressive concerns of a layer of the population which has had enough of the basij militias and the media clampdowns and the political prisoners. He didn't actually offer much reform, but all was in the branding. (It is telling that, in much of the Anglophone media coverage, these concerns are emblematized by the status of the chador - as if the major issue is the right to expose one's hair). So, when these protests began, it seemed a reasonable assumption that it was overwhelmingly a middle class revolt - perhaps not for neoliberalism as such, but against what they saw as an electoral fix-up and the obviously undemocratic system behind it. If Mousavi's base was so middle class, however, it would be difficult to see how he could possibly have been in the lead. If the protest movement were exclusively middle class, it probably couldn't win, and could be expected to dissipate.

Some liberal analysts disputed the idea that Ahmadinejad had decisively won the working class vote. Robert Dreyfuss, reporting from Tehran, claimed that it was almost impossible to find a supporter of Ahmadinejad even in the poorer areas. Juan Cole, disputing the primacy of class in interpreting Iranian elections, pointed out that neoliberal reformers such as Khatami had won 70% of the vote in 1997, and then over 78% in 2001. Khatami obviously had to win support far beyond his business supporters. This did not prove that the reformers had a majority in 2009, of course - we aren't going to get proof, whatever the truth of the matter is - but it does mean that caution is called for in the assumptions that we make. Reza Fiyouzat makes what seems to be to be a far more compelling point, though: "The most class-conscious, the most politically active of the Iranian working classes, are by far the most anti-government. How do we know this? We know this because they invariably end up in jail." Well, quite.

The issue of class is important here, not because the workers are angels with whom we may not ever differ, but because their organised power is necessary to make even these democratic demands effective. Even if the protesters were all middle class, I would want them to win. Truth be told, I would want them to win even more than they bargained for - to win so comprehensively that they gave a shot in the arm to the working class and facilitated their rapid self-organisation outside of the Islamic Labour Council approved unions. Never mind a general strike: what is urgently needed is the reappearance of the shoras. And we have seen the riots spread chaotically to working class areas of Isfahan (see also), where the protesters drove out the police, and the southern city of Yazd. The protests have spread to workers districts in southern Tehran. Reports of working class turnout are appearing, albeit infrequently, in some of the English-language press.

There is an understandable tendency to think of this upheaval in terms of the 'colour revolutions'. I have even seen reports quoting figures from the March 14th movement attempting to associate themselves with the revolt. It's fatuous on their part, since there is clearly a lot more going on here than just another 'Cedar Revolution', with the upper and middle classes (and their much abused Syrian maids) turning out to be admired by photographers. The demonstrations have not been restricted to middle class areas or richer parts of Tehran. They have not been orchestrated set-piece protests with glory days in the sun and an atmosphere borrowed from a Coca-Cola commercial. At any rate, what the self-styled cedar revolutionaries typically neglect to mention is that Hezbollah's protests were far bigger than theirs. That isn't the case in Iran, where Ahmadinejad's supporters have plainly been outnumbered by far more militant protests.

The campaign in defence of the SOAS cleaners has issued a statement asking people to help out. The following is a list of things you can personally do (see the update at the end of the post):

1. Sign the online petition: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/28557.html


2. We have only hours to get the message to Alan Johnson & Phil Woolas, who have the power to intervene and stop the deportations. Please sign it, or write your own similar letter, and circulate to as many people who will do the same.

You can:
email: johnsona@parliament.uk
Subject: For the urgent attention of Alan Johnson

Email: woolasp@parliament.uk
Subject: For the urgent attention of Phil Woolas

Post the letter to:

Home Office
Direct Communications Unit
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF

Telephone:
020 7035 4848 (09:00-17:00 Mon-Fri). Fax: 020 7035 474

Address:
Date:

To Rt Honourable Minister of State, Phil Woolas
or
To Rt Honourable Home sectary, Alan Johnson

We are writing to ask you to grant leave to remain, with the right to work, to the SOAS cleaners, Marina Silva, who has claimed asylum and Rosa de Perez who are currently being held in Yarlswood detention centre. We are deeply concerned that five of their colleagues were deported within 48 hours of the raids, without any chance to put their case for being granted the right to stay and in come cases breaking up family relationships.

Marina and Rosa are two of the nine cleaners who were arrested in a raid by around 40 officers of the Border Agency on Friday 12th June 2009, on campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). They are charged with overstaying visas—but both women have had good reasons to have entered the UK and an urgent need to work to support themselves and their families. Both have worked hard for ISS, a company which is notorious for exploiting migrant labour, for low wages.

Marina is sixty three years old. She is from Bolovia and her husband was killed in an honour killing after which she was threatened and harassed until she was forced to leave her home. She has been living in the UK for several years and has made a life here. She is ill and was due a hospital appointment on the day of the raid. She has now made an application to stay to be safe and to live in dignity in the UK. These women are not criminals, they are hard working people on low pay who have worked to pay their bills and support their family in the dirty and undignified job as a cleaner. We believe that they should not be treated as criminals.

While Rosa has not sought to resist removal, she will be returned to extreme poverty in Nicaragua and will be unable to support her family—having four children who in the economic crisis of her home country have no other means of support. She will be unemployed when returned. She is in urgent need of the compassion to allow her, now she is here, the ability to stay and to work to support her children and we would ask for a work permit to allow her to continue to work, but in dignity.

While we recognize that their overstay was unlawful, the manner of their detainment at SOAS was shockingly aggressive, disproportionate, deceiving and unnecessary. The cleaning company which employs the cleaners, ISS, had collaborated with the UK Border Agency to arrest the workers through the pretence of an “emergency staff meeting” at 6.30am on Friday 12th June. Once 40 officers, dressed in riot gear, were hidden around the meeting and managers barred exit during the first part of the meeting before the immigration officers pounced on workers. The SOAS campus was sealed off while workers were locked in a room, and then questioned one by one in an adjacent room. Union representatives trying to bring water and aid to their members—including a woman more than six months pregnant—were denied access and not allowed to provide any legal aid for their members, who should have had the right to a solicitor.

We are very concerned about these workers who were employed by ISS, a company which had just been forced to grant union recognition and to pay the London Living Wage to its cleaners working in SOAS. We are especially concerned that the raid took place on the very morning on which cleaners were to rally in support of their sacked UNISON trade union branch chair, who was also an ISS employee. Rosa and Maria are just two of the thousands of migrant workers, refugee and asylum seekers who make a valuable contribution to our society. Like so many who work unsocial hours for low pay, they are making a valuable contribution to society, and they should not be punished and hunted like criminals for this.

We are deeply concerned at what appears to be BIA officials being used to discipline workers in the process of unionising and appeal for permission to stay and work to be granted to the SOAS workers. All of these people are working and supporting themselves as well as paying taxes and national insurance contributions. You will be aware of the research which shows the greater than average economic contribution of working migrants who are single and without dependents in the UK.

We therefore urge you to:

--Release Marina and Rosa on bail immediately and give consideration to our appeal for a grant of leave to remain to these workers.

-- In Marina’s case to grant humanitarian protection. In Rosa’s case to grant a work visa.

--to allow those SOAS cleaners who have already been deported to renter the country for reasons of family reunion and to work.

--to make clear that no person should be raided and held in such a way in the future, without water, medicine or the right to be seen by representatives wishing to provide legal assistance.

We would welcome an urgent response as these workers have only hours before removal directions. We look forward to hearing from you on the matters we have raised above.

Yours sincerely,

Etc.

Hamid Dabashi has an interesting article on the protests in Iran. He points out that, whatever the truth on the elections, the 'fix' has become a 'social fact' inasmuch as millions of Iranians are staking their lives on that very belief. He also pointedly satirises Orientalist assumptions of the Reading-Lolita-in-Tehran variety, and takes the opportunity to remind people that solidarity, not 'democracy promotion', is what is required.

Unfortunately, the excitement about the possibility of a mass civil disobedience campaign arising does lead to an astonishing final sentence - the idea that Mousavi could be a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King beggars belief. In fact, the more one learns about Mousavi, the more unsavoury he seems, and the more it bcomes clear that his candidacy is essentially an enterprise of the plutocratic Rafsanjani family. And, as the Angry Arab has pointed out, when Mousavi was prime minister the Iranian state was much more repressive than it is now. In fact, it's hard to go along with Dabashi's wholehearted support for the 'reformists' who have yet to demonstrate that they are worthy of leadership of such a movement as this.

The movement is still in its earlier stages, there is an interesting document circulating that purports to be a 'manifesto' of the Iranian opposition. I don't know how reliable this is: one has to make allowances for the possibility of it being a forgery, or e-mail spam, or some NED bureaucrat's wet dream. Still, it does seem to summarise the main thrust of the protests - put Mousavi in charge, review the constitution, free political prisoners and disband the apparatus of repression. If the main goals are to be achieved, it looks as if the movement will have to move way beyond Mousavi in ideas and practise. If the protest movement were to die down following a recount in which Mousavi won, the result would probably be a few blunted reforms coupled with a more aggressive neoliberal policy. If a dozen deaths are to mean anything, the movement must surely acquire an independent organisational backbone to sustain it when the inevitable disappointments come.

I think it's a consensus on the liberal-left in the US and UK that the Iranian elections were fixed. If they are right, we are watching a bloodless coup turn into a bloody one, as protesters have been beaten and are now being shot at and killed by cops. One of Mousavi's supporters alleges he was told that a coup was coming. If they are not right, we are still faced with a state busily beating and killing the opposition. The Iranian state is still detaining 'reformist' MPs, censoring newspapers, shutting down access to social networking sites (although people are still finding ways to Twitter), and behaving as if for all the world it had every reason to act guiltily. It is not inherently implausible that Ahmadinejad got 63% of the vote, and it has to be shown that there was a fix. The fact that Ahmadinejad used state oil revenues to fund programmes for the poor can be approved or derided, but it arguably gave large numbers of people an interest in voting for Ahmadinejad against his more explicitly neoliberal rival. It gave him a base among some of the working class and bazaaris. Still, it is hardly implausible either that some vote-rigging went on, if only to make the win decisive enough to avoid a run-off.

So, the first question that occurs is, why should the ballots be rigged? This is skated over in a lot of the commentary as if the answer were obvious - Mousavi advocated reform, duh! However, Mousavi is hardly a dangerous candidate for the Iranian ruling class: rather, he represents a powerful faction of it. True, he was once on the 'Islamic Left' back in the 1980s, and it was due to the support of the left-leaning majles that he was made prime minister against Khomeini's preferences. Today, however, he is a centrist allied to the 'Modern Right'. His solutions to Iran's problems of accumulation and development are impeccably neoliberal. This is why he got the backing of the old crook, cynic, capitalist and Iran-Contra arms dealer, Hashem Rafsanjani. He supports privatization, and wants to reform Article 44 to assist the process. He supports strong counter-inflationary policies. Of course, he would like to take a slightly less 'hard line' with respect to the US. Indeed, like other would-be 'reform' candidates, his campaign tried to channel Obama - with some success since his wife, who spearheaded some important reforms in the late 1980s, was cast as the Michelle Obama of the campaign. Still, he isn't an outsider by any means. His candidacy wasn't struck off, while those that offend the Council of Guardians usually are. He wasn't excluded from the debates, as far as I can find out. He wasn't excluded from the polls, some of which put him ahead, and some behind. Why should he have suddenly become so dangerous that the Iranian state, or powerful sectors within it, would risk a stupid fix? The answer could only be that by tapping a popular demands for reforms, the candidacy might have unleashed a movement that seriously frightened some factions in the ruling class.

The next question is, what can come of the protests? Whatever the motivations of Mousavi, we have an enormous number of people on the streets, with a clear demand for political reform. They took to those streets, reportedly ignoring warnings that the police were carrying live ammunition. This means they are brave, certainly, and also confident in their numbers. Already, Khamenei has ceded the question of investigating the elections, which it seems clear he didn't want to do. The Iranian state may kill people, but these protesters are already starting to win. They can make gains far beyond the very limited promises that Mousavi made in order to excite progressive layers. (As far as I can tell, Mousavi was mildly critical of some state repression of television channels, and promised to 'review' legislation that could be harmful to women - hardly a tribune of the oppressed). So, whatever the truth about the claims of a fix, these protests can do nothing but good. They may, in addition to getting rid of some particularly onerous forms of oppression, open up a space in which the left can operate more freely, and in which the labour movement can assert itself more forcefully.

You'll remember that SOAS college has recently been the target of a campaign because of its sacking of a key union activist. Now, the union-busting process has acquired the assistance of the state. I am told that at 6.45 am yesterday, representatives form the Border Control Agency raided SOAS. The entire cleaning staff were in a meeting called by the contractors when up to fifty officers arrived. The immigration police interrogated the cleaners and eventually rounded up nine of them who they claimed were in the UK illegally. They were, eyewitnesses say, lined up against the wall, and marched into a room, locked inside, and forced to fill in some documents. They were given no legal representation, and no interpreters to assist in understanding the documents they were supposed to be filling in. If I understand matters correctly, the cleaners were due to be deported this evening. SOAS management say that the raid was carried out in a "sympathetic manner", but disclaims any responsibility. Members of the Living Wage campaign don't believe them, and students from SOAS have mounted protests over the raids with a number of members of staff have supported them.

This is one struggle among many, but for me it also resonates far beyond its own example. In what way? I think this instance makes a strong case that 'Fortress Europe' and the immigration controls associated with it in fact constitute a form of class war. As in the US, while employers are all to happy to exploit immigrant labour, they also rely on the state to discipline and attack that labour when it becomes too assertive and organised. I think it also makes the case that any political slogan that divides the working class, such as 'British Jobs for British Workers', is a valuable tool of employers for defeating it. Finally, I think it is resonant in another sense. Neal Ascherson once suggested that if you want to see how the government would like to treat us, look at how it deals with immigrants. In this case, the almost Gestapo-like tactics deployed by immigration police (which is absolutely routine) provide the model for crackdowns on all kinds of labour organisation.

Update: the cleaners are being fast-tracked for deportation. Campaigners are asking people to come and join the demonstration this morning, Monday 15th, at 8.30am, on the steps of SOAS just off Malet Street.

Update II: the students are in occupation. See their blog for details.

Footage from the occupation:

Let's start with the first leader of the modern British National Party (1982 - ?), John Tyndall. He had always been a Nazi, and a rather old-fashioned kind at that. Mein Kampf, as he famously said, was his bible. From the League of Empire Loyalists to the first incarnation of the British National Party (1960-1967) to the National Socialist Movement and then the Great Britain Movement, he was always rather fond of the 1930s style steet militia clobber. You can see him in his fancy-dress here (on the left) - you'll also notice that there are some rather unusual decorations in the abode in which he so gaily larks. He was also unabashed in his appetite for Nazi policies. For example, in a 1965 article for Spearhead magazine, named after his paramilitary organisation, Tyndall explained that: "with the numbers of murderous asocials and perverts on the increase, as a result of our sick society, there will be an unanswerable case when the day for the great clean-up comes, to implement the final solution against these sub-human elements by means of the gas chambers". Holocaust-approval, not Holocaust-denial, was the trend in those days.

Tyndall's magazine was also conventionally Nazi in its opinion of who the enemy was: "So that the claws of Jewry may be prised off, it is vital that every man in the street becomes Jew-wise. And the first step towards Jew-wisdom is Jew-consciousness . . . The Jews own Britain . . . Time and time again in recent history it has been shown that World Jewish Finance can make or break any established politician or financial enterprise in Britain". This isn't to say Tyndall didn't know how to dissimulate. His 1962 book, The Authoritarian State, was by the standards of his previous outbursts a far more controlled polemic, and he learned in this period to find euphemisms and to craft his Spearhead pieces in a vaguely 'academic' manner, delegating the more explicit ranting to a columnist with the pseudonym 'Julius' - this was Martin Webster, the future leader of the National Front.

Tyndall was still a Nazi when he joined the National Front in 1967, leading the members of his Great Britain Movement into the organisation. The Front was the result of a merger between the League of Empire Loyalists and the old British National Party. The LEL component was already disintegrating. It had been more of a fascist club than a political party, focused on persuading elite opinion. The merger with the BNP provided some experience with organising on the ground and in working class areas. Both Tyndall and Webster were to become leading figures in the new organisations. They had learned throughout the 1960s that you couldn't use explicitly Nazi language and get popular support in Britain, and that racism against migrants from the Commonwealth was more likely to gain support than antisemitism. So, they reinvented their style of address accordingly and successfully took over the new party. The Tyndall-Webster leadership did not advertise their neo-Nazi background, and the party presented itself as just another right-wing nationalist organisation. At the same time, the party's Honour Guard was used to attack antifascists, leftists, students whom the party didn't like the look of and, most importantly for them, black people. They pursued a murderous race war. Its activities were complemented by the explicitly Hitlerite British Movement, which had developed a following among football hooligans, and was handy with the ultra-violence. Predictably, of course, even as this was taking place, the NF were at pains to claim that they were victims of left-wing violence, and tried to prove, without success, that the publications of the IS (pre-SWP) and IMG (Tariq Ali's old haunt) were inciting physical attacks on the fascists. If anything, small groups of left-wing activists didn't stand a chance in physically duking it out with the NF's thugs, and the NF knew this. Tyndall boasted that while the police pretended to keep apart the Left and the NF, his version was that "the police saved the Left-wing".

The NF experienced a dramatic surge during the 1970s, thanks to the collapse of the postwar settlement and a surge of racism encouraged by mainstream politicians (including Labour politicians). By 1973, the formerly tiny organisation made a breakthrough of sorts by coming third in the West Bromwich bye-election. By 1974, the party was defeating Tories and Labour politicians in local elections. The weakness of the Heath government discredited it in the view of many right-wing Conservatives, some of whom broke away to join far right groups. But it was precisely at this point that revelations about Tyndall and Webster's Nazi proclivities appeared in an ITV documentary, and it caused immediate problems with that layer of members who had joined the organisation without understanding the ideology of its leadership. It also gave the party's ex-Tories and 'modernisers' the chance to change the leadership. Tyndall was later booed and jeered as a 'Nazi' when he attempted to make a speech at the party's annual conference. He was replaced as party chairman by the former Conservative John Stuart Read, and the new leadership was able to marginalise the Tyndallites for a time. But Tyndall had plenty of experience of organising within fascist sects, and he knew that if he maintained control of propaganda and kept a secure base, he could relaunch his leadership when the time was right. His ally, Richard Verral, took control of the party's journal, Spearhead, and used it to denounce those in NF who supported a nominal commitment to parliamentary democracy as purveyors of leftist propaganda. Eventally, Tyndall managed to reclaim leadership. The votes continued to rise. By 1977, the NF had 200,000 votes nationally, and had 19% of the vote in Hackney South and Bethnal Green. It was in this period that the fifteen year old Nicholas Griffin was first taken to National Front meetings by his father Edgar Griffin. By 1978, Griffin had become a local party secretary. He aligned with the more explicitly neo-Nazi 'Political Soldier' wing of the National Front, against the conservative 'Flag' group.

The role of antifascists in the NF's decline in the late 1970s, particularly in the Anti-Nazi League, is predictably a matter of sharp divisions in the historiography, and I don't propose to labour over them here. (See the reviews of David Renton's book, When We Touched the Sky, for a sense of this). The matter is obviously complicated by feelings toward the SWP, which took the initiative in founding the organisation in 1977 following the 'Battle of Lewisham' (pictured, the confrontation at Clifton Rise) in which antifascist activists and local black communities physically confronted an NF march, and stopped it from proceeding through the area. But whatever else people think of the ANL, it was able to unite broad groups of antifascists, including the Labour left and trade unionists. It was undeniably a mass social movement. It not only mobilised large numbers of people, but it also gave confidence to many who might have been scared of the Nazis, and helped resist some of the right-ward shift in British politics on issues of 'race' and immigration. Martin Webster certainly blamed the ANL for the NF's collapse, believing that they had been unstoppable until 1977. And personally, I am not convinced by arguments that say Thatcher stole the racist thunder of the far right by articulating her own anti-immigrant arguments. First of all, it carries the implication that Tory racism is an effective anti-fascist strategy. Secondly, and as a consequence, it overlooks the fact that the far right have done best when the mainstream parties have validated their arguments, whether today or in the years after Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech.

At any rate, having invested so much in the 1979 elections, standing in 303 seats, the National Front lost all their deposits and almost went bankrupt. They started to look for the root of their failure in the commie school system. 'Red' teachers, it was decided, were indoctrinating the young with marxist poison. And so, they used their youth publication to encourage students to report teachers, who would then receive a visit from a couple of boys in bomber jackets and DMs. One teacher, Stephen Harrowell, was targeted for a NF campaign just for teaching a history lecture about the Soviet Union. Others were beaten or had petrol poured through their letter box. But that campaign was a failure, as was almost everything else the NF did in that period. When I was growing up in the early 1980s, one still heard of the NF and there was still an ominous aura about them. Their associations with Ulster loyalism meant that their logo was daubed on the brick walls and buildings in Northern Ireland, alongside the usual charming array of death threats and community notices. By the 1990s, though, the NF were a groupuscule and had been overtaken by a new party, the modern BNP.

The modern BNP was the result of a merger between a split from the NF in 1980, led by John Tyndall and the British Movement. They formed the New National Front, and then in 1982, the British National Party. Old hands like Andrew Brons and Martin Webster remained in the NF to plot and wrangle with different factions, and it is partly the decision by Brons to side with the 'Strasserists' against Webster that led to the latter being forced out of the party for good. Nick Griffin remained in the NF, still a 'Political Soldier' advocating a 'revolutionary' strategy. When Andrew Brons was deposed from his leadership role in 1984, Griffin alongside Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland, also of the 'Political Soldier' faction, rose to dominance. But in the late 1980s, they broke off to join with the far right Italian terror suspect Roberto Fiore in his 'International Third Position'. (Fiore is one of those held responsible for the Bologna train station bombing in 1980, itself reportedly part of NATO's 'Operation Gladio', involving the use of far right activists in stay-behind armies to help resist leftist insurgency). It was while he was in the leadership of the ITP in 1990 that he lost his left eye, supposedly when a shotgun cartridge exploded in his face, which is why he has the glass eye.

The BNP was to continue the tradition of dissembling in public while maintaining Nazi organising principles. Even so, the BNP was still publicly committed to a 'revolutionary' anti-liberal stance. This much Tyndall insisted on. His own books discerned liberalism as the main source of decadence which had undermined the educated elite's resistance to communism and those racial Others supposedly behind both communism and finance-capital. The BNP's 1987 manifesto pledged the suppression of rival parties, since: "The old system of party warfare must come to an end, and political forces within the nation must be coordmated together in a mighty effort of national reconstruction". And it still railed against the "self-perpetuating oligarchies" of "International Finance" who supposedly pulled the politicians' strings - although at this point, they declined to mention that these "oligarchies" were, according to them, Jewish. Feeble subterfuge, but no more feeble than their current pretence that their racist incitements against Muslims is purely a critique of religion (an alibi that would probably not have worked in court were it not for the credibility given it by mainstream publications). But once again, the Nazis learned to adapt their language to tap into more popular forms of racism. From the early 1990s, the BNP's antisemitism was being rearticulated as racism toward Asians in the East End of London. At the same time, the BNP had formed a new militia organisation called Combat-18, (the 1 and the 8 standing for Adolf Hitler's initials), whose street activities were run by a violent former British Movement member named Charlie Sargent. The organisation was responsible for bloody assaults on the BNP's opponents, including one particularly notorious attack on ANL leafleters in Tower Hamlets in 1992. Combining an attempt to control the streets, as it were, with a strategy that exploited the racialisation of housing allocation that both Liberal Democrats and Labour councillors had engaged in, they managed to increase their support sufficiently to get Derek Beackon elected as a councillor in Tower Hamlets in 1993. This success led to the BNP making its first efforts to separate itself from C-18, in a bid for respectability. They opened new 'bookshop' (headquarters) in Welling, which was followed by a 300% rise in racist violence in the area. One of the victims of this surge of violence was, famously, Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered by five racists whom the police did little to pursue. The ANL had been relaunched in 1992 and, working with other groups, sought throw the fascists back into utter isolation. Local leafleting campaigns took off to ensure that Beackon would not be re-elected: he had won a bye-election with a majority of only 7 votes. In the full elections, shortly after, he lost the seat. A 50,000 strong protest outside the BNP's headquarters was battered by riot police (the infamous Territorial Support Group responsible for the death of Ian Tomlinson), and vilified on the BBC. But it was one of many mobilisations to exert a salutary effect on the BNP's morale. It wasn't until a combination of racist violence in Burnley, encouraged and exploited by the fascists, and a make-over after 1999, that the party were to recover. One other welcome result of the antifascist campaigns at the time was to hammer the Liberal Democrats after their nakedly racist campaign implying that white voters were suffering from 'special treatment' given to Bangladeshi communities by the Labour Party.

It was at this time that John Tyndall, perhaps looking for a few influential 'Nazi radicals' to bolster his position in the party, invited Nick Griffin to join the BNP. Griffin had been attending BNP meetings for some years, and had urged the party to see that the voters who backed the BNP in Millwall and elsewhere didn't want a 'postmodern Rightist party' on the continental model, but a militant organisation that could defend the slogan 'Rights for Whites' with "well-directed boots and punches" . Against any electoralist strategy, he argued that it was more important to control the streets than the council chamber, and that power was a product of force and will, not rational debate. He finally joined the party in 1995. In 1998, having defended the 'Political Soldier' line for years, Griffin abruptly switched sides. He aligned with Tony Lecomber's 'modernising' wing of the party. In 1999, he challenged for the leadership, and won. This 'modernising' didn't mean abandoning Nazi sympathies. (Lecomber has been known let the mask slip from time to time, as when he unwittingly told a reporter in 2004: "Do you remember Cabaret with Liza Minnelli, the part where, one by one, the Hitler Youth, our fellas, stand up and start saluting and singing? That is right stirring that is, gets the blood up every time.") The issue was how to represent oneself to the public. As Nick Griffin later explained: "As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern ... we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness". For the duration of Tyndall's leadership, the BNP had been contemptuous of any propaganda tactics that would compromise its hostility to liberalism. Moreover, as Griffin and Lecomber complained, Tyndall's fondness for posing in Nazi uniforms had proven a severe "handicap" for the party. The media-friendly strategy that Griffin adopted was in fact to adopt the keywords of liberalism in many ways. Watch this clip from Panorama, where Griffin explains to KKK members what his present orientation involves. He basically instructs them on how to repackage fascist arguments in saleable terms, using liberal catchphrases.

The infamous leaflets the BNP have distributed attacking Islam assert, among other things, that the religion is 'intolerant' and promotes the 'molestation of women'. (Other leaflets blame Muslims for the heroin trade). The BNP have posed as defenders of free speech and civil liberties, utilising the racist fiction that Muslims are enemies of traditional 'British liberties'. After the recent election results, Nick Griffin could be heard explaining that Islam was a menace to womens' rights. The organisation that spent the 1980s promising to crush feminism was now pretending to be its champion and spokesperson. In the same way, while Griffin had responded to the nail bombing of a gay pub in Soho by engaging a depraved attack on gays for "flaunting their perversion". Of late, the BNP has attempted to tamp down its explicit homophobia. And as for the Nick Griffin who declared the Holocaust the 'Holo-hoax' and accused Jews of controlling the media in 1998? Now he's dissing antisemitic conspiracy theories as if he had never written what he had written and said what he had said. The BNP, absurdly, even has a Jewish councillor, although this didn't stop the party from fielding a candidate in this year's elections who maintained that the Holocaust had been a positive process that resulted in the benefits of dentistry and plastic surgery.

The BNP has also learned to imitate the tactics of the Liberal Democrats, tapping local grievances and espousing a 'community' based politics. Take as an example their breakthrough in Burnley, where they acquired their first representation since 1993, following terrifying race riots. The local Labour bureaucracy was profoundly complacent about the events and the upsurge in fascist activity at the time, downplaying any suggestion that racism was a local issue. The trouble was that, as John Rhodes has argued, the riots that took place were the result of long-term processes in which the growing contempt of locals for the Labour party combined with the racialisation of local politics by 'Independent' political forces in the area. The running down and neglect of these council estates had already produced youth riots, and clashes with the police in the early 1990s, which were just reflexively condemned by politicians and press. From the mid-1990s onward, Labour's vote collapsed locally. The party's endorsement of neoliberal policies meant that in practise it supported the accelerating destruction of the local manufacturing industry with low-wage jobs in the service economy replacing it. The growth in poverty that resulted meant that a quarter of the town’s population lived in areas deemed to be within the 10 per cent most deprived in the country. Between 1996 and 2003, the proportion of votes going to Labour fell from 61% to 30%. And the turnout was miserably low, so that in fact only 12% of potential voters actually backed Labour. In the same period, due the weakness of mainstream opposition parties (who would vote Tory or Lib Dem?), the local Independents started to benefit from increased support. And they had begun to attack Labour from the right, accusing it of 'positive discrimination' in favour of Asian communities. Shamefully, some of these accusations came from former Labour members on the council, while the Lib Dems, Tories and the local paper, the Burnley Express, was all to happy to repeat these claims. Further, it turned out that Labour councillors - far from lavishing undue attention on Asian residents - had been promoting a de facto segregation in housing to keep Asian residents out of their wards. It was in the most 'segregated' wards, with the highest number of white residents and the lowest number of Asian residents, that the BNP later got councillors elected. On top of that, because local councillors tended to act as lobbyists for their particular ward, the distribution of resources acquired 'racial' dimensions which the BNP could exploit. They did this by knowing the wards, finding out the racist beefs that most exercised residents, what was supposedly done for Stoneyholme and Daneshouse but not elsewhere, and so on. The established parties and the Independents had pulled local politics to the right, racialised issues of funding and investment, and softened the terrain for the fascists. Once more, though, this is not a simple story of the BNP picking up Old Labour votes. In truth, while many local Labour voters, out of sheer despair and stupidity, backed the BNP, proportionally more Tory voters rallied to the BNP. And since 2004, the main beneficiary of opposition to New Labour combined with anti-BNP feeling has been the local Liberal Democrats. A pretty miserable state of affairs, it has to be admitted, but better than allowing the BNP to run the council.

Importantly, part of the BNP's new strategy has also involved making far more effective in their use of the internet than their opponents. This is not a novelty introduced by Griffin. Nigel Copsey's informative discussion of this question points out that the Nazis were extolling the virtues of the internet since 1995 as it was 'the most significant development for politics since the invention of the television'. They understood fully the potential for reaching out beyond their marginal enclaves, and the focus paid off. BNP voters read the party's website and rely on it for news more than voters for any other organisation - according to this research, while only 4% of Tory and Labour voters use their party's website as the main source of news, 12% of BNP voters do. This is a comparatively sophisticated operation. The website contains reams and reams of regularly updated 'news' articles, racist polemics, misleading statistics, inventive but ultimately bizarre Youtube videos, and of course glowing photographs of the BNP higher-ups cuddling old ladies and things.

And so here we are. Despite the splits in the BNP throughout the decade (which the adept factionalist Griffin is surely used to), despite the leaks and the divisions and PR blunder, the generation of Nazis that had seen the NF almost decisively break through in the 1970s, and fail, has managed its comeback. The two BNP MEPs are both 0f that era. In fact, Andrew Brons was a member of the National Socialist Movement when it was launched by Tyndall, so his Nazi roots go back even further than those of his boss. If Tyndall had not bitten the dust in 2005, he would now be part of the same leadership, further underlining the continuity. The BNP's current strategy involves elaborate dissimulation about those fascistic dispositions, with careful restrictions on what party members may say in public, and labyrinthine procedures for getting to internal meetings. Matthew Collins, a former BNP member who left the organisation, has revealed how this works. He asserts that while the BNP has publicly abandoned its commitment to forced repatriation new goal is to effect ethnic cleansing by introducing a system of apartheid that would, through increasing harrassment and pressure, force the non-white population to leave Britain. This is what is meant by 'voluntary repatriation'. It would be a system of authoritarian terror that would, of necesssity, have to wipe out all democratic institutions and political opponents to achieve such ends. Who can say that Tyndall's dream of gas chamber eugenics might not become an important technology in such a process?

I have just been looking through some of the criminal records of current and former BNP members - quite revealing it is too. You get a sense of the kinds of people the fascists attract, as well as the things they prepare people to do. Because the remarkable fact is that the BNP have proven themselves adept at spreading terror in localised settings, despite lacking a police force, an army or even a paramilitary outfit that it would call its own ( these days, the BNP tends to maintain an organisational distance from the Combat-18 group it set up, although the ban on C-18 membership is known to be widely ignored in the party). It is well-known, for example, that when the BNP set up shop in Welling, the level of racist violence shot up three-fold. The election of a single councillor in Barking in 2004 was followed by an immediate 18% rise in racist violence. Former members like Andy Sykes have disclosed the fact that the party expects its members to get involved in violent acts (he was the one who helped make the documentary, The Secret Agent, in which BNP members confessed to violent assaults on Asians). When you look at the convictions lists, you see what forms this violence takes. Here's a relatively short list of examples, grouped very roughly by the category of the crime committed:

Terrorism/attempted murder/arson: John Laidlaw, whom says he was a BNP member (the BNP deny this), threatened to "kill all black people" before going on a shooting spree at Finsbury Park tube station. He shot two people, missed a third target, and hit a white woman - apparently by accident. Tony Lecomber, group development officer for the BNP, has convictions for handling explosives and for an assault on a Jewish teacher. This was when he was the party's Propaganda Director, back in its pre-'modernising' era. Robert Cottage, a BNP member and one-time candidate for that joyous bunch, was of course a co-conspirator in a massive terror plot that was barely even covered in the media, involving the largest haul of chemical weapons to date. Former BNP member David Copeland was, of course, the infamous nail bomber who killed three people and injured 139 with a series of bombings around London. Ex-BNP activist Mark Bulman tried to firebomb his local mosque, and daubed swastikas on local businesses he thought were 'ethnic'. Stephen Bailey, a Lincoln BNP member, is a convicted arsonist. BNP member Terry Collins is probably only recently out of jail after conducting a reign of racist terror and arson against his neighbours. His confederate, fellow BNP member Allen Boyce, will have got out a bit earlier, because his only crime was to teach Collins bomb-making instructions. The former leader of the BNP, the deceased John Tyndall, had numerous convictions including one for organising paramilitaries.

Assault: BNP councillor David Enderby has been convicted of assault, while his agent Kevin Hughes was convicted of racially aggravated assault. BNP councillor Brian Turner has been convicted of racially aggravated public order offenses (as well as beating his wife - they believe in patriarchy, the Nazis). BNP member Anthony Weeks has convictions for racially aggravated assault. Martin Glasgow, a BNP fundholder in Chesterfield, has served 12 months for a racist assault. Former BNP election agent Kevin Hughes has served jail time for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker. Kevin Scott, a regional organiser for the north-east, has been convicted of assault. Graham Tasker, a BNP branch organiser, has convictions for assault on a black woman and another on a solicitor. Steve Belshaw, East Midlands organiser for the BNP, has a conviction for assault. Former Oldham BNP organiser Mick Treacy, who got 11.21% of the vote as a candidate in the 2001 elections, has several convictions for theft and violence.

Rape: Roderick Rowley, one-time BNP candidate in Coventry, is a convicted child rapist; Ian Hindle and Andrew Wells, BNP members, have been convicted of molesting children and keeping explicit images of the rapes taking place. BNP member Robert Bennett, who was responsible for their leafletting campaign in Oldham in 2002, has convictions for assault and gang rape.

Threats/harrassment/incitement: Nick Griffin, supremo, fuhrer, duce, lord of the goosestep, has a well-known conviction for incitement to racial hatred, from 1998 when he published a magazine, The Rune, that effectively called for the lynching of opponents of "white unity'" . BNP councillor Brian Wainwright was found to have been sending letters to a local mosque, to a Muslim councillor, and to a local antifascist activists, threatening that "Muslim blood will be spilled" (he endearingly included an SS logo, just so that it would be understood what his position on the whole Nazi genocide thing was). One-time BNP council candidate Dominic Bugler has been convicted for possessing an imitation firearm. Joe Owens, Nick Griffin's former minder and former Merseyside organiser of the BNP, was also a gangland hitman, according to Searchlight, suspected of several murders by police. He has also spent time in jail for sending razor blades in the post to Jewish people and carrying CS gas. When he split with Nick Griffin a few years ago, he publicised claims that Tony Lecomber had tried to recruit him to an assassination scheme. Colin Smith, a regional officer for the BNP, has multiple convictions including for theft, assault, burglary and possession of an offensive weapon. Paul Ballard, a branch organiser in Croydon, has been convicted of incitement to racial hatred. BNP chief steward and branch organiser for Edinburgh, Warren Bennett, has convictions for public order offenses and connections with the neo-Nazi terror organisation, Combat-18. Former BNP candidate Darren Dobson, was convicted of racially aggravated harrassment, and he also had connections to C-18. Jim Dowson, the BNP's fund-raiser in Scotland, has a long list of convictions including for breach of peace, and possession of a weapon, and has links to loyalist terrorists like Michael Stone.

You get the picture. Certainly, few readers of this blog need to be reminded that the BNP are a violent Nazi organisation. Equally, if I wanted to be comprehensive on this topic, I'd have to write for a few more days. But it's worth highlighting a number of points that emerge here. 1) The BNP is not just circumstantially violent and criminal - it is violent and criminal from its leadership (advisory council) through its middling layers of organisation right down to its grassroots. 2) The BNP attracts paranoiacs and sociopaths of all varieties. It recruits them, cultivates them, and promotes them to leading positions in its organisation. 3) The BNP produces sociopaths who then, having been indoctrinated in the tenets of fascism, have a habit of going on the rampage. 4) The BNP is immersed in a violent Nazi milieu, which it has only recently felt the need to really distance itself from. Yesterday's BNP member is today's C-18 activist. Tomorrow's BNP member is today's Racial Volunteer Force member (they're the ones, apparently, who are protecting Johnny Adair from his former UVF confederates). And so on. If there was a Muslim organisation in this country which had the criminal record and mile-wide violent streak of this organisation, it would have been banned, its leaders hounded by the press, its members possibly even deported (or renditioned). Because they're white, they get respectful interviews with John Humphreys or Michael Crick on the BBC.

Well, we wanted to know who BNP voters were, what social class they are from, what party they traditionally backed, and what they knew about the party they have now given their vote to. This poll report gives us some of the material we need. It seems to be in accord with the findings of the study published by the Democracy Audit some years back, in the respect that the majority of BNP voters are Tories, not disaffected Labour voters. The twist in the tale is that they are from formerly solid Labour areas. They are people whose parents voted Labour, even if they never have. They work in manufacturing jobs, read tabloids, and are most likely to be discontented about their incomes, (and about their overall lot in life). Now, we had been told somewhat pontifically by some that the economic crisis, and the MPs expenses scandal, would lead to working class Labour supporters backing the far right. This was patronising, and it turns out not to be the case. Labour voters stayed at home or voted for some leftish substitute: by and large, they didn't vote for the right.

Further, the report tells us something about the political attitudes of BNP supporters. 94% want all immigration stopped. 72% of them support 'voluntary repatriation'. That's about 700,000 people behind that flagship BNP policy - I'd like to know what they think would amount to the government 'encouraging' such 'voluntary repatriation'. Bribes? Discrimination in the workplace? Well, there's a clue in that half of BNP voters want employers to discriminate on the grounds of race. 58% of their voters believe that most crime is committed by immigrants. Most of their voters are not signed up to the BNP's wholesale Holocaust-denial, although a disproportionate number of them are. So, what we are seeing is not so much support for the BNP's illicit Nazism, but rather support for segregation, racial privilege, 'soft' ethnic cleansing, and authoritarianism. I need hardly say that this is itself a significant menace and challenge. It is on the basis of such reactionary views that fascists have always built up support. And it is this layer of 'soft' racists whom the BNP seek to cultivate, draw in and convert to fascism proper. This is the process we need to interrupt.

I just want to summarise what is already known about the election results and put it into some shape and perspective. The worst, first. The BNP gained two MEPs, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, worth 120 139 and 132 094 votes respectively. [Figures at UAF]. Across the country, they averaged 6.2% of the vote according to the BBC's figures, and gained a total of 943 000 votes. I see that this confirms the UAF's pre-election analysis [pdf], which disputed the complacent tendency among some liberals to play down the BNP's prospects. There is still a fight to be had over whether these votes translate into long-term party identity or whether they amount to a temporary right-wing protest vote. But whatever the basis of the vote, that number of votes for a fascist party has to be treated as a menace and the basis for urgent organisation and rethinking.

Secondly, and relatedly, Labour's electoral annihilation has overwhelmingly benefited the right. The surprisingly strong votes for No2EU (born yesterday, as it were) and the Socialist Labour Party (no campaign, no profile) suggests that it didn't have to be this way. Their combined vote nationally was just over 2%, or about 300 000 votes. Had there been a united left alternative, with a real campaign, I am willing to bet it would have been capable of drawing three times that number of votes. The Greens saw their overall vote increase by 2.4% to 8.7%, just over a million votes. Otherwise, people shifted their votes from Labour to other reformist alternatives such as the SNP. Many, many people were obviously desperate to vote for some kind of left alternative, if only to really stick it to the New Labour machine. Nonetheless, it's true that across Europe the right made sweeping gains, despite some very good results for radical left candidates. This meltdown of social democracy is not just a British phenomenon, although the utter cravenness of New Labour has probably advanced the degeneration much more rapidly in the UK. There is some talk in the comment pieces suggesting that the very odd distribution of votes and the powerful showing by UKIP make it unlikely that such patterns will be reproduced in a general election. Perhaps not, but who can now be sure that the assumptions about general elections that worked in the past will continue to be operative a few months hence?

Thirdly, of course, while social democracy is disintegrating, this doesn't automatically rebound to the benefit of the right. In fact, those who think that the best response to such a crisis is to try to save social democracy and bolster its left-flank have some explaining to do. The UK results plainly show that even if the field is more less left open for New Labour, with only marginal challenges from the left, it still loses big time and the right-wing makes gains. The contrast between the UK and Ireland is striking. There, the Socialist Party made a breakthrough, sending Joe Higgins to Brussels by ousting the Fianna Fail MEP. In the council elections, the SP gained six seats and People Before Profit gained five. The ruling Fianna Fail-Green coalition was hammered for its attacks on workers and its decision to re-run the EU Treaty referendum until it obtained the result it wanted. Similarly, in Portugal the Left Bloc got 10% of the vote and the communist-green coalition also received 10%. In France, the combined vote for the Greens and the radical left was about 28%. In all of these places, the major reformist parties had treated their core voters like sandbags to be tossed overboard the better to ascend to loftier heights. As a result, they shed votes in abundance. But the political significance of the elections is very different from that in the UK.

We fluffed it, boys and girls. It has been obvious for some time that a fundamental crisis of social democracy was brewing, and that this was going to be deeper than ever before, and that nothing the left could do - even if it was so deranged as to want this - could rescue it. We watched a yawning political vacuum open up and, due to our shibboleths, totems and taboos, our inward-lookingness, our traditions of feuding, and many other flaws, we failed to fill it. Elections are not the be all and end all, and ultimately what will matter far more than such votes will be what we do between elections. But this was one important way for us to assert ourselves in this crisis, and we handed the initiative to everyone but the radical left. I am not saying we should hammer ourselves over the head repeatedly with such facts, but I think it would be healthy to begin by acknowledging them and resolving never to let that happen again.

Let there be no euphemism about this much: the UK election results have been atrocious. New Labour was wiped out, but little of this redounded to the advantage of the left. Forget about No2EU, or the Respect Party. The best we could do was give the Greens another 6 council seats to match those of UKIP. This looks like a pretty sad feat of resistance against the tidal wave of Tory blue. The striking gains made by the parties of the hard right, such as the preposterous English Democrats who took the Doncaster mayoral election, stand in complete contrast to the failure of even a symbolic victory for the left to manifest itself. Not even the Lib Dems were able to devour more than scraps from New Labour's carcass - in fact, they lost seats and councils across the board. Electorally, the country has just taken a headlong dive to the right. The worst of this is obviously the gains made by the BNP which, although limited and hedged in by antifascist activism, include 3 new councillors and their first seat on a county council, as well as a number of strong results locally. The worry has always been that they will get seats on the EU parliament, thus giving them not only representation but funding for their ramshackle party machine and more media profile. That obviously remains a strong possibility, and antifascist mobilisation will continue to be a priority after the elections.

The only bright spot is that elections across Europe are likely to go much better for the Left. In Ireland, the People Before Profit alliance has already made a breakthrough with five seats gained so far, while the Socialist Party candidates have also been performing extremely well. The strong vote for the SP's Joe Higgins should translate into a good Euro result for them. In France, the NPA vary between 4 and 9% in the polls, the Left Front vary between 3 or 6%, the Greens get between 7 and 11%, and the dear old Lutte Ouvriere hover consistently around 2%. There is a background here in which left-wing figures such as Michel Onfray are attacking the NPA for not joining with the Left Front in an electoral pact. The pro-PS media seems to be giving voice to these criticisms the better to exacerbate divisions on the left. The difficulty appears to reside in the fact that the Left Front's components (the Parti de Gauche and the PCF) still want to cut electoral deals with the PS, which the NPA fears would result in being compromised by the right-wing policies of the Socialists. But, however the votes are distributed, as a whole the left is polling well , and the fascists of the Front Nationale are set to see their vote fall from about 10% to 6%. In Greece, the polls consistently give high ratings for parties of the left such as Syriza (radical left, 6-8.5%), the KKE (communists, 6-9%) and the Greens (anything from 3 to 8.5%). There is no way to tell how strongly the anticapitalist ΑΝΤ.ΑΡ.ΣΥ.Α. will perform. In Spain, the United Left is polling as high as 5%, which is roughly the difference between the Socialists and the right-wing People's Party. In Portugal, the Left Bloc tends to poll between 8 and 10%, but one opinion survey puts them at 18%. In Germany, the Linke are polling at 8%, a rise on their last vote of 6% but down on some of the superb results we have seen in previous elections. Oh, and of course, there is the tremendous victory for the far left in Greenland (which looks like it will be accompanied by a strong showing for the Socialist People's Party in Denmark, Greenland's colonial overseer).

There is also some bad news afoot. Sadly, in Italy it looks as if the Berlusconi-led 'People of Freedom' will increase their vote on 2004 from 34% to as much as 40%. The left anticapitalist alliance including Rifondazione Comunista is polling at 5%, down from over 8% for the equivalent alliance in 2004, while the Lega Nord expect to get approximately 10%, double their previous figure of approx. 5%. Arguably, things could have been a lot worse by now after last year's electoral disaster which led to fascists in government, fascist salutes and cries of 'duce' in Rome, and threats from the new fascist mayor that had could unleash 300,000 footsoldiers against the Left. In much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, power is swinging between neoliberal and conservative nationalist blocs, with the Kaczyńskis' party of Law and Order losing out to the neoliberal Civic Platform in Poland, and the centre-right overwhelmingly dominant in Hungary and Slovenia. Finally, most worryingly, the results are in for the Netherlands, and it isn't looking good. The party has swung sharply to the right with a massive increase for Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, making them the second largest party next to the Christian Democrats. The Labour Party lost 11.4% and the radical left has only picked up a small fraction of that. This has been made possible not only by the Islamophobia of the 'war on terror' that the right has capitalised on, but also by the complicity of liberals in that discourse, which gives people like Wilders a veneer of respectibility.

I'll update this post as results come in.

Well, sources in the thread below suggest that: in France, the left vote includes 14.8% for the Greens, 6.3% for the Left Front, 5.5% for the NPA, and 1.5% for Lutte Ouvriere. The Front Nationale saw their vote fall to 6%; in Greece, the KKE are projected to get up to 10%, Syriza between 5 and 7%, and the Greens have between 4 and 6%. The far right LAOS has anything up to 7% of the vote; and in Germany the Linke have about 7.5% of the vote. There are projections listed here which more or less confirm these estimates.

In the UK, it looks as if UKIP is expected to come second to the Tories with 18% of the vote, which is pretty disastrous. I note that Labour and Tories between them seem to command only 42% of the vote, which partially reflects the low turnout and lack of motivation among their core supporters, and also the splintering and polarisation that is taking place. LabourList isn't necessarily reliable, but it is reporting that the BNP are likely to send their fuhrer to Europe as a representative for the sunny West Midlands, and are 'confident' in Yorkshire.

I hear that Sweden has just seen a 7.4% vote for the Pirate Party, although the Left Bloc has seen its vote fall to 6%. Yarrr. In Germany, the right-wing EPP bloc (CDU + CSU) has lost 7.1% of its vote, with 1% distributed to the Greens, 1% to the Socialists (SPD), 1% to the Linke and 4% to the liberals (pro-business FDP). The results for France are in, and it looks as if the combined Left vote (NPA and Left Front and others) is 14%, up 4%. The Socialists (PS) are down 18.1%, and the EPP (Sarkozy's UMP and others) is up a whopping 15.3%. The Green vote is also up 11%.

Austria has swung to the right, with reduced votes for the Socialists and Greens, and gains for the nationalist right. The far right and nationalist parties got about a third of the vote between them. Similar story with Finland, it seems, where both the Socialists and Left lost 7% each.

The Grauniad reports that there was a confrontation at Manchester, where antifascist activists prevented Nick Griffin from attending the count.

Labour are being so thoroughly slaughtered that they have been beaten to second place by UKIP in Hull, of all cities. The rise of UKIP in this election, after their setback with Kilroy-Silk and the Veritas split-away, is quite astonishing. They, not the Tories, are picking up the bulk of the right-wing 'protest vote'. It is also now confirmed that Labour came fifth in Cornwall.

BNP wins its first MEP with 120,000 votes in Yorkshire and Humber. That means the Nazis can look forward to £2m in funds and the kind of media coverage you normally have to kill for.

Is the right taking advantage of the capitalist crisis? Are weirdo nationalists and 'Fathers 4 Justice' types crowbarring their volumous guts through the doors of representative government? Are you now left wondering whatever happened to that left-wing alternative to New Labour? Well then, why not immerse yourself in some prestidigitous parole, a dextrous diversionary discourse, a soupçon of sly satire, and an alliterative address to boot?:

I've just spent a week sleeping at the houses of the Hannoun family in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Three modest two bedroom bungalows are home to the families of the Hannoun brothers – they are part of 28 homes in the neighborhood, inhabited by over 500 Palestinians.

As part of their illegal "Judaization" of East Jerusalem (which is meant to be the future capital of Palestine), the Israelis have told the Hannoun's, and other families in the area, they will be evicted and their homes destroyed to make way for new Jewish settlers. A brave collection of international activists stay up to the small hours in preparation to document and resist the imminent confiscation of the homes, which is scheduled to take place in the period from now to July 19th.

Sheikh Jarrah is situated in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when he deigns Jerusalem with his presence as the Quartet's "Peace Envoy". When you look out of the Hannoun's window, Blair's hotel is 30m away; Blair can probably see the Hannoun's house during his morning swim. Before I contacted his spokesman he had nothing to say about the evictions. That's one side of the valley. On the other, the British consulate peers down from its high security peak. In the full glare of our consulate and our former Prime Minister a community is being illegally destroyed.

The Hannoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel's attempts to take their homes. Maher Hannoun, who is leading the resistance and speaks with eloquence and calm, chain smokes his way through the evenings as he recounts to anyone who will listen what has befallen his family.

Maher's father was a refugee from The Nakba (or 'The Catastophe' as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948) when he was forced out of Nablus; his grandfather was forced out of Haifa at the same time. The Jordanian government gave them the houses in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home. The Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, is trying to use a forged century-old Ottoman-era contract to claim ownership. Like all over East Jerusalem, the Israelis have also tried to bribe Maher with an open cheque if he goes quietly. He refused. "This is my home," he said. "I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams."

The Israelis tactics are what Maher calls "slow torture", and have included arrests, bribery and violence. In 1998, after Maher refused to start paying rent to settlers, soldiers came to his house, while his mother was very ill with leukemia and took all their furniture, including the bed Maher had pleaded with them to leave so his mother could die peacefully on it. In 2002, the Israelis succeeded and eventually kicked the Hannoun's out for four years, before they returned in 2006; in 2002 his two girls were 9 and 13.

Two weeks ago, on May 17th, an Israeli court told Maher that unless he hands over the keys by July 19^th he would have to pay $50,000 and face an unspecified amount of time in prison until he pays the fine and agrees to evacuate his home. In 2008 he spent three months in prison in similar circumstances. Despite the pressure, he is staying resolute.

Across the way, and in the eyeline of Mr. Blair and our consulate, there is a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman is now living after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when the Israelis violently repossessed their house with the help of over 50 soldiers. After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused a bribe of an open cheque -- in the millions of dollars -- from the Israelis to leave their homes. "I don't have a life now," she said from her tent. "With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes."

I walked from Sheikh Jarrah to the British consulate (it took about five minutes) and asked Karen Mcluskie, the spokeswoman, what the British line was on the ethnic cleansing of what is meant to be the future capital of Palestine. "The British position is that Jerusalem has to be the shared capital of two states," she said. "I think what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah is not unique sadly. There are a number of sites around Jerusalem where these kinds of actions are taking place – demolitions, evictions and settlement encouragement." She specifically asked not to drawn on what the British government is actually doing to stop this illegal and inhuman destruction of Sheikh Jarrah and, along with it, any hopes of a viable future state in Palestine. Mcluskie did concede: "The annexation of Jerusalem simply makes it harder to any reach a peace deal, it simply cuts off the options." After I contacted Blair's spokesman even the infamous Israel apologist said that "Blair has raised with the Israeli government," and that "it remains an issue of concern". I asked if Mr. Blair would make the three minute walk down to the Hannoun's to talk to them about their predicament, to which the spokesman assured me: "[S]taff from his office have previously visited families who have been evicted." Notice the past-tense.

Another place where the indigenous population is being uprooted is the Bustan area of Silwan which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in Biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in the 960 BC (I learnt this with 3D glasses on in the initial video).

In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that the lore was true. Now, the Israeli government want to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archeological theme park. 88 homes are due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians. At the end of the tour we went through the waterway that was built to connect the Old City to the spring outside the city walls. When I came out at the end of the tour, I didn't realize that the spring was located in Silwan. A few days later I went to the tent where the residents of Bustan are mobilizing against the destruction of their homes and realized, while watching all the tourists being bussed back up the hill to the "City of David", where I had actually been. Again, like in Sheikh Jarrah, the people are defiant. "If they demolish my home, they will have to demolish my body too, I will die for my land," says Zaid Ziulany, 54, who lives with his family in house "38" which is due for demolition. "Where are we meant to go?" he asked. "Should we all just sleep on the street?"

The most disturbing fact about the Israelis program is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to illegally build new settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem. As Maher asks, "Why can't they build a settlement on any other bit of land?"

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration is that they are much more honest about their colonization program than their "centrist" predecessors. In the Israeli press last week it was reported that Netanyahu administration is willing to get rid of some "outposts", in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and "natural grow" in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the same policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu is just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state. "I can't see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people," agrees Maher.

The timetable for this year's Marxism festival is out, although still being updated. For anyone who wants to know, I will be speaking alongside playwright David Edgar on the topic of Left-Right defectors on Monday 6th July, 10am at the main hall in the Friends Meeting House. Now, I need 900 or so of you to buy tickets and show up that morning. And if you feel like 'spontaneously' delivering a standing ovation at the end, I won't be offended. Aside from that, there is a good line up to dissect every vital issue of the day. David Harvey will be introducing you to Capital, Tariq Ali will speak on the American Empire, and Gary Younge will explain the rise of Obama. John Bellamy Foster will talk about Marx and ecology, and there will be a speaker from France's Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste to talk about the exciting new party and its prospects. The excellent Paul Gilroy has a meeting on 'the state of black Britain', and Graham Turner will talk about the credit crunch. History enthusiasts would do well to drop in on Neil Faulkner discussing the Roman Empire, (you might see if he has any thoughts on Bryan Ward-Perkins' findings which would seem to challenge his thesis). On the culture front, Michael Rosen and Lowkey will celebrate the life and works of Adrian Mitchell, there will be a tribute to Harold Pinter, Nick Broomfield will introduce one of his documentaries, and there will be the now regular Cultures of Resistance gig. Oh, and there will be endless frivolity and frolicking on the grass around Bloomsbury.