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Friday, 27 June 2008 |
(Hackney Gazette 26 June 2008)
Dear Editor,I hope you will allow a final response to Terry Fitzpatrick’s letter (Gazette, 19 June 2008) in this ongoing debate about strategies to challenge the British National Party (BNP).
It’s a shame that Terry has chosen to caricature Hackney Independent’s contribution to the debate about anti-BNP strategy in Monty-Python ‘Life of Brian’ terms; and incidentally not even address any of the arguments we put forward.
Hackney Independent shares his concerns about the lollypop-waving antics of the Socialist Workers Party’s various front groups. It is unfair of him to lump us together and pretend that what we have to say isn’t worth listening to. In doing so he ignores the fact that what we are suggesting is not only very different, but also not a million miles away from what his own organisation is beginning to discuss.
We would not deny that Hope Not Hate have put an enormous amount of effort into combating the BNP, making alliances with trade unions and local groups, etc, in the areas in which the BNP have contested elections. Where we have a problem with the Hope Not Hate strategy is that it concentrates its response to the BNP during election campaigns, for example its “2008 Anti-Fascist Fortnight” campaign.
We believe that building consistent, long-term, community campaigns that address people’s genuine concerns about local problems could more effectively undermine the BNP. To focus on a fortnight of activity to “fire-fight” the BNP where they have already established themselves is crisis management and, moreover, non-sustainable.
In fact Nick Lowles, the Editor of Searchlight, which organises Hope Not Hate, has recently acknowledged that the kind of strategy that Hackney Independent has argued for is partly the way forward. In a recent article in Searchlight magazine (“Where Now?” June 2008) Nick Lowles says, “unless we do something radically different the situation will get a lot worse before it gets better… It is also clear that a simple Hope Not Hate message is insufficient… We need to replace empty slogans with substance, and that means involving ourselves in the community as never before… A good functioning local group … needs to be community-orientated, broad-based and non-dogmatic. It needs to be able to address local issues and concerns while having roots within the community.”
(You can read the full article on Searchlight’s website.)
I don’t pretend to agree with everything that Nick Lowles has to say in his article, and Terry Fitzpatrick may not agree with him either; but it clearly demonstrates that even Terry’s own organisation is taking seriously the most important aspects of the argument that Hackney Independent has been making. Perhaps anti-fascists could begin to make progress if we concentrated on the substance of important debates like this one without evasion and name-calling.
Carl Taylor, Hackney Independent
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