A Brush with the Dark

When I met up with Dr Bones and LadySunHouse for lunch on Saturday, I jokingly apologized for having been obstructed by fascists in Trafalgar Square. Dr Bones quite reasonably asked me whether that was an insult or whether that’s how they’d think about themselves. It turned out it was the demonstration addressed by Tommy Robinson before he fled the country for breaching a court order forbidding him to repeat libels against a Syrian refugee.

Nigel Farage suggested this morning that the public might be being lied to about recent violent acts around the country, including the awful murders of three children in Southport. He doesn’t say explicitly that Muslims are responsible for these acts and the authorities are hiding it, but he doesn’t need to: it's plausible deniability. Like Mr Trump in the States, he can insinuate to the extent that everyone knows what he means, without being indictably precise.

This is a conscious campaign to undermine social discourse, to set up an alternative narrative. It may well be that there are communities in the UK who have reasons not to be well-disposed towards the police, but this is different: it’s about hinting that the police, the courts, the government, and the media are all part of a grand cover-up keeping the truth from ordinary people. It’s about saying, You can’t trust what these structures tell you: you can only trust what we tell you. And you cannot rely on them to protect you: you can only rely on us, and on your own willingness to take up arms, to throw paving slabs at a mosque in a Lancashire town.

'Nazis gonna Nazi', commented a friend, but while this is so, I think it's important that those of us who are broadly on the progressive side of things understand the process, which is why I keep posting about the links between violence, corruption, and the undermining of truth. It's not just 'these people are right wing so they are nasty'. You can be a perfectly constitutional, lawful party of the Right, even a long way to the Right, and still not be an intrinsic threat to the liberal order which protects our persons. These people are not constitutional and lawful, and there's a link between the malignity of Mr Farage and the corruption of Boris Johnson which is more than just being on the same side of the spectrum.

This is pre-fascism: this is the stage of deliberately softening society up for polarisation and violence. This is the condition we are in.