On flags and fascists

ere I come back to Gordon Brown’s explicit suggestion to achieve a new harmonious order under the flag of a unified British national identity.

According to the Fabian Speach I alluded to last time, in addition to freshen up, nurture and reinvigorate such hitherto dry debates on national belonging and national pride, celebrating an officially sanctioned festive Patriotic Day and using the Union Jack in every gardenmay also be of some assistance (Italics from the original speach). Hence the new urgencyof reclaiming the power of national symbols back from the most idiosyncratic internal enemy that Britain faces today, the enemy within: the far right BNP. As Gordon Brown said:

Let us remember that when people on the centre-left recoiled from national symbols, the BNP tried to steal the Union Jack. Instead of the BNP using it as a symbol of racial division, the flag should be a symbol of unity, part of a modern expression of patriotism. So we should respond to the BNP by saying the union flag is a flag for Britain, not for the BNP; all the United Kingdom should honour it, not ignore it; we should assert that the union flag is, by definition, a flag of tolerance and inclusion.

By monopolizing the British flag shamelessly the xenophobic and prejudiced far right distorts thus the good old British patriotic feelings and values of liberty, tolerance, inclusion and fair play. The un-stated reasons why, however, somebody should be so fond of catapulting the marginal BNP into becoming a rightist populist party with a serious presence in British politics are less paradoxical that they seem. Still relevant nowadays are Žižek’s remarks in “Why we all love to hate Haider”(The Universal Exception, 2006, pp. 236-7:

The first thing to do here is to recall the well-concealed but non the less unmistakable sight of relief in the predominant democratic political field when, a decade ago, the Rightist populist parties became a serious presence (Haider in Austria, Le Pen in France, Republicans in Germany, Bucharan in the USA). The message of this relief was: at last an enemy whom we can properly hate all together, whom we can sacrifice – excommunicate- in order to demonstrate our democratic consensus! This relief is to be read against the background of what is usually referred to as the emerging ‘post-political consensus’: the only political force with the serious weight which does still evoke the properly political antagonistic response of Us against Them is the new Populist Right.

The BNP, therefore, plays a key structural role in the legitimacy of Gordon Brown’s liberal-democratic discourse of tolerant multiculturalism as now hegemonised by a new sense of inclusive national belonging. The BNP constitutes, Žižek’s words are still relevant here, the very “negative common denominator of the entire…‘democratic’ bloc” (242), the unacceptable party of government which is the proof of our own democratic standards, credentials and attitudes; the extremely good for comfort enemy (them) who everybody (us) loves to hate.

Moreover: does not the BNP also become the enemy  that gives the very center-left liberal spectrum in general and Labour grassroots, in particular, the possibility of still playing proper ‘radical’, ‘anti-fascist’ politics while having to concede on traditionally unheard of calls for unsauvory national(ist) adhesions?