The Far Right Is Rising Again-- In The U.K.

Before Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, he had already served in Parliament between 1918 and 1931 first as a member of the Conservative Party, then as an independent and later as a member of Labour. Mosley’s fascist party, which was also blatantly anti-Semitic, had the support of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror . Mosely was eventually rounded up and thrown in prison and his party abolished but after the war, fascist parties started up in Britain again, primarily organized around racism and anti-immigrant extremism. The National Front and the British National Party (BNP) were the two biggies until the more recent rise of UKIP. The National Front wants to deport all foreigners but the BNP where Mitt Romney and other racist Republicans picked up their “self-deportation” ideas. Neither the National Front nor the BNP ever managed to elect any of their crazy right-wing members to Parliament. Last week, though, UKIP did.

The earlier fascist parties all drew members from the far right of the Conservative Party, just as the English Defense League and UKIP have. The BNP made common cause with extremists inside the Conservative Party, clowns who called themselves the Conservative Monday Club. They all love titillating themselves by talking about their admiration for Hitler.

UKIP prefers to describe itself as “libertarian” instead of fascist and have lately made a play for a more respectable place within Britain’s right-wing. As we mentioned last month, the Conservative Party recently lost 2 right-wing nut jobs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless. Both resigned from Parliament, triggering by-elections in which each decided to run as the UKIP candidate. Carswell’s election was last week and he crushed his Conservative opponent, the first outright fascist elected to Parliament in our lifetimes. Cameron warned wayward Conservatives that “What last night demonstrates is that if you see a big Ukip vote, you will end up with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister, Ed Balls as Chancellor and Labour in power.” Miliband didn’t disagree: “The Tories,” he said, are a “party losing in their own backyard and retreating from what they used to call their own frontline. The Tories are a party that cannot win a majority at the next general election.”

Ukip's next target is Rochester and Strood, where Mr Carswell's fellow defector Mark Reckless is hoping to return to Parliament.

Mr Carswell said: 'In Rochester, as in Clacton, I believe voters will reject negative campaigns by old party machines.'

This morning Mr Farage claimed more MPs were likely to defect to Ukip within the next few months-- including Labour backbenchers.’

Former Tory chairman Lord Ashcroft tweeted that the Conservative party leadership 'must take a large part of the credit for the rise of Ukip.’

UKIP secured 60 per cent of the vote to just 25 per cent for the Conservatives-- the Tories worst drop in support in a by-election for 20 years.

‎Mr Carswell was the overwhelming favourite to retain his seat of Clacton, Essex, after triggering a by-election when he switched parties.

Turnout was 51.2 per cent with 35,386 ballot papers counted, a decrease from the 64.2 per cent turnout out at the 2010 general election.

Tory Mr Watling received 8,709 votes to finish second while Labour's Tim Young finished third with 3,957 votes.

Ukip defector Mark Reckless, who also triggered the by-election in Rochester and Strood, attended the count in Clacton's Princes Theatre.

Former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik also made an appearance in support of independent candidate Charlotte Rose, who was campaigning for sexual freedom and finished in last place with 56 votes.

Mr Carswell previously secured the Clacton seat in 2010 with a majority of 12,068 votes over Labour's Ivan Henderson, having first being elected to Parliament in 2005 in the Harwich seat.

His victory for Ukip means that 12 political parties will be represented in the House of Commons, thought to be the biggest number since 1945 and an indication that Britain's traditional two-party system is fragmenting.

It is the first time an MP who has defected and stood under a different banner in a by-election has won since 1973, when Labour MP Dick Taverne resigned his seat and stood for 'Democratic Labour.'

The victory has piled more pressure on the Conservatives to retain the seat of Rochester and Strood, where the second defector to Mr Farage's party, Mark Reckless, will stand next month.

In an interview with the magazine Newsweek Europe, to be published today, Mr Farage makes the audacious suggestion that he is aiming for a ministerial job if Ukip wins a number of MPs in next year's election and is invited to join a coalition.

Mr Farage said: 'What I will say is this: if things go well next spring, I would like to be minister for Europe,' he said. 'I mean that quite seriously.'

'I would like to be the person who goes to Brussels and says, "We want to trade with you. We want reciprocal relationships. But this European Treaty doesn't work for us, and so we are breaking it".'

Mr Carswell said Ukip's rise was 'a profound change in British politics.'

He said the strong showing in Heywood and Middleton, a 'rock-solid Labour seat' meant 'we can take votes from the centre-left as well as from the centre-right.’

He told Sky News: 'The idea that we are somehow the Tory party in exile, that myth died this evening.

'We are a different party that stands for all Britain and all Britons, from disillusioned former Labour voters to people who have given up on politics altogether, every bit as much as for traditional Conservative voters.

'This is something new, this is something different. The real significance is that result in the north of England. We are part of something that is profoundly different in British politics.'

He said his data showed that '45 per cent of people who voted Labour in 2010 voted for me.'

Dismissing the Tory attack that a vote for Ukip helps Mr Miliband reach No 10, he said that in Heywood and Middleton 'it was the Conservative vote that kept Ed Miliband's candidate in.'

Mr Carswell, who said he still had many friends in the Tory ranks despite his defection, said: 'I've even had some nice friendly texts from people in the Cabinet-- they are friends and they are going to stay my friends.’

John Cassidy, writing for this week’s New Yorker asserts that the rise of right-wing extremism in the U.K. is part of a worldwide movement that includes the radicalization of the GOP here in the U.S. The centrist government in the U.S. is at least not rushing headlong towards the right-- wait tip Hillary is president-- but in the U.K. is has.

Wrapping themselves in the flag and excoriating what they view as a corrupt élite, these protest parties attract the support of alienated voters from across the political spectrum. By channelling economic distress and cultural alienation into resentment of foreigners, welfare beneficiaries, and government officials, they come to drive the political agenda. Meanwhile, avowedly left-wing parties, where they still exist, hardly get a look-in. And moderate progressive parties, far from being presented with an opportunity to enact an egalitarian agenda, are forced to back up and defend basic institutions of social democracy, such as progressive taxation and a universal social-safety net.

In the United States, the Obama Administration, to its credit, has offered this defense. By getting the Affordable Care Act enacted, it even managed to fill a big gap in the safety net. In Britain, by contrast, the Conservative–Liberal coalition, working under the banner of austerity, is steadily chipping away at the welfare state, cutting the level of benefits, tightening qualification requirements, and forcing students to pay more. But even that agenda isn’t tough enough for UKIP, which, in addition to bashing immigrants and Eurocrats, makes a fetish of targeting “scroungers” who subsist at the taxpayers’ expense.

…To be sure, we’re just talking about two by-elections. Come the general election, protest parties tend to fall back—UKIP may conform to that pattern. For now, though, Farage is setting the political agenda, and some of the other parties, particularly the Conservatives, are pandering to him. Cameron has already promised a referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the E.U. Last week, at the annual Conservative-party conference, he announced that, even before the referendum takes place, his government will scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, which enshrined the principles of the European Court of Human Rights into British law. But that announcement wasn’t enough to check the progress of UKIP.

And where is the equivalent of Farage on the left? Nowhere to be found.