Right so far?

How the Thatcherite revolution paved the way for 21st century fascism

It is becoming increasingly difficult for the wealthy elite to hide the damage that is being done to society through their seemingly insatiable greed.

Aware of increasing discontent and wary of even the slightest rumblings of coordinated resistance, the super rich are desperately attempting to redirect working class anger inwards in order to divert our attention away from the real cause of falling living standards – four decades of anti-working class, neoliberal economic policies.

From the late 1970s the mission of the neoliberals was to reverse the gains made over the previous two centuries by the organised working class. In the UK, in the wake of World War 2, workers movements had forced compromises with capitalism such as improved wages and conditions, ‘homes fit for heroes’ and the creation of the Welfare State. The now widely discredited neoliberal project promoted the doctrine of ‘selfish individualism’ and the redistribution of wealth to the top of society through widespread privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. This crucially required the destruction of heavy industry and the decimation of trade unions. The theory (whether they actually believed this or not is a moot point) was that if we allow the economic and political elite the freedom to make as much money as possible by driving down wages, cutting health and safety regulations and removing the freedom of workers to organise, some of this wealth would eventually trickle down, with benefits for all.

The answer to the obvious question of how anyone ever fell for this nonsense is that the ascension of neoliberalism was decades in the making, with hundreds of millions of dollars having been spent on propaganda to convince working class people that not only was the illogical logical, but that this once fringe doctrine was the inevitable next step in economic evolution. Four decades of this theory being put into practice has proved the lie but, for those who have reaped the rewards, all our pain and suffering has been well worth it.

Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book, but for the filthy rich, it’s the gift that keeps on giving

The hijacking and weaponising of national flags by extremists; the ramping up of racial and religious hatred on our streets; the promotion of identity politics and the ‘culture wars’; the spreading of outrageous conspiracy theories; Holocaust denial; attempts to portray all Muslims as extremists: the scapegoating of refugees and asylum seekers; calls for the mass deportation of essential, foreign born workers; victim blaming and the racialisation of social and political problems. This is all part of a coordinated campaign to destabilise Britain and pave the way for an authoritarian self-serving government masquerading as the saviours of society.

In 2018 Steve Bannon, investment banker, founder of ‘alt-right’ Breitbart News and former Chief Strategist for Donald Trump, famously set the tone when he advised his side that, “The real opposition is the media and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” With Bannon’s guile and the likes of Elon Musk’s money the far right have created an online sideshow hall of mirrors where the wildest of conspiracy theories and the most malignant of misinformation is conflated with scientific research and verifiable facts.

The dirty war

While the hard right cynically sow confusion, distrust and ethnic/religious division amongst the working class the ruling elite and their lackeys prescribe the complete opposite for themselves.

In the dirty war against the working class their segregationist propaganda is merely a useful tool to divide us, but they know all too well that their own class interests are best served by mutually beneficial alliances across the ethnic, religious and cultural divide – an evident fact they do not want working class people to recognise.

Farage and Robinson – hired lackeys of the wealthy elite

But what of the UK’s two most prominent professional provocateurs, Nigel Farage and Tommy ‘ten names’ Robinson?

In common with many Reform UK politicians, Farage is a wealthy, privately educated, ex-Conservative Party member who passionately advocated for the Thatcherite economic policies that have undermined the nation he claims to love and created the very problems he now exploits to further his political career.

Deindustrialisation, chronic homelessness, the proliferation of Class A drugs, the rising cost of living and widespread societal breakdown did not arrive with the ‘small boats’. These were pre-existing conditions caused, in the main, by the political choices of the Thatcher administration and its successive UK governments, including Tony Blair’s New Labour, that slavishly applied the same, now discredited economic programme.

Operation Raise The Double Standard

While Farage encourages ethnic and religious division amongst the working class, he places no such restrictions on himself or his associates.

Reform UK is a multi-ethnic, multi religious party in which wealthy politicians of all faiths and none happily work side by side. These people don’t give a toss about each other’s backgrounds as long as they are making money together.

It is very telling that, while Farage gleefully whips up hatred and suspicion against decent working class people from Muslim backgrounds, he has no issue collaborating with those of the Muslim faith in his own party and, shamefully, with Islamic fundamentalist elites abroad. Revealing more of the man behind the ‘respectable’ mask he has openly stated that if he achieves office he will work with the Taliban, the enemy that Britain was at war with for twenty years ending in 2021, to repatriate individuals and families who have sought sanctuary in the UK from the horrors of the Afghan regime – a regime, let us not forget, that is still largely unrecognised internationally – in the full knowledge that he would be handing them over to almost certain torture and death.

Farage’s double standards regarding the Taliban not only expose his hypocrisy and indicate how comfortable he is in the company of murderous totalitarians, they also give us an indication of what deportation would actually mean in any future Reform UK type administration.

Farage’s hero, Margaret Thatcher, would no doubt have been very proud. Maggie was also rather partial to overseas dictators. She enjoyed a personal friendship with Augusto Pinochet, who seized power from Chile’s democratically elected government in 1973 through a US backed, military coup. Pinochet’s fascist regime was responsible for the systematic torture and murder of left wing opponents. Around 30,000 direct victims of human rights violations were recorded in Chile, with 27,255 tortured and 2,279 executed.

200,000 people suffered exile and an unknown number were ‘disappeared’. When Pinochet was finally indicted and arrested for crimes against humanity, Margaret Thatcher lobbied to have him released. Unfortunately, the tyrant died before facing charges.

The bloody fascist coup that birthed neoliberalism

Pinochet’s campaign of terror and brutality, waged against the democratically elected government in Chile and its supporters, cleared the ground for the South American country to become the pilot for the neoliberal economic experiment. Buoyed by the results in Chile, the Conservative Party and the Democrats, in the UK and US respectively, embraced the neoliberal philosophy and upon their consecutive election victories in 1979 the Governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan unleashed neoliberalism upon the wider world.

The elephant in the room

The proverbial elephant in the room for the far right is that the authoritarian regimes they support are a major cause of the international refugee problem that they shamelessly exploit to further their political or ‘influencer’ careers.

Leaving aside historic cases such as the support for the aforementioned dictatorship in Chile and for the theocratic Mujahadeen in Afghanistan (the precursor to today’s Taliban), it is the support from British ‘nationalists’ for foreign ethno-nationalist regimes such as Likud in Israel and for proxy wars in Iraq and Syria (both incidentally fought against the backdrop of brutal totalitarian dictatorships) that exposes the cynical opportunism of their public stance against refugees. And if this wasn’t enough, the asylum seekers filling UK hotels are also lining the pockets of multi-millionaires who make substantial donations to these same right wing parties.

Until we dismiss the propaganda of these hate-fueled, right wing grifters, who appear to have a problem for every solution, we will continue to go around in circles. We need to recognise the symbiotic relationship between the authoritarian regimes that create the conditions driving the tragic merry-go-round of forced migration and the reactionary movements cynically undermining attempts by host countries to deal with the refugee crisis.

Refugees do not flee Scandinavian, left leaning democracies, Basque Country cooperative communities or other places where there is political accountability and a relatively high standard of living for working class people, they escape from the brutality of the type of ultra conservative, authoritarian dictatorships that the likes of Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’ dream of bringing to the UK.

Refugees: the stats

Research by the United Nations, found that more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born: ‘In 2024 the global number of international migrants was 304 million, a figure that has nearly doubled since 1990, when there were an estimated 154 million international migrants worldwide. International migrants comprise 3.7 per cent of the global population, having increased from 2.9 per cent in 1990. Female migrants constituted 48 per cent of international migrants’.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that, at the end of 2024, there were an estimated 43.7 million refugees across the globe, including 6 million Palestinian refugees. 8 million of these refugees were asylum-seekers.

‘Oh, Tommy Tommy…’

Farage’s fellow millionaire scam artist, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon), has also made a lucrative career promoting ethnic nationalism and anti-Muslim hatred.

Yet Robinson seems to have no issue with Muslims when they are lining his pockets. He is a member of Advance UK, an extreme right wing party that broke away from Farage’s Reform UK. Advance UK is led by the ex-Deputy Leader of Reform, Benyamin Naeem Habib, a wealthy Pakistani born Muslim. But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there; Tommy/Stephen has built a career positioning himself as the UK’s No 1 crusader against Islamic extremism yet, behind closed doors, he is funded and vociferously supported by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk – a close business associate of the brutal Saudi regime – the world’s top exporter of Islamist terror.

Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk also have a ‘complicated’ relationship with Judaism. Robinson recently reiterated his belief in the manufactured conspiracy theory of a Jewish plot to undermine western civilisation – a myth used by the Third Reich to justify the slaughter of around 6 million Jews in

WW2. Yet, despite Robinson’s propagation of this dangerous anti-Jewish myth, Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right wing, Likud government has welcomed him to Israel.

You can take the boy out of apartheid South Africa…

Tommy’s ally, Elon Musk, a South African Holocaust denier with familial links to the Nazis, is widely seen as a kingpin of the international fascist movement because of his funding and promotion of extremist propaganda and disinformation through his social media platforms. In full knowledge of all this he was appointed to the inner circle of the Donald Trump administration (and would probably still be there if not for the inevitable clash of egos that signalled an end to the grotesque bromance). A cosy friendship with another powerful President does endure though; like his puppet, Tommy Robinson, Musk also enjoys a cosy relationship with the Israeli Leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Fascism doesn’t start with concentration camps – that’s where it ends

The far-right parties that came to power across the world in the early to mid 20th Century had common basic features which place them in the wider fascist family: an autocratic leader; ultra-conservatism; militarism; totalitarian ambitions; a belief in racial superiority; the need for a scapegoat; nostalgia for a mythic idyllic past; a view of women as domestic servants and most notably, a hatred of the organised working class. Although it is true to say that the rabid dog of fascism has a tendency to eventually bite off the hand that feeds it, as with today’s far right groups, the early fascist movements were routinely funded by elements of the ruling elite as a tool to suppress working class militancy.

Prior to the rise to power of the fascist movements of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Italy and Germany had the most developed working class movements in Europe and the ruling class in both countries feared the possibility of a revolution for political and economic democracy. The short sharp shock of far right violence was seen by the ruling elite as a way of restoring their old corrupt order. Early into the flagship Italian dictatorship, trade unions were banned in order to prevent any organised resistance to the planned increase in production and drop in pay and working conditions. In Germany, once the Nazis came to power, they followed suit, abolishing trade unions and other workers’ organisations before setting up concentration camps for their predominantly working class, left wing political opponents.

In the 1930s the rise of fascism was a reaction to the strength of the organised working class. Today, conversely, fascism is re-emerging across Europe almost unchallenged because of the weakness of our class. For the first time in over a century the working class is bereft of a unifying philosophy and is without political or industrial organisation – a situation that has been deliberately engineered over the last forty years by governments who have faithfully followed the playbook of neoliberalism.

This relentless onslaught has cleared the field for today’s ultra-conservative ethno-nationalist groups who have crept out of the shadows without any need for the jackboot or iron fist. Through well planned, well funded social media campaigns recruits have been groomed and primed and are being encouraged onto the streets by their wealthy backers as a pre-emptive strike against a possible working class political renaissance.

Here in the UK of course, white nationalism is the horse that the super rich are backing. In a population where non-whites are in the minority, the dominant ethnonationalist strain is ‘White Nationalism’. However, historically and internationally, fascism was not, and is not the preserve of any one ethnic or religious group.

20th Century fascism adopted different qualities from country to country in order to tap into the culture and conditions of the particular region. If we take religion for example: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Irish and Croatian fascist parties had a very cosy relationship with the Roman Catholic Church (though early in the days of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Black Shirt membership was open to all, and included a number of Jewish members); Nazis in Germany had a diverse range of ideas on religion. Hitler held strong anti-Christian beliefs, while a few leading party members practiced orthodox German Protestantism and others were attracted to the Occult; in Japan, Emperor worship was promoted alongside the main religions of Shintoism and Buddhism; there were Muslim fascist legions in Egypt and the Balkans; Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had both Protestant and Catholic branches and the Indian Hindutva movement was Hindu separatist.

The nature of the beast

The dominant narrative, shaped by right wing actors, is that ethnic and religious groups are homogeneous. This is patently ridiculous. All societies have class antagonisms and understanding this helps us find a way through the dense forest of right wing black propaganda.

 While racism is invariably a component of ethnonationalism, the target of this racism varies according to the location of the particular far right organisation and, even then, can shift according to convenience.

British fascism wraps itself in the union flag, espousing white ‘Christian’ superiority to appeal to the majority population, citing ‘Jews, Blacks, Asians and Muslims’ (amongst others) as the enemy, but fascists in other countries choose different scapegoats, usually according to existing prejudices and enmities.

Paradoxically, understanding the breadth and diversity of fascism can help us get to grips with the core nature of the beast. So to this end, it’s probably worth a brief diversion to look at a range of ultra conservative movements that developed across the globe in the early to mid 20th Century.

Marcus Garvey – ‘the first fascist’

Though he never achieved the power he craved, it is probably worth a brief look at the influential Black Nationalist, Marcus Garvey, to help us understand the nature of fascism. While it is important to recognise that, in practical terms, Garvey’s impact was to raise the confidence and consciousness of black people in the Western World who were subject to the most horrendous persecution, unfortunately, an examination of the man and his end game reveals a totalitarian dictator in the making.

The Jamaican demagogue was disgusted at Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, for allegedly stealing his ideas. Garvey insisted that he was ‘the first fascist’ and if we look at the pompous home-made Napoleonic uniform, the Messiah complex, the racial separatism, the anti-Semitism and authoritarian tendencies, it’s hard to disagree with him. In Garvey too, we find the fascist phobia of miscegenation. He bitterly opposed “race-mixing” and regarded the Ku Klux Klan as ‘better friends of the [black] race, than any other whites’. Garvey also adhered to the all important (from a fascist perspective) hatred of the working class. His vision for a ‘Black State’ in Liberia excluded black workers, in favour of intellectuals and the well educated middle class (although he was happy to recruit working class members into his paramilitary security force, the African Legion). The African Legion was deployed, more often than not, to attack rival black leaders and organisations including black communists. It is important to note that at the time, Garvey and his reactionary ideas attracted robust opposition from prominent black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, Claude McKay, Pauli Murray and Frantz Fanon.

The Jewish far right

Regardless of the common perception that Jewish people are inherently anti-fascists; given the collective memory of the Holocaust, the truth is that in common with societies elsewhere, Jewish societies were/are subject to class division and with the setting up of the Israeli state, Jewish fascists finally had a national flag to rally behind.

As far back as December 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were amongst 29 prominent Jewish figures that signed an open letter to the New York Times airing concerns about the emergence of an extreme right wing Jewish party in Israel. The opening paragraph of that letter is worth quoting in full:

‘The most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine’.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party can be seen as the heir to this early emergence of Israeli fascism. Likud is rabidly anti-Arab/Muslim and, as such, the party recently accepted an invitation to join other anti-Muslim parties from across Europe, as ‘an observer member’ on the EU fascist block, PfE (Patriots for Europe). The fact that many of these parties have previously espoused extreme anti-Semitic views and that they have a profound nostalgia for the regimes in their respective countries that played an enthusiastic part in the Holocaust, seems a moot point. For Netanyahu, who is currently the subject of a high profile corruption trial in Israel, it doesn’t appear to be the methods of the Third Reich that disturb him, but merely the ethnicity and religion of the victims. This is evidenced not only by his genocidal campaign against Palestinians, but also through his relaxed attitude to working alongside German far right party, the AfD, whose members have called for a ‘Srebrenica 2.0’ in reference to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War, a massacre that was the first legally recognised genocide in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Netanyahu also seems to have no concern about the backlash of anti-semitism being suffered by innocent Jewish working class communities across the world in response to his genocidal actions against the Palestinians and his alliance with anti-Semites. His own expansionist political agenda and personal ambition are obviously far more important to him.

Fascism in the Islamic world

The inner circles of the Saudi Arabian, Iranian and Afghani Islamic elites also live the high life while many working class Muslims in these countries live in poverty and suffer brutality and murder if they fail to fall in line with the demands of the regime. These regimes closely resemble European fascist movements and it is often forgotten that some Muslims in the Middle East, fought alongside the Nazis in World War 2 – mainly over a shared hatred of Jews – motivated by Hitler’s cynical, pseudo scientific propaganda that Germans, Middle Eastern Muslims (and incidentally Indian Hindus) are all part of the ‘Aryan Master Race’. Other Muslim fascist parties who rose to prominence in the first half of the 20th Century include the Young Egypt Party (the Green Shirts) founded in 1933 and the Nazi SS Handar Division from Bosnia. European fascism also had a strong influence on the Baath Party in both Iraq and Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood which was founded in Egypt 1928.

Imperial Japan

While the veneration of the leader is a staple feature of fascism, this reached another level in Imperial Japan. Here, the Emperor, who claimed direct descent from the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu, was literally worshipped. Likewise, the cult of death, destruction and martyrdom which permeates fascism generally was also taken very seriously. The Imperial regime demanded total sacrifice from its soldiers and this was demonstrated no more so than in the Kamikaze suicide attacks on US warships.

The Japanese case may appear, at first glance, too exceptional to qualify as fascist but an overview of its wider strategies suggests otherwise.

On achieving power, the regime waged war on the organised working class. Unions and left wing parties were attacked and decimated (incidentally trade union membership shot back up, very soon after the end of WW2 – much to the horror of the new US overlords); the regime harboured grand colonial ambitions; censorship was enforced by a Gestapo style secret police called the Kempeitai; the general population was indoctrinated into ideas of racial superiority and a nostalgia for the feudal Samurai past; the whole of society was militarised and women were kept subservient. While internal scapegoats were less of an issue in Japan than elsewhere, the regime was anti-Western, having a special loathing for the USA and also fostered an intense hatred and the racial denigration of China and Korea.

A class act or a race to the bottom?

Liberal analysis of fascism that reduces the phenomenon down to white racism is a dangerous misreading of history and a hindrance to understanding how to combat the current global resurgence in authoritarian politics. An analysis that insists that black people or Jews, for instance, cannot be racist or fascist fetishises both groups as somehow unique from the rest of humanity and removes agency; on the one hand casting perpetual victim status upon them and on the other, excusing the monstrous behaviour of autocratic leaders. This plays into the hands of segregationists, both white and black, as it concentrates our attention away from our shared humanity and common working class interests.

Thatcherism – The Road to Serfdom

Some of those who became obscenely rich as a result of the global application of the Thatcherite policies of privatisation and deregulation will, it appears, never be satisfied.

Aware that democracy, even in its most limited form, is stifling their James Bond villain level ambition, they look to authoritarian regimes across the globe, both historical and contemporary, for inspiration. It is important to understand that it is the authoritarianism of a regime, rather than its creed or colour that attracts fellow extremists and it is this authoritarianism that is key to understanding the superficial contradictions in both the Farage and Robinson camps. How else would we explain anti-Semites working with the Jewish Israeli state, anti-Islam activists partnering up with the Islamist Saudi and Afghani regimes and self-professed ‘British Patriots’ talking Britain down in the US and Israeli media and taking bribes to promote Russian business interests in the UK? These people are not patriots, they are narcissistic traitors out only for themselves.

If we view the world through the distorted lens of the mainstream media and online far right propaganda, it is no wonder that the picture often seems obscured and that none of this makes sense. But if we turn the binoculars around the right way, the picture comes into focus. When we view these political/financial relationships through the lens of cold hard economics and class interests, there is no contradiction at all. It’s the age-old story of greedy, amoral, self-serving elites and their fellow travellers forming convenient alliances to grab as much for themselves as possible at the expense of the rest of us. The alliances may shift as egos clash and brinkmanship comes into play, but they are always on the hustle and we, the working class, always pay the price.

These days, crackpot conspiracy theories are spewed across the political landscape like vomit on the Saturday night city streets. It is no coincidence that this confusing cacophony of nonsense serves to obscure the real, flesh and blood conspiracy of neoliberal capitalism’s creeping replacement by increasingly authoritarian solutions. Let’s be crystal clear; the super rich are uniting along class lines for the very reason they fear us doing the same – because it is a winning strategy.

Don’t be mugged off. Don’t be fooled by their lies and disinformation. The clock is ticking, but we still have time to turn things around if we pull together. We need each other now, more than ever.