On the storm to come: Right-wing extremism moving centre-stage in British politics.

‘We Want Our Country Back’ – On Saturday, 6 September, the third Saturday in a row, English nationalists draped in union jack and St George flags protested noisily outside the Best Western Hotel in Long Eaton, where many asylum seekers have been housed. Shouts of ‘Stop the Boats’ were combined with anti-trans, anti-Palestine and anti-left slogans, intermixed with direct personal attacks on migrant supporting counter-protesters, taking up position on the other side of the road in front of the hotel itself. In this blog post, I will discuss why these developments mark a dangerous turn in British politics.

 

How to explain the Swiss vote against the Free Movement of Workers

On 8 February 2009, almost 60 percent of Swiss voters supported the extension of the bilateral EU-Switzerland agreement on the free movement of workers to workers from Romania and Bulgaria. In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that this clear endorsement of the free movement of Romanian and Bulgarian workers in the Swiss labour market is noteworthy because the Swiss People Party (SVP) at the time conducted an overtly xenophobic campaign against it, depicting Romanian and Bulgarian workers as black ravens that were pecking on a map of Switzerland. Whereas xenophobic inclinations may be a recurrent feature of humanity, xenophobia can hardly explain the sudden shift of Swiss voters against the free movement of all EU workers in the referendum of 9 February 2014; notably after a referendum campaign in which the SVP – for once – avoided the use of xenophobic stereotypes on its major campaign poster.