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.

 

The white terror – Déjà vu about fascism and the reactionary turn of our time.

In the summer of 1980, Italian fascists blew up the central station in “red” Bologna. 85 people were killed, more than 200 were wounded. The terrorists had close ties to the Italian military intelligence and NATOs secret stay-behind groups. In Norway in the summer of 2011, two fascist lone wolf terrorist attacks were carried out against the government square block and the Youths Labor party summer camp, claiming the lives of 77 people and wounding more than 300. August 2^nd in Italy and July 22^nd in Norway are both markers of the worst terrorist acts in post-war Western Europe. In this guest post, Idar Helle, a member of the Transnational Labour Project in Oslo, reviews the book by Eystein Kleven 22. juli-terroren: Angrepet på arbeiderbevegelsen [The terror of 22^nd of July: The attack on the labor movement] (Marxist publishing 2011, 42 pages).