Legitimising Racism: An Exploration of the Challenges Posed by the Use of Indigeneity Discourses by the Far Right

Abstract

The disintegration of the British National Party (BNP) has removed the threat of the party securing a place in the political mainstream in the UK. But, in coming close to this objective it has succeeded in renewing and legitimising both its own claims to speak on behalf of the indigenous people of Britain, as well as the similar claims of other groups such as the English Defence League (EDL), the English Democrats and the Freedom Party. Rather than assessing the impact of the BNP in terms of the number of votes and councillors, this article contends that the renewal of racist discourse may enable far right views and ideologies to penetrate and gain acceptance in mainstream British society over the next decade. This article examines the re-shaping of the rhetoric of indigeneity by the BNP to legitimise racism. Using articles originally written for the BNP magazine Identity between 2006 and 2008 and extracted from the BNP website in advance of the 2010 elections, this article discursively analyses the way in which the BNP deploys the concept of indigeneity in its constructions of social groups in Britain. It is suggested that the potential (mis)use of indigeneity as a legitimising vehicle for racist and illiberal views and policies is exacerbated by the lack of clear definitional boundaries around the concept of indigeneity itself.

The Ideology and Discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not Racist, Not Violent, Just No Longer Silent’

“…Both groups focus on Islam as a central danger threatening Britain, yet for the BNP Muslims are merely a particular symptom of the wider problem of immigration and multiculturalism. Muslims are considered racial ‘others'by the BNP, lacking the white Anglo-Saxon ‘liberal gene’ that genetically predisposes the British to liberal democratic culture (Williams and Law 2011, para. 5.7–5.8).…”

The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia

“…This is not only historically nonsensical but morally devious: by turning the vulnerable into the powerful and the powerful into the vulnerable, this misrepresentation of power relations legitimizes the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Brexiteers have adopted this very apocryphal narrative, an affinity that has revealed yet another thing (Williams & Law 2012): it is not so much immigration Brexiteers are against, but rather a certain kind of immigration; theirs is a selective xenophobia, an Islamophobic and illiberal phobia, a fear of a Muslim geography that cannot be fended off using the tools of liberal legal frameworks, for it is the liberal principles of the rule of law, equality before the law, non-discrimination and respect for human rights that prevents taking the necessary measures to exclude 'the Muslim''. "We are back to being a normal country, in charge of our own laws and able to start making our own relationships with the rest of the world.…”

Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League

“…Electoral results from show that support for such parties 2 in the UK did not rise above 1 per cent until 2010-12; even then, at 1.8 per cent, support remained well below that in neighbouring countries such as France (13.6 per cent) and The Netherlands (12.7 per cent) (Minkenberg, 2013: 20). The reasons for this are explored in more nuanced ways by others (see Goodwin, 2011a) but might be summarised as resulting from a combination of: the first-past-the-post electoral system, which significantly reduces the incentive to vote for candidates with little chance of securing victory in a given constituency; and the failure of the British National Party 3 (BNP) to move in the direction of a 'renewed' radical right of the kind that has emerged elsewhere in Europe (Minkenberg, 2013: 17), continuing instead to mobilise racist and racial supremacist discourse thinly disguised in the notion of indigeneity (Williams and Law, 2012).…”