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Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests


Who Are These "Far Right"?

Tuesday, 20th November 2007

Regarding various fascist types and holocaust denialists appearing at the Oxford Union:

Police are bracing themselves for violent clashes between university students and far-Right groups after the Holocaust-denying historian, David Irving, and the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, were invited to speak at the Oxford Union.

Why are these groups known as "far-right"? Their economic ideas are corporatist, a combination of a strong State, strong unions and big business. A version of socialism in fact, not all that surprising given that Mussolini, Hitler himself (in so far as he actually had any economic ideas), our own Moseley were all of the left.  Indeed, it can be argued that the closest the UK came to a form of fascist economics is in the Wilson/Heath years, when a similar corporatism was touted as the solution to all our problems.

Is it the racism? Either that only people on the right can be racist (patently absurd) or that racism is nasty, leftists are good, so any racist must be on the right?

I realise that I've got as much chance of changing the nomenclature here as I have of bagging a date with Claudia Schiffer, but can we please get this sorted out? Fascists are socialists, of the left, admittedly socialists of a particularly racist kind, but of the left all the same.

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