What is a Fascist?

10.25.17pm UTC (GMT +0000) Sun 13th Mar 2005

Tony Greaves "New Labour's behaviour will continue to bewilder. All we can do as Liberal Democrats is stick to our principles and do everything we can to reduce the damage that they are doing. Fascist or not, these things are wrong and long may we stand up and fight them."

Tony Greaves is a leading member of the Liberal Democrats and is both a Councillor and a member of the House of Lords. The following article was written in the middle of the recent debates in parliament on the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. It originally appeared in the Liberal Democrats weekly newspaper, Liberal Democrat News, on Friday 11 March and has been reprinted here with his permission.

"I have to pinch myself, really I do. I watch all these people traipsing into the government lobby to support measures which until recently we all thought were the hallmarks of fascist regimes, apartheid South Africa, tin-pot banana republics, and the old so-called people's democracies of Eastern Europe. Mussolini and Galtieri, Mugabe and Verwoerd, Eric Honecker and Uncle Joe Stalin. And a few more.

Yet there they are. Voting to deprive people of basic freedoms - of association, speech, movement, making a living - with no rights to challenge the evidence against you, warmly say-so of a minister, and on the basis of no more than security services tackle dressed up as 'reasonable suspicion'. (Like Sadam Hussein launching rockets full of WMD at Cyprus at three quarters of an hour's notice).

Then I remembered some of these people only last week defiantly proclaiming their socialism after my noble friend Roger Roberts had been teasing them over their enthusiasm for massive new casinos.

To be fair, some are ministers and whips who have to do as they are told. It's easy to be cynical but if you are doing a good job (or think you are) it's genuinely hard to throw it away just because the rest of the government are making a mess of things.

But socialism? This is where I start to pinch myself. For the past 40 years a few of us have been telling sceptical colleagues that socialism and liberalism do not mix. That 'we are the bosses now' and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' are just different sides of the same coin.

Of course there is socialism and socialism (and there are socialisms and socialisms…). A lot of members of the Labour Party have always been good Liberals at heart, and often in practice - not least colleagues now in the Liberal Democrats, and some of the Labour MPs and peers who have been resisting the Anti-Terrorism Bill.

Then I remember the vehemence with which many people on the left socialists and labourites alike - used to attack the whole of the ruling classes, with 'the privately educated privileged white male judiciary' at the top of the list. Alongside the House of Lords, of course!

Perhaps it is not a surprise that calls from such quarters to "defend 800 years of historic liberty" (which sound like sophistry until you realise that it really might be about habeas corpus)fall on deaf ears in some parts of the Labour Party. But I still start that pinching business.

Peter Hain used to bang on endlessly about libertarian socialism, a construction he said really did bring together the classic watchwords of equality and liberty. Now as Blair's cheer-leader in the Commons he is leading the attack on both and denouncing opponents the South African apartheid style banning orders with a 'soft on terrorism' script he must have learned from Doctor Verwoerd and Mr Vorster. Pinch yourself? It hardly seems to meet the scale of the moment.

Of course it would be ludicrous to describe the new Labour project as fascist. There may be concerns in other quarters about the growth of something very like Mussolini's corporate state - the bringing together of the public and commercial sectors in an ever more complex system of local and regional quangos, partnerships, networks and forums, ever more strictly controlled from the centre, is a case in point.

But even with political hooligans like Hazel Blears on the loose, this is not a racist government. What is worrying is not where it is at, it's the direction in which it is moving. If you really get into the habit of triangulating to the right, how do you stop?

If you have quite deliberately abandoned ideology and replaced it with amorphous and ultimately mean-anything 'values', how do you know when and where to stop?

It's tempting to say: "if it sounds like a fascist and puts forward proposals that would not be out of place in a fascist state, then???" But the people I watched traipsing through those lobbies are not fascists and they do not 'looked like a fascist', tempting though it may be to imagine John Prescott with three rows of medals on his chest!

Monday and Tuesday in the Lords were magnificent. By the time this piece appears the end-game will have played itself out. Compromise will have been reached and the Tories may have surrendered as they too often do. Anti-climax will set in.

But New Labour's behaviour will continue to bewilder. All we can do as Liberal Democrats is stick to our principles and do everything we can to reduce the damage that they are doing. Fascist or not, these things are wrong and long may we stand up and fight them.