Category: Right-wing populism
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The free speech on campus culture war rages on
This was originally posted on my Patreon page over the weekend. If you enjoy my work and have the means, please subscribe and support my research/writing. In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump repeatedly referred to ‘cancel culture’, ‘radical professors’ and ‘speech codes’ as things to be battled in the United States.…
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Today’s right-wing talking points resurrect yesterday’s fascist tropes
Last weekend, The Independent published a piece by myself on how the contemporary hard right are reusing fascist tropes from the 1930s. Below is a longer version of that piece with links added. As public disorder has swept across the United States in protest against police brutality, many on the right have blamed ‘antifa’ for…
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There is no such thing as the ‘alt left’
Earlier in the week, a journalist at the ABC asked me some questions about whether there was such a thing as the ‘alt left’ and the possibility of left-wing violence in the twenty first century. I responded, but in the article published, there were no quotes from me. As the article has attracted significant criticism…
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Two new opinion pieces on the history of fascism and anti-fascism
A quick post to let people know that I have had two opinion pieces published this week on the history of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain and Australia. Firstly, the Times Higher Education website published a piece on the pre-history of ‘no platform’ and the protests against far right speakers on university campuses in the…
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The last time the government evoked the ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ slogan
The new Home Secretary Amber Rudd has, in the wake of Brexit, evoked the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’, which has been used in the past by Gordon Brown in 2007 and by the British National Party and the National Front in the 1980s. While she has been heavily criticized for her statements, this…
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The Communist Party of Australia reports on ‘the Battle of Cable Street’
The importance of the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ for the Communist Party of Great Britain has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, but I thought readers might be interested in how it was reported on in the Workers’ Weekly, the bi-weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia. On Friday October 9, 1936, the newspaper…
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My article in The Guardian on the history of the Australian far right
Just a quick note that I have reached the bourgeois elite now. The Guardian Australia website has published a short piece by myself on the history of the far right in Australia since the 1960s. The argument of the piece is that the far right has swung between electoralism and ‘direct action’ at different points…
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From Powell to Brexit: My interview with the Weekly Worker on ‘race’, anti-racism and the British left
This week, the CPGB’s Weekly Worker (see here for more info on its background) conducted an interview with me about my forthcoming book, British Communism and the Politics of Race, as well as on my research in general and the anti-racist movement in Britain since the 1960s. You can read the full interview here. It…
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Theresa May and UKIP: A repeat of Thatcher and the NF in ’79?
While everyone is falling over themselves to make analogies between the Labour Party of the 1980s and that of today under Corbyn (or stressing that it’s not a repeat of that decade), we are also in danger of seeing Theresa May’s time (however long) as Prime Minister through the prism of Margaret Thatcher. In the…
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Powellism and the advent of the British far right: The Communist Party response
48 years ago this week, Tory Minister Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he predicted dire consequences for Britain if further immigration from the Commonwealth continued. While criticised by many at the time, Powell’s speech opened up a political space to the right of the Conservative Party, mobilising around the…
New Historical Express 