Stoking Britain’s Political Fringe

How Trump Is Stoking Britain’s Political Fringe

And why it will hurt the special relationship.

By ALEX MASSIE

This is a sentence that grows no less astonishing the more often you read it:

Eighteen months after a member of the House of Commons was assassinated by a supporter of Britain First, a far-right, anti-Muslim organization polluting the fringe of British public discourse, the president of the United States essentially endorsed the organization, retweeting three videos originally posted by its deputy leader, Jayda Fransen.

Yet, who can really be surprised it has come to this? Even here in Britain, our days have assumed a familiar, if wearisome, pattern. As breakfast is taken in Washington, the world turns to Twitter to see what President Donald Trump has said now. What fresh insight into his fevered brain has he given the planet? Charitable interpretations of Trump’s first year allow that, hitherto, his presidency has been an aesthetic affront more than it has resulted in policy disaster—at least on the international stage. But aesthetics—the mood music of modern politics so often dictated by social media—is still a matter of some importance.

Just what was Trump associating himself with through his retweets on Wednesday? The videos purported to show Muslims committing acts of violence: beating up a young man on crutches, destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary, pushing a boy off a roof. (The first video, claiming to show a Caucasian Dutchman being assaulted by a Muslim immigrant actually showed a squabble between two Dutchmen, according to a local official.) Nevertheless, in this instance, retweets can be taken as (Islamophobic) endorsements. Fransen certainly thought so: In response to the attention from @realDonaldTrump, she tweeted, “GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP!”

Fransen, 31, could hardly have hoped for a better present at this time of year. With a single tweet, the president of the United States put a fringe bigot at the heart of what is becoming an international incident. Fransen was convicted last year of religiously aggravated harassment for berating a woman for wearing a hijab. A week after the conviction, which resulted in a fine, Fransen posted a video online in which she suggested, “If the presence of armed police is required to protect an innocent Christian family against Muslims in Britain, then they should be permitted to turn their guns on those Muslims.”

Britain First is a fringe organization even by the standards of fringe organizations. In 2011, the movement broke off from the far-right British National Party. Today, Britain First exists to stoke outrage and a sense of dread, promoting the concept of an unavoidable clash of civilizations between white, Christian Britons and the non-white, immigrant, often Muslim population. It is not, at heart, a political party so much as it is a movement of racist alienation. As Britain First sees it, the “native” British are losing, betrayed by a feckless elite who know little and care less about the future health of their country. Indeed, the elite are a subset of the problem itself, selling the true-born Britons’ birthright for a mess of multicultural pottage. Last year, Fransen warned that the organization’s “pro-EU, Islamist-loving opponents” were “ruining our country.” Britain First, she vowed, “will not rest until every traitor is punished for their crimes against our country. And by punished, I mean good old-fashioned British justice at the end of a rope.” This, then, is the company the president of the United States of America now keeps.

Accurate estimates of Britain First’s membership are hard to come by, though most suggest it has no more than 1,000 active members. It specializes in provocative stunts such as carrying crucifixes through heavily Muslim neighborhoods or asking mobs of Union Jack-waving patriots to “invade” and occupy mosques. As an electoral force, Britain First is close to an irrelevance. Last year, its leader, Paul Golding ran in London’s mayoral election and won just 1 percent of the vote. Like Fransen, Golding is due in court later this month on further charges of religiously inspired hatred and harassment. Last year, he was jailed for four months for breaching the terms of a court order banning him from entering mosques. When Fransen stood in a parliamentary special election in 2014, she won just 56 votes.

Social media remains a land of opportunity for organizations such as Britain First, however. Golding has boasted that “we’re looking forward to all the new followers and support we’ll get from Trump’s publicity.” In a video message to Trump, recorded on Thursday, Fransen appealed for Trump’s help in advance of her next court appearance. Complaining that Britain has become “Sharia compliant,” she said she was speaking “on behalf of myself and every citizen of Britain and for everyone, every man and woman that has fought bled and died for us to have to have the freedom of speech.” One analysis of Britain First’s social media reach, done by a Scottish investigative outlet, reported that from February 2016 to January 2017 the group’s Facebook posts earned more than a million “reactions”—almost four times as many as on the Conservative Party’s official page. While this partly reflects Britain First’s high volume of posting, it’s still disturbing to think the audience for the group’s provocations is so widespread.

Until Trump tweeted, Britain First’s cravings for attention had been subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Their provocations needed to be endured just as much as they required confronting. That has showed in the reaction to Trump’s retweets this week. As Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States, put it, “British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far-right, which seeks to divide communities and erode decency, tolerance and respect. British Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding citizens. And I raised these concerns with the White House yesterday.”

Brendan Cox, the widower of Jo Cox, the member of Parliament murdered by a Britain First supporter last June, spoke for the vast majority of Britons, saying, “Almost nothing Trump does surprises us anymore,” including the dispiriting fact that “the president of our nearest ally is sharing far-right hatred, giving them a microphone.” Jo Cox, an advocate for refugees, was murdered outside her constituency office in Yorkshire by an assassin named Thomas Mair, who, according to eye-witnesses, repeatedly screamed “Britain First!” as he stabbed her.

Typically, Trump doubled down, tweeting at Theresa May, the British prime minister, “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom.” May duly condemned Trump’s retweets, but the affair is a mighty embarrassment for the prime minister: Her decision in January to hug the new U.S. administration close looked foolhardy at the time and has hardly improved with age. In the House of Commons on Thursday, fresh calls were made to cancel a Trump state visit that is due to take place at some point next year. How can Britain honor a president who, one member of Parliament asked, is “either racist, incompetent or unthinking or all three?”

As yet, plans for a Trump state visit remain in place. In a post-Brexit environment, the British government has been careful to reaffirm long-standing alliances, including holding out hope for a bilateral trade deal with the United States. Still, it is hard to see how a Trump visit could pass off without incident. When one MP suggested on Wednesday that the world might be a better place if the president of the United States deleted his Twitter account, Amber Rudd, Britain’s home secretary, allowed that this is a view “many of us might share.” Some of Rudd’s colleagues went further: Sajid Javid, the secretary of state for communities and local government, tweeted, “So POTUS has endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organization that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing.” Almost every other significant figure in British public life—from the mayor of London to the archbishop of Canterbury—agreed.

It is important to remember, however, that there is an audience for Trump’s revanchist nationalism in almost every Western democracy, and Britain is no exception. Indeed, many Brits see Trump as one of their own. In that sense, asking Trump to cease encouraging groups such as Britain First spectacularly misses the point: Even if he forswore the delights of Twitter, his presidency would still offer such groups more encouragement than they need. At the very least, doing so gives marginal racist groups more publicity than they could ever have hoped to achieve on their own. Not content with poisoning American public life, Trump now coarsens Britain’s.

Scottish activist James Dowson, the founder of Britain First, has confirmed as much. Although he left the group in 2014, complaining that mosque invasions and other stunts were counterproductive because of the backlash they invted, he sees Trumpian politics as a cure for the weakness that he believes imperils Western civilization. Among the websites linked to Dowson is something called the “Patriot News Agency,” which sought during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign to “spread devastating anti-[Hillary] Clinton, pro-Trump memes and soundbites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning,” Dowson wrote. The president’s “stunning victory” was a triumph “for Trump, America and God,” he added.

Given that, the surprise may not be that Trump has cheerfully shared Britain First posts but that it took him a year since his election to do so. Britain First is an organization of extremist trolls, but the White House is now occupied by an extremist troll, too. Why should they not get along famously?