By Charlie Wilson
The day after the magnificent counter demonstrations by anti racists dwarfed the few far right die-hards who turned out for their overly well flagged prospective attacks on immigration lawyers offices on 8th August, anyone looking at the front pages of the right wing tabloids will be forgiven for having picked up the distinct whiff of burning rubber from the screeching U-turns in the line of front page headlines. After years of pumping hatred of refugees and immigrants into the body politic, headlines like “United Britain Stands Firm Against Thugs” in the Daily Express and “Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down the Thugs” must have made disorienting reading for regular subscribers used to reading article after article preparing the ground for the sort of actions that those same thugs had taken over the preceding week and a half. As if butter wouldn’t melt…
A variation on that theme from the Metro neatly pivoted to blame Russia with the headline “Putin’s Pawns Stoking Riot”, using the accusation that bots based there were copying and amplifying the accounts of “Brexit backing British patriots” (sic) even though the “Russia expert” from Chatham House that they quoted “told Metro it would be a mistake to ascribe all social media of this sort to Russia”. The more overt and unhinged interventions from Elon Musk come to mind. Incidental fishing in troubled waters of this sort is dwarfed by the online and offline support for the UK Far Right that flows from the United States, because the significant funding of the UK Far Right by US Think Tanks that promote Islamophobia, Sinophobia, and climate denial reflects geopolitical imperatives where the defence of US global dominance overlaps with a domestic imperative to divide and crush the working class. The climate denial aspect of this is not incidental, but central.
To maintain its current 5 planet lifestyle, while it transitions towards sustainability at a pace slow enough not to threaten the wealth and power of its ruling class, the United States has to suppress the development of the Global South and stave off the challenge from China, to keep carbon emissions unbalanced in its favour. As China is rapidly becoming the world’s renewable energy superpower,
- with more than half the global total of new solar and wind investment in production this year, to the point that they are within 1% of overhauling coal as the main energy source,
- their solar energy companies now producing more usable energy each year than the big seven western fossil fuel companies,
- their EV companies looking like they will eclipse Tesla and the fossil fuel legacy car companies,
- their high speed rail showing a viable alternative to medium haul flight,
the US approach is now to try to slow this down, complaining of “overcapacity”. As if the world needs fewer cheap solar panels or affordable EVs. They are not emulating the Chinese model because they can’t, as that would require the private sector not to be in charge of the economy with the government as its servant.
Their economic attack is not working out; the tariffs are blowing back and the US economy, for all the hype about it, is now running out of steam. This is despite doubling down on fossil fuel investment, with the Biden administration having granted 20% more licences for new oil and gas as the Trump administration did, accelerating the trajectory that has made the US the world’s biggest oil state. This would continue under Harris, who has pledged no fracking ban, but drill down even deeper if Trump is returned, with sabotage of the half way house towards the Green New Deal set up by Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act – which acts to suck what sustainable capital investment there is into the US from its subordinate allies through “Made in America” subsidies – and ripping up the UN framework for global cooperation represented by the Paris process. This would be America with the mask off. The proposal that Brazil just got through the G20 for a 2% global tax on billionaires to raise $250 billion a year for climate mitigation and global levelling up would be spurned with contempt, not simply sabotaged, delayed and obstructed on the sort of US game plan that worked so well with the pledge for $100 billion annual transfer to the Global South agreed at Copenhagen but never fulfilled.
Every day that passes sees the US hegemony slipping. Hence its increased military brinkmanship in Ukraine and the South China Sea and fuelling the genocidal attack on Gaza by its lynch pin in West Asia, each of which is edging closer to nuclear war. When there is talk of “rising tensions in the world” or “the world is becoming a more dangerous place” Socialists should be very clear where those tensions and the drive for war are coming from. The weight of US Global power is being increasingly felt in the increasing burden of military expenditure. The “war on terror”, which might be described as the first phase of the wars for the New American Century, killed 4.5 million people according to Browns University. The wars that have marked the second phase in Ukraine and Gaza are a bloody overture to the showdown with China that so many US Foreign Policy specialists argue for that, even if it didn’t go nuclear, would kill tens of millions of people.
In the meantime the world is hurtling ever faster towards climate disaster with the hottest days ever recorded on July 21st and 22nd, Antarctica, in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere winter, 28C above normal temperature, 146 million people in the United States under severe weather alerts, heatwaves so severe in Japan and Pakistan that people are being advised not to go out, this year’s wildfires in North America and the Amazon the most severe yet, and severe flooding in China, South Africa and India. This is now becoming wallpaper. “Factored in”, as they say in the markets.
The impact of this, however, is heading for massive social dislocation and political collapse on a global level in which US strategic think tanks have posited “episodes of nightmarish triage” in which “states with resources” (i.e. them) decide who or what can be salvaged from the wreckage, with those sacrificed being “among the poorest” not just abroad but at home.
If the current massive campaign by Fossil Fuel interests to derail progress in meeting climate targets succeeds, this also has profound political implications for what kind of polity the ruling class will need to carry this out. The sort of democratic spaces that have been conceded in the most developed imperialist countries will have to be squeezed out and the working class atomised and, preferably shattered into conflict within itself.
It is therefore no accident that the far right gets a lot of its funding from US dark money, some directly linked to fossil fuel interests. According to Open Secrets in the US “So far this election cycle, contributions from dark money groups and shell companies is outpacing all prior elections and may even surpass the roughly $660 million in contributions from unknown sources that flooded 2020 elections — a cycle that attracted over $1 billion in total dark money, counting political ad spending as well as contributions”. This obviously plays into the denialist Trump agenda in the US but is also apparent in Europe. The sums are smaller, but the impact comparable. The Global Warming Policy Foundation has received more than half a million dollars through a fund linked to the oil rich Koch brothers, and has now been found in breach of charity commission rules. And £3.5 million in donations from what the Guardian called “entities linked to fossil fuels, high-polluting industries and climate denial” greased the Tory Party’s trajectory towards sabotaging its own climate targets in its dying years in office.
But this is even more the case with the far right. Its one thing to grease the palm of those currently in power, or likely to be. Quid pro quo. Its why there were so many business stalls at the Labour Party conference last year while the Tories had tumbleweed blowing through their exhibition area. But funding the far right – who are not near power yet – indicates a project in development.
This drives their policy positions. When Nigel Farage comes out with nonsense like ‘All I do know is that man produces about 3% of the CO2 produced in the world every year… and that it is nuts to call CO2 a poison’ – when without human activity the carbon content of the atmosphere would be in balance – or breezily dismisses the global scientific consensus as a “scam”, he is spouting tripe to order from the interests that bankroll his Party. In 2019 he set up a World4Brexit fund raising operation in the US, registered in Michigan and run by Peggy Grande, a former executive assistant to Ronald Reagan. It is registered in the US tax code as a 501(c)(4) organisation – which means it does not have to reveal who gives money to it. Farage was quoted in the FT after a meeting with Donald Trump at the time as saying “Trump wants to see a realignment of British politics. The Remain side is already having a realignment but now the Right will have to realign too.” The 2024 General Election, with Farage in Parliament for the first time, and sitting on more votes than the Lib Dems or Greens, together with the riots and pogroms we are now mobilising against, is the birth pangs of what that realignment will look like if we don’t face it down and defeat it.
As for “Tommy Robinson”, a second pseudonym that followed his unfortunate initial choice of “Wayne King”, the Guardian in 2019 published an investigation into his sources of finance and media/tech support at the time of his arrest for contempt of court that year. “Robinson” has a record as long as your arm for fraud and violence, and been in and out of prison like he’s doing the hokey cokey, starting in 2005 when he was “convicted of assaulting an off duty police officer who intervened to protect Robinson’s girlfriend from Robinson himself “, so “Tommy”, like 70% of those arrested for rioting, has previous.
Nevertheless, a well financed “Free Tommy Robinson” campaign was launched which included three rallies that were financed by $60,000 from a US Think Tank, the Middle East Forum and it was notable that 40% of the “Free Tommy” Tweets that were part of this campaign came from the US, and only 30% from the UK. The MEF is primarily an Islamophobic outfit run by Daniel Pipes and it, in its own words “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western values from Middle Eastern threats”. Financed, among others, by the Koch brothers, who own the second largest private company in the US with oil at its core, it runs articles with lines like “Now, with the rise of “climate change” (rebranded from “global warming”) as the latest moral panic, the BDS movement has taken to equating portents of climate damage with the environmental “crisis” in Gaza.”
Robinson’s $5000 a month salary to write for the Canadian website “Rebel News” in 2017 was paid for by US Tech billionaire Robert Shillman. This site, publishes articles with titles like “The ‘Green energy’ scam is starting to collapse” and “Climatealarmists are anti-human radicals” alongside articles like “Trump calls Harris Walz ticket Communist”. They are now running an interview with Robinson as their top story, just underneath an ad for a “solidarity mission” to Israel they are scheduling for November. On Sunday Robinson appeared on Infowars with Alex Jones, whose grotesque lie that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a hoax bankrupted him when he was ordered in court to pay compensation amounting to £1.5 billion to parents whose children had been killed. “Save our kids” anyone? Jones is still running his channel pending having to sell it off to pay the debt and “Robinson” is shameless enough to appear on it.
Shillman is also on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which also backed Robinson with a series of articles and efforts to lobby US politicians. The Washington Post notes that “Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming”.
Another US Think Tank, the Gatestone institute, which gets some of its funding from the Robert and Rebekah Mercer – Hedge Fund Billionaires who are also the chief funders of Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica – has published articles in defence of Robinson alongside articles with titles like ClimateChange Alarmism Is a Lie that Must Stop.
So, while the UK Far Right does not get all of its funding from a stream of US dark money with a distinctly oily tinge – and they are by no means its sole recipient – they will be consistently bailed out and refloated by it, whatever form they take, and however they realign, because the ruling class will have need of them if we do not prevent the “Age of Consequences” from unfolding in its full horror.
Image: Tommy Robinson on the “Anything Goes With James English” Podcast in 2023; Source – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJajUrb7AKc; Picture cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.