Cowardly politicians, a deceitful press and the rise of the far right in Britain

Far from preventing a rise in fascism, adopting the tone and priorities of fascists only helps them to seem credible

Each set of local elections over the past decade has seen a drip-drip of support towards the British National Party. Despite the BNP's attempt to rebrand themselves as glossy, 21st-century far right wingers, these are seriously unpleasant people. To give just a few examples: Paul Thompson, a BNP candidate in Gateshead, has taken part in Combat 18 attacks and was described by the High Court judge Sir Charles Gray as "a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist"; and Mark Collett, a BNP candidate in Leeds, has said that his hero is Adolf Hitler and that he'd rather live in Nazi Germany than in contemporary Britain.

Some of these people might actually win an election tomorrow – yet the main political parties have sought to avoid a confrontation with the far right, for two reasons. The first is admirable: nobody wants to give the BNP the oxygen of publicity. Let them rant, howl and curse in a dark corner; the Burnley and Oldham fever will pass, party tacticians argue. Even in the handful of seats the BNP do fight, they never get anything approaching a majority, so why dignify them with a response? The second reason, however, is more telling: nobody has stood up firmly to the BNP because both major parties – one way or another – are conceding to BNP-style sentiments about asylum-seekers.

Asylum-seekers, whatever their ethnicity, are the new blacks and Irish: everyone feels free to spit in their direction. This climate has been fed by a rabid tabloid press – with the honourable exception of the Daily Mirror – who have realised that racism sells newspapers. When a boat sank in the English Channel last December, the Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn lamented the fact that it didn't contain asylum-seekers. He didn't even bother to add the word "bogus": his hatred extends effortlessly to those who are fleeing torture and rape. The Mail, Star and Express are filled with outright lies and abuse; the classic slurs about immigrants which used to be applied to Jews – that they are greedy, selfish thieves carrying disease – are there. Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail has asked why more people are not proud of "white culture"; it is a mentality which informs his whole paper. Of course, these newspapers pay lip-service to opposing the far right, but all the while they passionately articulate an agenda close to that of the BNP.

One sign of how close the overlap is between far-right discourse and our tabloids can be seen in the figure of an odious man called Gary Bushell. He is a former TV critic for The Sun, where he gave vent to his prejudices readily, and he now writes for the Daily Star, which has a rapidly growing circulation. When he announced that he was thinking of running as London mayoral candidate for the UK Independence Party, the BNP was delighted. They are considering standing down their candidate to give him a "free run" on the "white nationalist" right. They lauded his "involvement with nationalist patriotic [ie far right] parties in the past", and his support for repatriating immigrants. A spokesman said that "the declining number of White folk in the capital will ... see Mr Bushell's patriotic platform as a means of salvation from the multicultural mess our once-great capital city has descended to".

Every day, newspapers like Bushell's, motivated by sentiments similar to his own, pour out lies about asylum-seekers. They are told there are three million illegal immigrants in the UK – a ridiculous, concocted figure; that asylum-seekers live in luxury ("wall-to-wall welfare", in Littlejohn's words), when they get £37 a week and flats on estates that nobody else wants to live on; that they get "free holidays", which turn out to be a day trip for their kids to Blackpool; and so on. The notion that we in Britain are a "soft touch" is bizarre, as is the idea that asylum-seekers are "flocking" to Britain. Per head of population, we are 10th in the European league table of 17 countries for taking in refugees, and our benefit levels are among the lowest.

Of course, not every person who is concerned about asylum is a fascist. But everyone who rants about refugees without mentioning these facts – and carefully pointing out that even "bogus" asylum-seekers are decent people fleeing poverty and seeking a better life – feeds the misrepresentations which are so rife now.

The clear job for any British government, especially a Labour one, is to calmly rebut these lies. The Home Office under David Blunkett has instead conceded to bigotry and insisted that they are trying to "tackle" asylum-seekers. It is not hard to see why. There is no doubt he and Tony Blair find the BNP repellent, and are horrified by the poisonous language used. They rationalise their behaviour by saying that they are trying to prevent something worse happening, like a substantial neo-fascist resurgence.

Yet the historical record does not back up their analysis. After six years of being horribly tough – so tough that this year, several asylum-seekers have ended up homeless and begging simply because they did not claim asylum at port – the Government is damned on two fronts. Not only have they pursued an immoral asylum policy, but also they get no electoral credit for "toughness".

The French experience shows that appeasing the far right over asylum only helps the far right in the long term. Professor Harvey Simmons, an expert on neo-fascist parties, documented the conditions that gave rise to the Front National. From the mid-1980s – when Jacques Chirac first had a spell as Prime Minister – the political class conceded that the FN, fresh from very limited success in local elections, had voiced "legitimate concerns", and began to act on them. Far from abating, FN support grew. And so the story continued: governments got tougher and tougher, and the FN eventually became so popular that it squeezed the left out of the second round of the presidential elections altogether. Far from preventing a rise in fascism, adopting the tone and priorities of fascists only helps them to seem credible.

Why is the current government – so good on many issues – wantonly refusing to learn this basic lesson? Even if New Labour became yet more harsh, the tabloids will simply lie, as they do today, and say it isn't so. Asylum-seekers are treated more badly by the state now than at any time since the Second World War, yet still the Axis of Asylum-Bashing – The Sun, the Mail and the Express – claim that they are living it up at the Savoy. Perhaps it is not just that New Labour has the wrong analysis; perhaps they are cowards, afraid to challenge and lead public opinion. I hope that this is wrong, but I fear it is not.

The only moral option for Blair is to now be as tough on quasi-fascism at home as he was in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Here is a moral crusade and a half: challenge the lies and turn around the obscene mistreatment of asylum-seekers in Britain. If Blair doesn't, shunting victims of torture on to British streets will continue to be a terrible scar – both on his conscience and on our country.

j.hari@independent.co.uk