The Closed Circle (27 page)

4

Having decided that what he wanted to write was not an article, but a whole book about the British far right and their rise in popularity during Blair's second term, Philip spent almost fifteen months collecting material. Then, one morning in September, 2002, he sat down to start work on the first chapter, and three days later—having written 243 words and played 168 games of Freecell on his computer—he resigned himself to a dismal fact: he was never going to do it. For two decades he had produced nothing longer than 2,000 words; had never bothered with any argument so complicated that it couldn't be pitched to the features editor in a few seconds. “About Town with Philip Chase” might have become a tired old formula from which he was desperate to break free, but it was also—unfortunately—all he was capable of. A man must work within his limits, he concluded.

After abandoning this project, he did not look at the notes he had amassed towards it for almost two months: not until he received a letter from Benjamin, in the second week of November. That was what prompted him to boot up his computer at work one morning, and reopen the folder labelled
BNP Book.

What chaos he found there! How had he ever hoped to fashion something coherent out of this random selection of press cuttings, photographs and taped interviews? There were three sub-folders, labelled
Neoliberalism,
Fundamentalism
and
Nationalism.
These, he seemed to remember, had been the three strands he was trying to weave together in the course of his treatise. He had been hoping to argue that they could all be traced back to the same source: that the proponents of each system were driven by the essentially primitive impulse to inhabit a self-contained world, insulated from anyone with whose beliefs or way of life they felt uncomfortable.

The neoliberals
[he had written]
are seekers after purity just as much as the
fundamentalists or the neo-Nazis. The only
difference is that they are not setting
out to create a nation state based on religious or genetic principles. The state they are
building (which is rising up all around us, even as I write) is supra-national: global
travel being one of its defining characteristics. Its geographical features are exclusive hotels, exclusive resorts, gated communities of wildly expensive houses. Its
inhabitants will not travel by public transport, and will only use private hospitals.
The impulse which drives these people is fear of contact with, and contamination
from, the great mass of humanity. They wish to live among them (or rather, they
have no choice in the matter) but use their money to put up as many screens as possible, as many boundaries as possible, in order that they need only come into meaningful contact with people of their own economic and cultural type. The way that
New Labour has got into bed with these people—domestically, through things like
the Private Finance Initiatives—and in foreign policy, through their support of
Bush and the neo-cons in America—shows that it basically supports them in their
elitist and divisive objectives. Small-scale, social democratic initiatives in health and
education are a smoke-screen, a sort of lip-service paid to old style Leftism, in order
to camouflage the real nature of the New Labour project.

After this, he had added a note to himself:
Ask Claire why her boyfriend
was having dinner with Paul Trotter!!

Philip sighed as he looked over this material again. That last paragraph was all well and good, he thought, but it was meant to be the conclusion of the book, and he could never remember quite how he was supposed to arrive at it. What was the path he had hoped to trace, leading from those terrible letters Steve had been sent, to this damning indictment of current mainstream politics? It was to do with the nature of modern fascism, the way the nationalist movement in Britain had splintered, and now based itself not just upon old-fashioned race hatred but a far more tangled, far more slippery matrix of beliefs. The way that the battle-lines, which had seemed so stark and simple back in the 1970s, were now almost impossible to define with any clarity. Among the new British fascists, for instance, he had found that there were a number of thinkers (using the term in a fairly loose sense) who no longer advocated violence against the black or Asian population, and no longer talked about forced repatriation or tighter immigration controls, but who argued, instead, that white racists should form themselves into small, close-knit, rural communities, become self-sufficient, develop a quasi-mystical relationship with nature and “the land,” and generally have nothing to do with a decadent, urbanized, multicultural modern society. None of which, admittedly, was likely to appeal much to the young skinheads who still made up a large part of the movement, whose
milieu
was the inner city and whose liking for violence and hooliganism was queasily romanticized by these theoreticians as a modern version of the “warrior” spirit inherent among the Aryan people. It did, however, mean that strange, uncomfortable affinities were beginning to emerge between elements of neo-Nazi thinking and aspects of the Green movement.

Similarly, the gulf between British fascism and militant Islam no longer seemed to be as wide as Phil had expected to find it. Hatred of black, Asian and Arabic people now seemed to take second place to anti-Semitism: all the talk was of overthrowing the Zionist Occupational Government, a conspiracy of powerful Jews which was alleged to rule the world with American (and British) corporate and military backing. Perhaps it was no surprise, therefore, to discover that white racists were prepared to make common cause with revolutionary groups from other cultures committed to the same idea, and that Osama bin Laden had been a hero to these people long before the September 11th bombings. And so it was now being argued in some quarters (mainly on the internet, in nationalist discussion forums), that true National Socialism had nothing to do with racism, but was simply a political system which allowed all peoples to return to their (separate) cultural roots and live in harmony with nature and God; and the only thing holding it back—the current “established world-order” based on capitalism, decadence and Godless materialism—therefore had to be overthrown by violent or subversive means.

Philip found that following the logic of these conspiracy theories was deeply treacherous and disorientating. He kept finding himself arriving at conclusions he agreed with (that Western society was decadent and valueless, for instance) and then having to retrace his steps and anchor himself in simple facts, concrete objects eliciting a gut response in which he could trust: the foul, racist language used in the anonymous letters to Steve, or the hate-filled lyrics on the
Auschwitz Carnival
CD. In the absolute incompatibility between these things and the mystical, almost poetical outpourings of the more articulate neo-Nazis, with their talk of Folk Culture, Soil and Honour, Philip struggled to find a moral position of his own. His overriding sense was that every system of values seemed to be in a state of flux, of melt-down, and that somehow New Labour itself was symptomatic of this, constantly talking a language of beliefs and idealism but in fact behaving with as much ruthless pragmatism as anybody else, and as deeply in thrall to its own God (the free market economy) as any Muslim fanatic. The figure of Paul Trotter kept coming to mind.

But it was all far too complicated to put into words. Sometimes he would draft a paragraph or two, and read it back only to discover that he himself had started to sound like a far-right sympathizer; and then half an hour later he would look at it again and find that it now seemed to be coming from the radical left. There didn't seem to be a difference between the two perspectives any more; between anybody's perspectives. At other times, what he had been attempting looked so massive and all-encompassing that he had started to feel like Benjamin, with his ever-evolving, never-completed masterwork: which, if its fusion of words and music had any precedent at all, harked back to Wagner's notion of the
Gesamtkunstwerk,
a concept which had also turned out to sit far too comfortably with Nazi ideology. More complications! Philip couldn't get a grip on this. He was much better off doing “About Town” again. He had it in mind to write some pieces about the Gas Street Basin, how its network of interlocking canals bore witness to the bitter rivalries between the controlling companies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These, at least, were the kinds of complexities he could handle. He would take refuge in what he understood; in what was knowable.

One evening, during the time when he was most deeply mired in his research on the book, Carol had said something interesting.

“Why are you so fascinated by all this stuff?” she asked.

And Philip explained, not for the first time, about the warmth and good feeling he had observed between Steve and his family, and how sickened he had felt when he saw the things that had been anonymously written about them.

“Yes, but what's the point in dwelling on any of that? The people who do these things are just scum—lowlife. By writing about them you're just glamourizing them.”

“Well, racism is a continuing problem. These letters prove it. The case of Errol McGowan proves it. So somebody should be writing about it.”

“But in a way, what you're investigating isn't racism. I mean, racism is everywhere, but it doesn't
announce
itself. If you want to find racism, take a look inside Middle England and gatecrash a Rotary Club dinner, or something. There's a whole lot of white, middle-class British people out there who basically don't
like
black people—don't like
anybody
who's different to themselves—but they're comfortably off and they're in control of their own lives so they don't have to do anything about it: except maybe read the
Daily
Mail
and sound off about it among themselves at the golf club bar.
That's
racism. Whereas the people you're talking about, the people who organize, the people who go on demos and get into fights, the ones who talk about it openly—that's about something different. These people are damaged. Their fear and their sense of powerlessness are so strong that they can't hide it. In fact, that's why they're doing it—
they want people to see their fear.
”

“So what are you saying—that Combat 18 is a cry for help?”

“What I'm saying, Phil,” Carol answered, laying a hand on his shoulder as he sat chewing a pencil at his desk, “is that I know you. You can't write about politics, you can't write about ideas. It's too abstract for you. You're interested in
people.
That's what this book ought to be about, if you're ever going to write it: what drives people to these positions? And I think that maybe it's started to fascinate you because in the middle of all this you think you're going to find something out.”

“Something? What sort of something?”

“I don't know. The answer to some riddle. The answer to something that's been puzzling you for years. That's why it's started to take you over, this book.”

He had frowned at her, not really understanding what she meant; but her words had stayed with him, for many months, and they came back to him that November morning when he opened Benjamin's letter and saw what he had discovered in Dorset.

Dear Phil [
Benjamin wrote
],

Harding is alive and well!

Or at least, he was nine years ago.

Last week I was staying down in Dorset with Mum and Dad, and Lois and her daughter Sophie. We were staying in an old castle which had lots of log-books which previous visitors had written in. And Sophie was reading them one night when she discovered this! What do you reckon. Is it our man, do you think?

All the best
Benjamin.

The photocopied log-book entry was on four separate sheets of paper. It said:

13–17 March 1995

They say that an Englishman's home is his castle, and I very much wish that
this were true. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, my home (to which I must
return, heavy-hearted, in only a few hours) is an almost derelict caravan in the
bleak north-east of England, permanently sited in a windswept field only twenty
yards from a nuclear reactor and with the most physically and psychologically challenging sanitary facilities that I think I have ever encountered in seventy-five
years of—in retrospect—futile and utterly miserable existence.

O, that the last of the Pusey-Hamiltons should have come to this!

It has been a joy, by contrast, to occupy this noble establishment for the last
three days. If only I could have shared them with Gladys, my late and so very
much lamented good lady wife! My late ex-wife, I should say. Not because she was
fond of dressing up in latex (although there were, I must admit, two or three
happy occasions when I persuaded her to do so, during my halcyon and fondly
remembered days as secretary of the Sutton Coldfield Bondage and Rubber
Fetishists Group, a circle of respectable citizens and taxpayers engaged in entirely
consensual activities, which was nevertheless scandalously closed down by the West
Midlands Vice Squad, despite its chief officer being, at that time, one of our most
enthusiastic members. O tempora, O mores!). Now—where was I? Yes—I refer to
Gladys as my late ex-wife not for that reason, but for two others: firstly, because
she is now deceased (she died, I regret to say, within a few days of her 67th birthday, after being struck on the head by a falling Maypole during a pagan fertility
rite that got seriously out of hand); and secondly, because—and even now I can
hardly bear to commit these words to paper—she also chose to leave me, to walk out
on her loyal companion of almost forty years, shortly before our ruby wedding
anniversary.