Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, immigration, poll, v for vendetta

Could V For Vendetta Could Really Happen In Britain?

Published Sun, 27 Feb 2011 07:44:53 -0600

In the comic V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, an alternative future history is seen, one where the really-left wing Labour party win the 1983 General Election (at the time they were well ahead in the polls) and cancel all nuclear weapons, a manifesto pledge. There is a nuclear war, but Britain is spared the attack and survives. However the country is thrown into economic chaos and from it emerges Norsefire, an anti-immigration, anti-miscegination, anti-gay, anti-semetic party who are elected and enact a fascist state.

Years late, Alan Moore stated that the most fantastic thing there was to suppose that not only could we survive a worldwide nuclear war just because we weren't fighting in it, but it would take a war to plunge Britain into such a system. That was a direct criticism of British governments that followed, but it was a major exagerration – whatever their flaws, and despite the rise of the likes of CCTV, no one could realistically argue that even the greatest excesses of Thatcher and Blair could match the concentration camps and fascist state control of Norsefire.

For now anyway.

According to a new poll almost half of British people would consider supporting a party that banned immigration and restricted the practice of Islam, as long as the group was not involved in violence or used fascist imagery.

A report by the Searchlight Education Trust, an anti-fascist group, will be released tomorrow entitled Fear and Hope – the New Politics of Identity. They are worried that the only reasons that a group has yet to rise is that existing parties such as the British National Party and the English Defence League are associated with reports of violence. The project will be unveiled by Labour failed leadership candidates David Miliband and Jon Crudda. Cruddas is quoted as saying that there is a "very real threat of a new potent political constituency built around an assertive English nationalism".

This attitude however is not restricted to the white English popular however. The survey also finds;

39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that "immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country". Just over half of respondents – 52% – agreed with the proposition that "Muslims create problems in the UK".

Say, I wonder what John Hurt's doing right now?