My Godfather Andrew Fountaine was an interesting man. He lived in a giant house (in Spain, it would be called un palacio) in the middle of the Norfolk countryside called Narford Hall. It had 52 bedrooms and a private chapel reserved for Henry VIII (when he happened to be in the neighbourhood). Andrew was known locally as being bitterly against fox hunting, and he would empty a shotgun in the general direction of anyone he saw on his estate wearing red and riding a horse. After the War, Andrew – something of a Mosleyite – went into politics but ‘…exiled from the Conservative Party prior to the 1950 general election, Fountaine, standing for a new party, the National Front, fell just 361 votes short of being returned to Westminster. He would remain a prime mover in the NF cause throughout the 1960s and ’70s – ‘the movement’s moneybags to a large degree’ – losing more elections along the way…’
He wasn’t much of a godfather, truth to say. I don’t think he ever passed me a single cheque drawn on Coutts.
There’s a ringing quote from Andrew in the 1948 Conservative conference where he denounced the Labour Party as consisting of "semi-alien mongrels and hermaphrodite communists".
He told my mother (she was a cousin of his) that his party didn’t need or want the usual suspects – Blacks, Homosexuals, Jews (although they seem to favour Israel in these interesting times), Women (their place is in the home), Intellectuals (always asking difficult questions) and any Aristocrats (present company excluded). No, he said, we want the down-trodden, the poorly educated, the fearful and the (beery) flag-wavers.
A generation or two later, the British have Brexit, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
These days, here in Spain, the equivalent to this collection of extremists is the Vox party and their leader Santiago Abascal (he often dresses up in military outfits, presumably for the sake of it). He and many of his circle came from the Spanish conservative party, the PP.
I was having dinner the other night with a conservative friend with ties to the Establishment in Madrid, and he says that the apparent 15% approval that Vox enjoys is in fact badly understated; in fact, the latest poll finds them with 19% favour. Since then, they’ve squabbled with the Catholic Church and been found to have received a second tranche of money from a Hungarian bank.
Across Europe we have these hate groups, politically linked in every way except for the detail on the flag, while being strongly supported and financed by the Russians and their allies. In England, there’s currently an (embarrassing) George Cross flag-waving anti-immigrant campaign. Here we have the Vox politicians attempting to disallow Muslim prayer meetings.
If you see someone with a Spanish flag wristband, that’ll be a Voxxer, so don’t ask them about Franco. It also leads the question – can you have a national flag without being a Nationalist? Unless it’s the season of the World Cup, then evidently not.
Social Media has been kind to Vox (extreme posts often attract more attention that the softer ones, as Donald Trump would tell you), while several eccentric groups such as Abogados Cristianos, Hazte Oir and Manos Limpias have all helped to put a spoke in the lefty government’s wheels, and then there are several news outlets which are heavily subsidised by the far-right who print what they’re told – OKDiario, The Objective and EDATV being examples...
It may be too soon to fear a Vox government, but they would likely enter through the back door in an alliance with the Partido Popular (the party under Feijóo’s control could never earn a majority). Expect lots of flags.
Perhaps I’ll be able to dine out with my Andrew Fountaine stories.
The PP and Vox: a likely case of the tail wagging the dog.