The only good fascist is a dead fascist: The case of Paul Lumber 

Trotsky is often quoted  as having recommended dealing with fascists by acquainting their heads with the pavement. But Paul Lumber decided to save us the trouble. A leading figure in the racist, intimidatory “Raise the Colours” campaign in South Bristol, he brought his life to an appropriate end when he fell off a ladder while attempting to hang a flag from a lamppost and fractured his skull. Perhaps there is a god after all.

As you might expect, anti-racists expressed little sympathy for Lumber, and some regarded his fate as a fitting subject for schadenfreude and mockery (see my comments above). This was not at all to the liking of Spiked editor Tom Slater. In an indignant article for the Spectator (“Paul Lumber’s death isn’t funny. Why does that need saying?”) Slater lectured us on our tasteless and insensitive response to Lumber’s tragic demise.

He took even exception to Femi Oluwole’s observation that Lumber “died KNOWINGLY provoking fear and division”. Flag-hangers, Slater insisted, are for the most part just “patriotic people … who are simply opposed to mass migration, chafing at a divisive, lopsided multiculturalism, and keen to assert a sense of national, shared pride”. We were invited to believe that Lumber fell (no pun intended) into this category.

According to Slater, the hostility that anti-racists expressed towards the deceased flag-hanger was not to be explained by the fact that he was an actual racist. Apparently it was nothing more than a product of the contempt the left feels towards the working class, of which Lumber was held to be a representative member.

In contrast to the left’s malicious hatred, Slater wrote, “the tributes poured in from those who knew him. ‘He was widely regarded as one of the area’s most colourful and recognisable characters’, a friend told the media. ‘His family and friends were at the heart of everything he did’, said another. ‘Anyone who knew him will recall the pride, love and warmth with which he spoke about them all. He was a working-class hero.’”

The gushing tributes quoted by Slater originated in a report from the Bristol Post (“Well-known Bristol football fan died in tragic fall from lamppost putting up flags”) and were repeated by the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and LBC, with the latter contributing a laughably uncritical piece about Lumber. When the rest of us die, we can only hope for such adulatory obituaries.

The most Slater would concede, citing Lumber’s record of football hooliganism going back to the 1970s, was that he “might not have been a choir boy”. Here again Slater was joining the media consensus on Lumber. So far as his history of  football-related violence was acknowledged, it was presented as a youthful indiscretion, just part of Lumber’s “colourful character”.

Even a cursory study of the evidence revealed that Slater’s account was a fantasy. His accusation that the left’s hostility expressed middle-class contempt for the working class ignored the fact that Lumber was self-employed, with his own decorating company. The political tendency of which Slater is a member once claimed to be Marxists, but these days they can’t even distinguish the proletariat from the petit bourgeoisie.

More seriously, Slater ignored Lumber’s actual politics. One of Lumber’s mates was quoted as saying that he had been “known for his strong political activism and vocal criticism of the current government”. But Slater showed no interest in investigating what this activism consisted of, or in identifying the political standpoint from which Lumber opposed the government.

An obvious step for any competent journalist would have been to check Lumber’s social media history, but Slater doesn’t appear to have bothered. Lumber posted only intermittently on Facebook (probably because on this evidence he lacked the basic literacy skills required), and this was in the 2010-2015 period. But his politics are openly on display there.

Predictably, we find Lumber rallying to the defence of “English culter” against the alien hordes. In 2010, with a general election looming, he posted a warning by the British National Party about the evils of Islam, followed by a video promoting the BNP as the only force capable of stemming the flood of  migrants. In the run-up to the elections to the European Parliament in 2014 he boosted Paul Golding’s fascist group Britain First by adopting its emblem as his profile picture.

When a (ghost-written) memoir of his experiences in the violent gang of Bristol City supporters known as the City Service Firm was published in 2018, Lumber claimed he had put all that behind him and was “a different, more mature person now with a family”, to quote the Bristol Post. But there is little sign of this on Facebook. In 2014 we find him boasting about how the CSF had given a “battering” to Cardiff City supporters.

We are also provided with an insight into Lumber’s more generally antisocial behaviour: “Fuck the neighbours banging on the wall for me to turn the music down, turn it up full volume, only just getting started.” Lumber’s admirers claim his loss was “felt deeply across South Bristol, where he will be remembered with great affection and sorely missed by many”.  Presumably they didn’t include the people who had to live next door to this sociopath.

In short, in these Facebook posts Lumber comes across as a walking caricature of an illiterate fascist thug. Athough his post-2015 life is not covered there, his role in Operation Raise the Colours was of a piece with his far-right past. While Slater tries to whitewash this campaign as a movement of decent-minded patriots, anti-fascist organisations have exposed the far-right forces behind it. Clearly the situation in South Bristol was no different.

Of course this is nothing new as far as Spiked is concerned. Their despicable record of support for the far right (see for example here, here and here) was established long ago in the days of the EDL. But here we have a Spiked contributor presenting their apologetics for fascism in a mainstream magazine like the Spectator, and nobody even raises an eyebrow. It is one more example of how the far right is increasingly becoming normalised on the “respectable” right.