First, They Came For The Nazis

Where to begin?

Well, for a start, what will George George Galloway say on his talkSPORT programme this weekend, about that station's sacking of a BNP member?

The Police are civilians, paid to do what, if the circumstances arose, we would all do, and we would all be entitled to do, for free. They should have the right to strike. And they should have the right to join political parties.

The Political Class wants a breakthrough for the BNP. Numerous Westminster Villagers sped that along in the polling booths of London not so long ago, making sure that the BNP got the GLA list seat for which it was in any case well on course. And they regard with unalloyed glee the prospect of at least nine, and probably 12, BNP MEPs next year. That would secure First Past The Post for at least a generation. It would be the excuse for all manner of repressive measures aimed mostly at the white working class, and therefore likely to receive little or no media coverage. And it would confirm all their own prejudices, enabling them to denounce "pandering" to actual or potential BNP voters.

David Dimbleby displayed not one hint of irony when he glided, on Question Time, from the panel's denunciation of the BNP to the news that in a fortnight's time that panel would include Martin Maguinness. The BNP is currently confined (even if not for much longer) to a few council seats here and there. Whereas Northern Ireland is in fact governed by a very heavily armed gang of Marxist terrorists who act in full accord with their belief that the sovereign body throughout Ireland is their own Army Council, one member of which is Martin Maguinness.

The BNP is, for some reason, in favour of an English Parliament. Neither Sinn Fein nor the bizarre fundamentalist sect, unconnected to mainstream Ulster Protestantism, with which it has carved up the government of Northern Ireland is in any sense normal there. Those who now run Wales by using Welsh as an upper-middle-class cordon sanitaire in English-speaking areas are neither normal residents of those areas nor normal speakers of Welsh. The SNP has nothing whatever to do with the normal political culture of Scotland, which is different hardly, of at all, from that of England in general and, if anything, the North in particular, rather than being preoccupied with constitutional questions.

And there is nothing normal about either the BNP or a certain sort of sectarian Marxism which taps, it is true, into an older Radical idea of a pre-Imperial, and thus (it is held) pre-British, England. (Something similar exists in pockets of English Catholicism, with the Reformation replacing the Empire.) But expect the pair of them to share the running of any English Parliament, never mind of any independent England. In the other three parts of the United Kingdom, much the same thing may already be observed, and more than observed.