"The Centre Ground"

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there:

With Sinn Fein on the Policing Board, why complain about the PSNI training the Police in Libya? Northern Ireland, carved up between members of a bizarre fundamentalist sect who have put on suits and a Marxist guerrilla organisation who have put on suits, is at the cutting edge of “centrist” politics. And we all approve of that. Don’t we?

Calling something “the centre ground”, so that anything else isn’t, is really a way of calling it “the only acceptable opinion”. Who are New Labour to tell us what that is or is not? John Reid, formerly a member of the Communist Party, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power? Peter Mandelson, formerly active in the Young Communist League? Alistair Darling, former supporter of the International Marxist Group? Jack Straw, ally of the pro-Soviet communists in the NUS? And so on, and on, and on.

The “moderate”, “mainstream”, “Centre Left” New Labour was, and is, riddled with this sort of thing, not always recanted. New Labourites sang not The Red Flag but The Internationale at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. And, despite also being covertly assisted by the CIA through NORAID, the Soviet-funded IRA was an integral part of this little world. It still is.

Likewise, the “moderate”, “mainstream”, “Centre Right” Cameroons include ex-cheerleaders for the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown, as well as former defenders of Pinochet’s Chile. Some of them once moved in circles in which it was also de rigueur to demand the dismantlement of the public services, the legalisation of all drugs, the abolition of any minimum age of consent, and much else besides. Once again, it has not necessarily been recanted. And, once again, Northern Ireland, in this case the DUP and those sections of the UUP which have since left it, was and remains integral.

Look at the things that “centre ground” politicians all support, so that any deviation is “extremism”. From the Iraq War, to the funny-money flogging off of the schools and the hospitals, to practically uncontrolled immigration, are these policies with which most people would at least broadly agree? “The centre ground” also includes support for the European Union, which subjects us, both in the European Parliament and in the coalitions filling the Council of Ministers, to the legislative will of assorted Stalinists, Trotskyists, neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, East European kleptomaniacs and other neocon crazies, and people who regard the Provisional Army Council as the sovereign body throughout Ireland. Those ranks will soon to be swelled by Turkish Islamists, Turkish ultra-nationalists, and Marxist Kurdish separatists.

New Labour has duly installed in the Speaker’s Chair the erstwhile Secretary of the Immigration and Repatriation Committee of the Monday Club. And the New Tories are heavily dependent on Demos, one of several continuity organisations created out of the ruins of Marxism Today, whose founding director, Geoff Mulgan, could be on course for a peerage and ministerial office under Cameron.

Don’t vote for any of them. Make alternative arrangements.