Sold Short

Ted Short? I mean, we all know that there was a large pro-Soviet faction within Labour. And some of us know that it, with the Communist Party itself and with the Trots, created New Labour, having followed academic Marxism's transition from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means. Like the American Trotskyists who surrounded Bush. And like the Portuguese Maoist who, via a rabidly "free"-marketeering and pro-Bush Premiership, is now the President of the European Commission.

But Ted Short was decorated by Franco, is a Companion of Honour (in the personal gift of the monarch), and is or was a Vice-President of the Prayer Book Society. Just ask any Hard Leftists who go back to the Wilson era what they think of Short. Please do not spoil a good and important story with something as silly as this.

During the same period, the Tory Hard Right was devoted to a Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown. That Republic sponsored an act of high treason against the Queen, and those traitors not only purported to abolish the monarchy, but even removed the Union Flag from their own, as not even the Boer Republic ever did.

Political extremism is fundamentally alien to this country, and involves alliance with hostile foreign powers, whether the Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, the extremely anti-British Clinton and Bush Administrations, or the heirs of Irgun and Lehi.