Things Fall Apart

Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson. Right when the “dissident Republicans”, who would be dead if they were actually any such thing, are so visibly on the rise. Northern Ireland was carved up between members of a bizarre fundamentalist sect (unconnected to mainstream Ulster Protestantism, very Protestant though that undoubtedly is) and a Marxist guerrilla organisation. Such was 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”. The “moderate”, “mainstream”, “Centre Left” New Labour was and is riddled with unrepentant old Communists, fellow-travellers and Trotskyists. New Labourites sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. And, despite also being openly funded 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 unrepentant old paid 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 unrepentant former paid 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, these views have never been recanted; indeed, they have largely come to pass. 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. If “the centre ground” has its way, then 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 Race 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 the Communist Party of Great Britain, though whose founding director, Geoff Mulgan, is ecumenically a veteran Trotskyist. Mulgan is on course for a peerage and Ministerial office under Cameron.

And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Don’t vote for any of them. Make alternative arrangements. Or end up like Northern Ireland, land of the “dissident Republicans” and the dissolute Robinsons.