Never Heard

In rather a contorted piece trying both to mitigate his shameful opposition to the position of Michael Foot during the Falklands War and to defend his shameful support for the position of Tony Blair during the Iraq War, Nick Cohen suggests that younger readers may never have heard of the SDP, behind whom Margaret Thatcher was in third place before the first of those conflicts broke out. He may very well be right.

But the SDP is one of the three streams feeding into the permanent, electorally irremovable government to which we are now subject, and the ideology of which is defined as "the centre ground", any dissent from which is therefore branded eccentric and extreme. That extends to any dissent from the Iraq War, the funny-money flogging off of the schools and the hospitals, practically uncontrolled immigration, and so many other policies with which most people would and do not even broadly agree. And that extends to pointing out the facts about the backgrounds, always wholly unrecanted, of these "centrists".

Stream One is that of John Reid, David Aaronovitch and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power. Of Peter Mandelson and the Young Communist League. Of Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth and the International Marxist Group. Of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet, because Soviet-funded, faction that controlled the NUS. Of Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and Trotskyism; Milburn's only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope". Of Tony McNulty and IRA fundraising in the very city that was then bearing the brunt of the bombing campaign thus funded. Of Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation. And so on, and on, and on. Including the assembled New Labourites who sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. And including Nick Cohen.

Stream Two is that of the 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 the unrepentant former paid defenders of Pinochet's Chile. In those circles, 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.

So we see 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. We see the carve-up of Northern Ireland between that Army Council's Marxist guerrilla organisation and a bizarre fundamentalist sect unconnected to mainstream Ulster Protestantism, very Protestant though that undoubtedly is. And we see that the old sectarian Leftists of New Labour have installed in the Speaker's Chair the erstwhile Secretary of the Race and Repatriation Committee of the Monday Club.

And Stream Three is the SDP. There are more former members of the SDP in the Shadow Cabinet than on the Lib Dem front bench. The Cameron project is the SDP's path back to power. Somewhat ironically considering that John Cleese used to do Party Political Broadcasts for the SDP, there is now something of a "don't mention the War" attitude to that party. Be in no doubt, the SDP was very imperfect. Apparently unable to see that the unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, it was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Blair without the rate for the job. It had betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed Christian Socialism (and, lest we forget, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, and adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams.

Cameron has all those four political faults, and he has an SDP-laden front bench to prove it. What is more, he is heavily dependent on Demos, the Communist Party continuity organisation to whose founding Director, Geoff Mulgan, ecumenically an old Trotskyist, he has promised a peerage and Ministerial office. Cameron is of course also surrounded by the 1980s hired help of apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet's Chile.

The other two parties are just the same. Don't vote for any of them. Make alternative arrangements.