Don't Go Wilders

The Wilders-Fortuyn tradition is actually the same as the sort of thing now being put out by the likes of the National Secular Society, opposed to immigration by Poles because they are orthodox Catholics, or by African Pentecostals simply as Pentecostals, rather than to the practical consequences of mass immigration as such, or to the subversion of Christendom by Islam.

Wilders is still in favour of the war in Afghanistan, just so long as his own country no longer has to fight it. He is opposed to welfare provision and other public services, to full employment and workers' rights, and to the classically Christian basis of the State and of the wider culture. The Muslims are not his real target; on the contrary, both mass immigration itself and a particularly virulent challenge to Christianity are very useful to him. His real targets are the orthodox Catholics and the small but very strong conservative Protestant "pillar" (one of whose parties, though not the other, has a growing appeal among African immigrants).

He is not without his equivalents in Britain, one of whom has popped up all over the place in the last week to denounce the presence at local level within a political party of people who dared to practise prayer and fasting, a presence presented, including on a publicly owned television channel, as a self-evident evil. We have been warned.