Real Causes for Real Concern

Richard Barnbrook has resigned from the BNP, and will now sit in the Greater London Assembly as an Independent. The BNP hardly seems worth bothering to hate, however revolting may be its obsequies at Yasukuni.

By contrast, those idols of neoconservatism and "liberal interventionism", Ronald Reagan (actually the man who withdrew from Lebanon and who initiated nuclear arms reduction in Europe, but that is another story) and Bill Clinton, respectively laid wreathes at an SS cemetery on a State Visit to West Germany and at Confederate Army cemeteries year on year while Governor of Arkansas. Clinton, the George Wallace of our age, is said to be planning to launch his Lurleen as a challenger for the Democratic nomination against "that boy who should be getting us coffee", as he charmingly described the then Senator Obama to Ted Kennedy.

We are ruled by an alliance of two London contingents. One contingent is of those who are loud in their admiration of Reagan but more muted, though still audible, in their admiration of Clinton, despite the fact that Reagan's record hardly contained anything of which they approved (their immediate intellectual godfathers routinely compared him to Neville Chamberlain while he was actually President and alive), whereas Clinton's record embodies their views only too horrifically. The other contingent is of those who do it the more obvious and logical way round.

But they are both thoroughly motley crews. The Almost Inexplicable Reaganites cut their teeth raising funds for, spreading propaganda for, organising visits by, and taking funds from the apartheid South Africa that had erected a monument to Hitler, the Latin American regimes that were harbouring various Nazi war crimes suspects, and assorted Holocaust deniers. The Wholly Explicable Clintonites cut their teeth raising funds for, spreading propaganda for, organising visits by, and taking funds from the heirs of and apologists for Stalin and Mao, or else maintaining the Trotskyist distinction without a difference.

One lot was not without ties to the venerators at Yasukuni even then, while the other lot was not without ties to those who had fought for Hirohito as a "liberator", and today sound more than a little like the Asian Marxists who had cheered on General Tojo in exactly those terms at the time before exercising in later life a formative influence on those who have gone on to become New Labour.

David Aaronovitch, held up yesterday as the Blairite Broadcasting Corporation's Voice of Reason against those who dared to suggest nothing more than a Coroner's Inquest into a suspicious death, was a Soviet cheerleader and dependent literally from the cradle until that system collapsed, into his middle age and not very long at all before his faction used an unexpected tragedy to install an absurd puppet at the head of the party bound to win the impending General Election, a party which Aaronovitch himself has never joined, and a puppet who had been preparing to announce his retirement from Parliament until what little mind he has was changed by the death of his, Peter Mandelson's and certain other people's archenemy.

The BNP is now merely ridiculous. Would that the same could be said of these. I know by whom we should be more worried.