What Respect

Punctuation to this post's title will be supplied on request.

Obviously, Labour has had to expel those Tower Hamlets Councillors and activists who have adhered to the Independent candidacy of Lutfur Rahman, an adherence which more than suggests that they either couldn't care less, or else are positively delighted.

But Andrew Gilligan (on whom Google "Andrew Gilligan Keith Vaz") has a new attack line, namely that all of those who have signed Rahman's nomination papers have "Asian" names. Now, one can bemoan the fact that nomination only by people from a certain background in a mixed area is seen as an electoral asset rather than an electoral liability. I for one certainly do bemoan that. But exactly what upper limit would Gilligan put on the number of "Asian" names permitted on any candidate's nomination papers, and why?

Having switched sides, Gilligan has work to do in convincing his new comrades that he is trustworthy, but this really does look like trying a bit too hard, to put it at its very mildest. One really does not have to carry any candle for Rahman or his supporters to deprecate most ferociously the assumption, and that as if it were self-evident, that only upper-middle-class white atheists should be permitted to play any part whatever in the political process, with no one else even allowed to join a political party. Never mind to wonder how and why the Telegraph Group became the media outlet for the expression of that assumption and for a sustained political campaign on the basis of it. The Times, you could understand, even expect.

When is Labour going to expel the 1970s Communists, fellow-travellers and Trotskyists who re-named themselves New Labour as they followed academic Marxism from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means to the same old ends, and who have just been defeated, by however improbable a candidate for that purpose, in the Labour Leadership Election?

When is the Conservative Party going to expel the assorted Hard Leftists and (mostly South Asian) communalist rabble-rousers whose defections it regularly welcomes with open arms? Or those who adhere to Demos, a Communist Party continuity organisation which was nevertheless initially directed by a Trot, a Trot whom Cameron would have given a peerage and Ministerial office if he had won an overall majority, just as surely as he would have kept on the old Communist Peter Mandelson?

Or the 1980s Radical Right, unrepentant old supporters of apartheid South Africa, of the Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America, and of many another such regime from Marcos to Mobutu, from Suharto to the Duvaliers, and unrepentant, like the sectarian Left with which it has converged in the last 15 or 20 years, in its advocacy of the legalisation and normalisation of drug use and of sex with children?

Or the continuing SDP party-within-the-party, not least on The Times, which is still acting out the betrayal of Gaitskellism over Europe, the attitude to nuclear weapons wholly at variance with the best of High Toryism, the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, her regret at not having resigned in protest against past Labour measures to restrict immigration, and, related to all of those but especially to the last, the fanatical hatred of trade unions? (On the eve of this year's General Election, there were more former SDP members in the Shadow Cabinet than on the Lib Dem front bench. On 28th May, all four panellists on Any Questions - Polly Toynbee, Andrew Adonis, Vince Cable and Toby Young - were ex-SDP.)

When are both parties going to expel their "Israel First, America Second, Britain Third (If At All)" lobbies?

One could go on. And on, and on, and on.

So, when is anyone in the media going to expose any of these entryist tendencies and the havoc that they are wreaking? Don't hold your breath.