Wednesday 13 July 2011

Goodbye To Berlin

George Monbiot tweets that this is our Berlin Wall moment. If so, then we could do with several more of them. Ed Miliband is on a roll. He should make the most of it.

Murdoch's biggest-selling title, now that the News of the World has gone, is the journal of record for the burgeoning white nationalist movement that is increasingly centred, not even on the collapsing BNP, but on the EDL, which has deep, deep roots in the "casual" football hooliganism of the 1980s and 1990s. It is foreign-funded and foreign-controlled, by the Fox-brewed Tea Party and by the secular Israeli Hard Right, which is currently in government, and whose American branch office was recently addressed by one Rupert Murdoch. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

Then there is the (often desperately ignorant) African-American takeover of our black politics, which is of overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean or African origin, and barely, if at all, related to African-American culture. If the things being colonised from Harlem and Chicago were being run from the Caribbean or from Africa, as they sometimes have been and are, then that would be bad enough. This, however, is not merely outrageous, although it is certainly that. It is downright bizarre. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

All political parties in certain Midland, Yorkshire and North-Western towns and cities run as (by no means always predictable) proxies for rival factions in Pakistan, to the extent that the rally designed to name Asif Ali Zardari's son as sole Chairman of the Pakistan People's Party was held in Birmingham, with a large rival demonstration outside; Glasgow is heading the same way, as both Labour's selection of a candidate for its safe seat of Glasgow Central, and the scramble for the Conservatives' list seat at Holyrood, made abundantly clear. We now have an entire London Borough in which political life is being directed from Bangladesh, even if one does have to laugh at the implicit suggestion that the East End was somehow a model of probity before the Bengalis shipped up. We now have thriving scenes loyal to each of Hindutva and Khalistan, both of which were significant at the Ealing Southall by-election. And so on, and on, and on. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

We are subject to the legislative will of the sorts of people that turn up in the coalitions represented in the European Parliament and in the EU Council of Ministers. Stalinists and Trotskyists. Neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. Members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura. Neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany. Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women as candidates. Before long, the ruling Islamists of Turkey. And their opponents, variously extreme secular ultra-nationalists and Marxist Kurdish separatists. When Jörg Haider's party was in government in Austria, the totally unreconstructed Communist Party was in government in France. In the Council of Ministers, we were being legislated for by both of them. In the European Parliament, we still are, because we always are. People who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland may not take their seats at Westminster. But they do at Strasbourg. And so on, and on, and on. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

More broadly, British law is subject to that of the EU. EU law does not need to pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them. British Ministers attend a legislature which meets in secret and which publishes no Official Report. Rulings of the European Court of Justice and of the European Court of Human Rights, and of the "Supreme Court", have effect in the United Kingdom without any resolution of the House of Commons. That House is elected by a system which does not reflect public opinion. And the general electorate does not have the decisive say in selecting party candidates as well as in choosing among them and others. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

Our foreign and defence policies are effectively subject to the United States, the foreign and defence policies of which are effectively subject to the Israeli Hard Right whether or not it happens, as at present, to be in government in its own country. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

There is a separatist administration in Scotland, a borderline separatist and undoubtedly language-fascist party is in government in Wales, and Northern Ireland has been carved up between a fringe fundamentalist sect and people who believe the Provisional Army Council to the sovereign body throughout Ireland. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

Our Political Class is awash with the likes of John Reid, Peter Mandelson and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in their day the paid agency of an enemy power. With the likes of Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth and the International Marxist Group. With the likes of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that controlled the National Union of Students. With the likes 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". 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. They all backed the wrong brother, those of them who had not simply migrated to Cameron, a man who, like most of those around him, comes from exactly the right background to have come of age under the heavy influence not merely of Communists but of paid Soviet agents. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

Our Political Class is awash with the old 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 old defenders of Pinochet's Chile and of other Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America. In those circles, it was also normal to demand the dismantlement of the public services, the legalisation of all drugs, the abolition of any minimum age of consent, and so on. Again, these views have never been recanted; indeed, they have largely come to pass. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

And our Political Class is awash the SDP. Apparently unable to see that the trade 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 Tony Blair without the rate for the job. It had betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed Christian Socialism (and, contrary to what is usually assumed, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, and carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration. Faced with Bennism and Trotskyism on one side, and with the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, it advocated exactly the wrong thing, "more, not less, radical change in our society". Alliance with the Liberal Party committed the SDP to constitutional agenda scarcely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, many of which have now been enacted and many of the rest of which are now government policy. Mr Miliband, tear down this wall.

Not that those are the only walls crying out to be torn down. But they are the highest, the thickest and the most viciously guarded.

14 comments:

  1. Pity you no longer read Telegraph blogs. Today has Michael Weiss trying to weasel out of Israel's new law against inciting boycotts abroad, the presence of Liberman and members of Shas in government, and Raed Salah's former service as mayor of Umm al-Fahm ("an Arab village" of 43,300 people).

    He suggests at one point that Israel is an EU member state so can't be boycotted. Are the EU and the Eurovision Song Contest the same thing now? But the main point is that anyone would think he had been reading you on the subject of the country he is paid to promote.

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  2. If Israel were in the EU, then there would be regular references on here to our being subject to the legislative will of Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, the United Torah Judaism Party, whatever the lastest incarnation of the National Religious Party is called (it'll come back to me in a moment), and for that matter the likes Ibrahim Sarsur MK, who wants Jerusalem to be the capital of the new Caliphate.

    Weiss surely doesn't really call Umm al-Fahm a village? As for boycotts, if this means academic ones, then I am not in favour of them myself. As for more conventional economic ones, you do always have to be careful that you are not hurting the people whom you are keenest to help.

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  3. The National Union. Including Micahel Ben-Ari, the first openly Kahanist MK since Kahane himself.

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  4. The very same. Who has called for an investigation in American war crimes in Iraq. The neocons have the friends that they deserve.

    Now, let's see if we can find ourselves back on topic.

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  5. The Telegraph blogs site is still oddly absent from the main body of this post. You might say it wasn't that important. But it is the major Westminster village noticeboard for several of the overlapping treasons that you list.

    White nationalism, foreign policy subordinated to America, the Tea Party's British servants, the Israeli Far Right's British servants, Murdoch in the form of Fox, they are all there. There is no other concentration of them quite like it. So why forget to mention it?

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  6. I don't read it.

    If it is as you describe, then why would I?

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  7. Some of us, the real patriots, stopped reading Telegraph blogs when Mr L was sacked for being too erudite and controversial. The readers can only relate to Popbitch, the Jerusalem Post and Gay News apparently.

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  8. Well, I don't read any of them, either. I have never even heard of one of them, so perhaps I am not that erudite after all.

    Now, can we talk about the content of this post, please?

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  9. There is no one to touch you for annoying all the right people. And this post lists all the right people. Telling them that they are all as bad each other is the worst thing that you can say to any of them. You are second to none in doing so over and over and over again. I hope you are very proud of your enemies.

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  10. With your profound appreciation of all things French, you will understand that we are now in France's position of having a Right as seditious as the Left.

    White nationalists, English separatists, Tea Party influences, secular Israeli Hard Right influences, Murdoch, lower middle class resentment, Orange tribalists, unrestricted capitalists, old supporters of South Africa and Chile, neocons: they are all as much of a threat to our ré publique as black nationalists, imported Pakistani snd Bangladeshi communalists, Islamists, Hindu fundamentalists, Sikh nationalists, old Commies and Trots, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin.

    But an earler comment had it right, you could not want a more comprehenisive collection of everyone in the first list than you find on the Telegraph site. Above and below the line. No wonder you fell out with them. Good for you.

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  11. Of course, Left-Right classifications break down here, as they so often do. Why are anarchists left-wing, but radical libertarians right-wing? And so on.

    But yes, each of the trends that you list does in fact challenge and threaten the very legitimacy and survival of our state, as such.

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  12. I don't give a flying monkey about the Telegraph blog. Will you put up my comment anyway?

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  13. Nothing could give me greater pleasure.

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