In Extremis

Not before time, the dreadful events in Norway are forcing us to pay some attention to the burgeoning white nationalist movement centred on the EDL. It 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. But there is also 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.

All political parties in certain Midland, Yorkshire and North-Western towns and cities are now being 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 a London Borough in which political life is being directed from Bangladesh. We have thriving scenes loyal to each of Hindutva and Khalistan, both of which were significant at the Ealing Southall by-election, and both of which have their own ties to the EDL.

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 ultranationalists 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.

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 or 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. Nor does the general electorate have the decisive say in selecting party candidates as well as in choosing among them and others. 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. There is a separatist administration in Scotland. A borderline separatist and undoubtedly language-fascist party is in government in Wales. Northern Ireland has been carved up between a fringe fundamentalist sect and, again, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to the sovereign body throughout Ireland.

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 Labour’s Red Flag, but the Communist Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook.

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 forth. Again, these views have never been recanted; indeed, they have largely come to pass.

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 those have now been enacted. Many of the rest are now the policy of all three parties.