Thomas Mair described himself to the Police as “a political activist”, and so he was.
No Irish Republican organisation has murdered a Member of Parliament in 26 years, and the people responsible are now such pillars of the British Establishment that they stay overnight at Windsor Castle and so forth.
No Islamist or Leftist organisation has ever murdered a Member of Parliament.
But the Far Right has done so, in 2016.
National Fronts come and BNPs go, EDLs come and Britain Firsts go, but certain institutional and organisational manifestations of the Far Right are perennial, hitherto even permanent.
Mair’s is the Springbok Club, which is run by the people who also run the London Swinton Circle.
And that, in turn, was addressed by Liam Fox (born 1961) and by Owen Paterson (born 1956) as recently as 2014.
Ah, those old 1980s Tory Boys, in their Hang Mandela T-shirts and all the rest of it. Wherever did they all end up?
In the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years, there were Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club.
Those crossed over, via such things as the League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, and so on.
Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, was a Vice-President of Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership Campaign. He answered what was listed as one of its official telephone numbers (in his house) with the words “British National Party”.
The days of treating even support for the NHS as Loony Leftism, while maintaining no right flank whatever on the officially designated political mainstream, are well and truly over.
The dominoes are going to start to fall, and some highly prominent people in what thinks that it is now this country’s perpetual party of government need to be very, very, very afraid.
This is happening. Everyone who was a Tory student in the 80s was surrounded by the Far Right. They were everywhere. They have managed to get away with until now when a Sprngbok Club member murdered an MP. Alongside the collapse of its economic reputation, this is enough to bring down the Tory Party. Sit back and watch.
ReplyDeleteSit back and watch nothing.
DeleteIt was still going on far later than that. In October 1997, into the Blair and Hague years, a friend of mine who was fairly high up in such things showed me the catalogues that were automatically sent out to everyone in the Young Conservatives.
White supremacist and Holocaust denial literature, and cassettes of the marching music of the Waffen SS. Yes, really.
That's before we even start about Gove, P.W. Botha's little helper.
ReplyDeleteHad apartheid South Africa survived to the advent of Tony Blair, and they missed each other by only a matter of months, then a "realistic engagement" with it would have matched the cover that previous Labour Governments had provided for it at the UN.
DeleteThe opposition, which was always treated as part of the "Loony Left" when that term was current, would have been confined to an alliance stretching from the churches, through the Labour Left (including the famously arrested Jeremy Corbyn), to the Communist Party. Just as it had been under those Governments.
The Far Right has never been a very big world in Britain, it is inconceivable that no 80s veteran in this government knew 52-year-old Thomas Mair personally. Lost touch with him, maybe. But at least one of them must have known him.
ReplyDelete