Wolves Inside The Door

Thomas Mair, the murderer of Jo Cox, described himself to the Police as “a political activist”, and so he was.

 

No Irish Republican organisation has murdered a Member of Parliament in the present century or in the preceding decade, and the people responsible are now such pillars of the British Establishment that they are entertained at Windsor Castle. No Islamist or Leftist organisation has ever murdered a Member of Parliament. But the Far Right has done so, only last year.

 

Although a “strong supporter” of Israel did attempt to murder George Galloway while he was the MP for Bradford West. These days, though, that constitutes part of the Far Right. Give that a moment to sink in.

 

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 have already started to fall. 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.

 

But no part of the Far Right, including fanatical support for Israel, is ever treated as a security risk. Just as you can never be too young to be taken entirely seriously as a right-wing commentator. Not long ago, the Telegraph and the Spectator were simultaneously carrying someone who was still at school.

 

And just as there is no view so right-wing that it would preclude, say, a Times column, or a regular gig on The Moral Maze. “White Western nationalism” was extolled repeatedly by Melanie Phillips a few weeks ago, days after she had written that there were no such nations as the Scots and the Irish.

 

Try and imagine a public figure remotely as Far Left as that is Far Right. You can’t. It couldn’t happen.