Toxic

What is the specific, practical effect of Russian, Iranian or, although there is some of this, even Chinese influence in British politics? Nathan Gill made some speeches. He should not have, but that was all he did. And what, if anything, followed from them? What did they achieve?

But at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, platform speaker after platform speaker has been floored from the floor, most notably Ben Shapiro by Nicky Rudd, as the rising generation demanded answers about Israeli influence in American politics, about anti-Christianity in the Talmud, about violence against Christians on the part of West Bank settlers and the IDF, and about the USS Liberty. Let America cough so that we might catch some of that cold in Britain.

For the time being, though, Russell Brand regaled the attendees about the wonders of Advance UK, which they must not have known had already removed at least one activist from its meetings for having made those points. I first called him "Toxic Brand" as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation's cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday. 

In 2014, when Brand's book Revolution came out as the ideal Christmas present for the relative you hated, then I was as critical as everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star. We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand. That fact was also gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. I offered to pay Brand's rail fare to the Durham Miners' Gala, to see how it would have received him. Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all.

Brand's perpetually adolescent erstwhile admirers are still there, now in the form of Labour Together, which among other things is campaigning to repeal even the heavily watered down Employment Rights Act, and the Resolution Foundation, which was largely responsible for that dilution, as well as contending that billionaires could not be taxed but cripples could because cripples could not move. Only three MPs were ever members of the Militant Tendency, and there was no suggestion of having any of them on the frontbench or anywhere near it. This level of entryism is something else.