Crazy Lefties

The libel courts are currently ornamented by one Johanna Kaschke, late of Respect and before that (or was it?) of the Communist Party, who left Labour in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for Bethnal Green & Bow, and who ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become quite a well-connected activist. Ms Kaschke maintains that alluding to her past brands her "a crazy lefty".

If she is, then she has joined the right party, and it is no wonder that she is doing so well in it. In fact, the entire SWP faction of Respect in her own Tower Hamlets not long ago defected thereto after having fallen out with the Islamists. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

But of course they are. It was David Cameron's vehicles that toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under the Tories. It was his "Quality of Life Commission" (don't laugh, it's real) that then proposed giving the power to decide these things to "local community leaders". What else would those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys' interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places would flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation for ever.

The Conservative Party recently welcomed, with some fanfare, John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January of this year.

Will Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek's fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy, recalling Marek's own parliamentary question to Tony Blair requesting that the Oath of Allegiance be replaced with something acceptable to anti-monarchists; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales? Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru to the Cameroons.

And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. They obviously find the 1980s Radical Right's company as congenial as they find each other's. As well they might. Blue is the new Red-Brown.

A toxic brand indeed, Tim Farron. A toxic brand, indeed.