Alive and Well

"The Loony Left is alive and well," brayed Cameron at PMQs. Indeed it is. For a start, it is alive and well in the form of Johanna Kaschke, late of Respect and before that (or was it?) of the Communist Party. She left Labour in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for Bethnal Green & Bow, and she ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become quite a well-connected activist.

In fact, the entire SWP faction of Respect in her own Tower Hamlets not long ago defected to her latest party 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 quite 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 last 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.

As well as Mandelson of the Young Communist League, who would have retained his Cabinet seat if Cameron had won an overall majority, do a little digging on Cameron platform-sharer John Reid, the unrepentant old Communist Party enforcer at Stirling University Students' Union (with its large cash turnover) while the Cold War was on. On Charles Clarke, the unrepentant old Soviet fellow-travelling President of the NUS. On David Aaronovitch, the unrepentant old plain-and-simple Communist Party President of the NUS. On Alan Milburn, who ran a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope", also precisely the position of the Radical Rightists who have now come of age in the Unconservative Party. On Geoff Mulgan, old Trotskyist ex-Director of Demos, Blair's favourite think tank and itself a literal continuation of the dissolved Communist Party of Great Britain. And on numerous other Cameron courtiers besides.

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. Oh, yes, the Loony Left, like the Loony Right, is only too obviously alive and well.