Round The Back

"They all join up round the back" is not the stuff of serious analysis. But there have been Molotov-Ribbentrop Pacts, and examples of Marxist intellectuals supporting the Japanese sweep across Asia and the Pacific as a liberation of the inhabitants from British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonialism, a view acted upon by India's much-revered Subhas Chandra Bose and, until the tide of the war turned, by General Aung San.

Today, we have a single Political Class, led first by Tony Blair and now by David Cameron. On the one hand, it has subsumed the Communists and Trotskyists who chose to ignore the attitude of the regimes that they supported when it came to acting out their preference for the legalisation and normalisation of all forms of drug use and all forms of sexual activity, with no minimum age of consent. On the other hand, it has subsumed the supporters of the Hitler-memorialising B J Vorster and of the Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America; again, they chose to ignore the attitude of the regimes that they supported when it came to acting out their preference for the legalisation and normalisation of all forms of drug use and all forms of sexual activity, with no minimum age of consent. These two elements, always indistinguishable in background and lifestyle, clearly find each other's company more than congenial. Well, of course they do.

Much is made, and not without cause, of the alliance between Islamists and the rather more obviously unreconstructed Marxists in opposition to the neoconservative war agenda, although that has very largely been talked up in order to ignore or dismiss the far broader body of such opposition. But what little support those adventures have ever enjoyed in Britain has come entirely from the alliance described above, into which David Cameron, as Leader in succession to Tony Blair, has gone to great lengths to draw both the rather more obviously unreconstructed Marxists and all manner of communalist rabble-rouser of South Asian origin. Last year, he even offered a peerage, a seat in Parliament for life, to Peter Tatchell, whom Michael Foot had once refused to endorse as a candidate for a parliamentary seat subject to regular re-election. Tatchell is now a frequent contributor to Harry's Place, previously Straight Left, the most uncompromisingly pro-Soviet faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Truly, Blue is the new Red-Brown.

Hence, no doubt, the Conservative Party's sole organisation and funding of the campaign for a No vote in the AV referendum. A campaign into which it has cheerfully welcomed, so that David Cameron is now effectively both leading and bankrolling, the Communist Party, the BNP, and various old Soviet fellow-travellers and Trots who went on to be the pre-eminent figures in New Labour. This is at least as distasteful as the Tea Party's marking of the Royal Wedding by repeating Lyndon LaRouche's claims about the Queen and the Royal Family. Except that the Tea Party and Lyndon LaRouche do not constitute the only electoral options in the United States.