Hope Not Hate, Indeed

The House of Commons will reconvene on 2 September. Condemning the riots unequivocally and in a single, short sentence, a motion in the name of the Prime Minister ought to be put to the vote. Let anyone who would oppose that simple sentiment be smoked out, along with anyone who would abstain on it, and anyone who would seek to amend it.

Not that that will happen. Nearly 20 years ago, I was sent Douglas Murray's Neoconservatism: Why We Need It and Oliver Kamm's Anti-totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy as a job lot. They had the same publisher, which clearly regarded them as companion volumes by companion authors. Certainly, Murray's book was praised in print by Christopher Hitchens, whom Kamm continues to regard as the Master. I own all of Kamm's books, although I have never paid him a penny for any of them. I sat through that whole Olympic closing ceremony because I had been promised that after Céline Dion's performance at the opening ceremony, and since Édith Piaf was dead, it would be mirrored by the next best thing, a rendition of My Heart Will Go On by Kamm. Words cannot convey the depth of my disappointment.

Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and never arises except by their joint enterprise. While pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all.

At that point, it activates the Lumpenproletariat. The working class? As is coming out in court, that was exactly what the rioters were not, at least not in the sense that left a paper trail. Of course they were not. Would you employ someone with a swastika tattoo? Or someone who got coked up on a weeknight? What working-class job has he been holding down? Is he a factory machinist? A delivery driver? What? At the same time, he is obviously not as poor as his file would suggest.

Say it again that to protect its hegemony, the liberal bourgeoisie rouses the rabble. Therefore, this Government told everyone to stay at home on Wednesday evening, in the hope that 100 riots would make the case for all manner of Fascistic measures, cunningly in the ostensible cause of anti-Fascism. But the Police know what they have never been allowed to do, and have no desire to have the power to do, while also knowing that those were the only methods that worked on the fash. So they let everyone know where the 100 riots were to have been, secure in the knowledge that the people who met such manifestations head-on would turn up.

They did. I saw them on the television. I waved. I am not going to be well enough for such events for a long time, if ever again. But in other capacities, I am still around. Knowing who would be bound to present themselves having been alerted, the swastika tattoo brigade ran away and hid. The confrontation was thus avoided, and the Government's furious outriders are moaning that the people responsible despised them and their patrons as much as we despised Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. To which our proud is reply is that yes, we do, and we do so on the same grounds. Moreover, having tasted victory, as we have rarely done before, we have well and truly acquired a taste for it.