Of Who They Are Or What They Are

The right-wing privilege in this country is obscene. Every allegation against Nigel Farage is worse than any allegation against Jeremy Corbyn, with each of the former on its own being better supported than all of the latter put together. Yet that Farage was professing Nazi sympathies to Jewish schoolmates after the then age of compulsory education seems not to bother, for example, Melanie Phillips.

Phillips's recent speech in New York would have brought her to the attention of Prevent if, with her text altered accordingly but not very much, it had been about Anglo-Saxon or otherwise Germanic identity. She would have been ostracised from The Times and the BBC. Similarly, people uproot their British children from the safety of the Jewish suburbs to the jeopardy of the West Bank settlements, yet are still able to return from their Return. But try moving your British children to Islamist Syria, which both Britain and Israel support.

Still, it is a pity to lose Phillip's voice on issues such as drugs, pornography, and the lockdowns. For having secured future earnings by causing mass deaths through attention to a weird cult of political and media operatives with pseudo-academic affectations, Boris Johnson deserves the same popular opprobrium for his delay in locking down as Tony Blair receives for Iraq. Yet even Blair remains at liberty and in prosperity, since right-wing privilege is not confined by party.

Although not even a right-wing Labour functionary such as Alastair Campbell or Morgan McSweeney could hope for anything like Robbie Gibb's position in the BBC. That Corporation has given no platform to any of the many academic economists who broadly agreed with Zack Polanski, but has instead staged his shouting down by the opaquely funded thinktankers whom it treated as experts. And it has censored a Reith Lecture, a Reith Lecture, to suit Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. The right-wing privilege in this country is obscene.