England's future: Islamist apologists vs white nationalists

The triumph of the grifters

The results of the Parliamentary by-election in Manchester early this morning portend a grim future for England. Like France, we will have a left dominated by appeasers of radical Islam and antisemitism and a right dominated by white, Trumpian racists.

I have a piece that should be going on the Spectator website later. For Writing for London readers, here is an annotated account that includes links to themes I have covered in this newsletter.

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The Gorton and Denton by-election gives us a taste of the vicious future that awaits England. The most dynamic force on the left, the Green Party, and on the right, Reform, are united in their willingness to exploit racism, and replace the old world of Labour and the Tories with sectarian politics.

Before I go any further, I must acknowledge the obvious and say that the collapse of the old parties is their own fault. The failures of the 2010-2024 Conservative government have doomed the party, while one does not need to get lost in the factionalism of Labour politics to understand that Sir Keir Starmer has failed as badly, and the sooner Labour can bring Andy Burnham back to Westminster, the better.

As I have emphasised (see link below) Starmer has gone out of his way to alienate his own supporters and now he is paying the price. No one in Labour has the right to be surprised by the scale of its defeat.

But we can all bash the elites, can’t we? Political discourse consists of little else than railing against the Westminster establishment.

As our country changes, it is more important to highlight the dark choices of the men and women who want to be our new bosses.

Like many on the centre left, I had a soft spot for the Greens. At least they were free of the taint of communism which clung to the old far left, I thought. And at least they had honourable concerns about climate change, pollution, the mass extinction of species and the destruction of natural habitats. If the Greens didn’t exist, there would be an urgent need to invent them.

Look at them now. All honour gone. If a right-wing politician behaved like Zach Polanski, the left would be screaming to the very heavens about his breathtaking cynicism and recklessness.

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot,” wrote George Orwell in 1940, and Polanski is determined to prove him right.

To win the Muslim vote he gave an interview to 5Pillars an Islamist outfit that, along with all the usual prejudices, is so antisemitic it welcomes white neo-fascists, including Nick Griffin, former leader of the British National Party.

I described it all in gruesome detail here

To give you a brief flavour, the platform featured Mark Collett, the leader of Patriotic Alternative, on its Blood Brothers podcast. Of course, he blamed Jews for “the porn industry, feminism, cultural Marxists, the whole LGBT industry, the anti-racist industry, the holocaust industry,” and much, much more. The press regulator IMPRESS said that 5Pillars had encouraged “hatred and abuse” towards Jewish and LGBT people.

In other circumstances Polanski, who is gay and Jewish, might have spoken out. But you don’t get the sectarian vote by opposing racism and homophobia, and so Zack was a good little boy and bit his tongue.

Can you imagine the furore if Nigel Farage or another right-wing figure endorsed a site that was so lost in antisemitism it promoted Nick Griffin? The liberal press would have a nervous breakdown. But Polanski is on the left and 5Pillars is run by fanatics with brown rather than white skins – and that makes all the difference.

When journalists from the Jewish News exposed the story the strongest condemnation Polanski could muster was that he does not “always know who I’m talking to”.

The poor chap just stumbles around and – whoops! – he finds himself on air with fascist-loving, gay-hating Islamists.

It could happen to any of us.

However, the Greens certainly knew what they were doing when they deliberately issued an Urdu language video for Muslim voters that flashed images of Keir Starmer with Narendra Modi and David Lammy with Benjamin Netanyahu in an attempt to play on Muslim-Hindu tensions and on Muslim-Jewish tensions – this in Manchester, where Jews were murdered in October just for being Jews.

Nor did the bumbling Polanski just happen to endorse a motion at the Greens spring conference that will declare that Zionism is racism, and crucially, will reject all internationally accepted definitions of antisemitism, thus making the party a safe space for Jew-hate.

Earlier this morning, Democracy Volunteers, an election observer group, claimed the Green victory had been accompanied by “concerningly high levels of family voting”, an illegal practice that can involve husbands telling their wives how to vote.

I am not going out on a limb when I predict that patriarchy will no more bother the Greens than homophobia or antisemitism, if it serves their interests.

As I watched Polanski celebrate, I paraphrased the line Robert Bolt gave Sir Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons

“Why Zach, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Gorton and Denton!”

Don’t look to the Greens rivals in Reform for help. Farage is pursuing the mirror-image of Green sectarian politics from the right or – if I may use the English language plainly – from the far right.

His platform is now more extreme than anything offered by his friend and mentor Donald Trump.

The paramilitaries of Trump’s ICE agency, whose killings have provoked global condemnation, are only meant to pick up illegal immigrants in the US. Farage wants to unpick the status of people who have indefinite leave to remain in the country and a legal right to be here – in clear contravention of the principle against retrospective legislation.

A Reform government will force migrants to reapply for a visa every five years.

If these changes sound too technical for you, consider how Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, ran with the endorsement of the thug Tommy Robinson. Before the campaign began Goodwin, an academic turned rabble rouser, dipped his hands into the blood-and-soil nationalism that was once the preserve of the neo-fascists the Islamists at 5Pillars put on their podcasts.

(I ran a profile of Goodwin here:

“Englishness is an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations,” he declared.

By this reckoning, Lenny Henry isn’t English, Ian Wright isn’t English, half the England football team isn’t English, Rishi Sunak isn’t English, and nor, I discovered after checking my family tree, am I

Meanwhile, Danny Kruger, who is charged by Farage with developing policy, laments Britain’s “totally unregulated sexual economy”, opposes no-fault divorces and says Reform UK has “pronatalist” ambition. It is possible to imagine a Reform government presiding over an attack on the rights of women and LGBT people, which once again would win the approval of the Green Party’s new friends.

It ought to be clear by now that the failure of Labour and the Conservatives is not leading to a national renewal and the emergence of better and more honest politicians.

Instead, we are seeing a parade of grifters who will exploit white nationalism and Muslim sectarianism, play any trick, and go along with any prejudice so long as they win.

If you thought being governed by the old establishment was bad, just wait until you meet its successors.

And finally, here is a piece on the new emphasis on reversing the sexual revolution and on how extremism sweeps the right.

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