"What a plonker" in Botley, sorry North Hinksey

Oh dear, oh dear! The Oxford Mail's Insider column reports (15 December 2011):

THE Insider knows only too well that council meetings can go on a bit. But if you have stood for election, it is probably wise to try hard to concentrate on those occasions voters come to County Hall to beg for your support.

As library campaigners put their case to the Safer and Stronger Communities Scrutiny Committee, member Alan Thompson revealed an unusual style for concentrating on the debate, closing his eyes and resting his chin on his chest at one stage.

However, when it came to the important bit, he wasn’t caught napping, springing into action and casting his vote on behalf of the electorate.

BUT it is at parish council meetings where the real drama lies. North Hinksey Parish Council has been caught up in “plonkergate”: just who did or did not call someone else a “plonker” at the council meeting on October 11?

Chairman Neil Clark believes that Remembrance Day Sub Committee chairman Bryony [actually Briony] Newport said “What a plonker!” at him across the floor of the meeting. [Newport was council chair before Clark.]

Mrs Newport insists she was misheard. In fact, she said: “procedures have not been followed and it would be plonkers to support it as repercussions would follow.”

It is easy to see how to the too [sic] very similar sounding phrases could have been confused.

It all makes The Insider proud of British democracy.

Neil Clark’s leotard moment?

In 1996 Pat Buchanan was running for President and concluded a speech by saying: “And, together, we will chase the purveyors of sex and violence back beneath the rocks whence they came.” In 2002 he thought the ‘culture wars’ were virtually lost to his opponents favour as children now experience “a culture they were born into and have known all their lives. Public homosexuality, pornography, abortion, trash talk on TV and in the movies, and filthy lyrics in popular music have been around since before they can remember.

An earlier post compared the attitudes of Neil Clark with the American conservative Pat Buchanan. In 2003 Clark wrote in Buchanan’sThe American Conservative: “if Pat Buchanan announced he was standing for president again, I would be on the next plane out to join his campaign team.” This is fantasy, the anti-communist Buchananite right would be unlikely to appoint someone with Clark’s politics, but I would not have thought it was hypocritical until recently.

On YouTube one can find a multi media presentation of a modern dance production of something called “The City of the Lame” given in Budapest during April 1999. A Mr Jones has been paralysed and is keen on “fisting” Nurse Hermione, who is caring for him. He also uses words like “fuck” and “boobies”. Quite shocking for “moral and social conservatives“, but not for the rest of us, or it now seems for Neil Clark who appears as Mr Jones and whose voice is heard on the soundtrack. Clark was living in Hungary at the time and he also participates in another section.

One would suppose that someone who attacked Roy Jenkins for wishing to relax censorship laws a few months before ingratiating himself with Buchanan was being genuine, but perhaps not. Presumably this ‘double act’ is an attempt to maximise an income from journalism, though conclusive prove is impossible to find.

Clark has argued for journalists to be transparent where they have a financial interest in matters they write about. He criticised Stephen Pollard on these grounds three years ago when Pollard commended the NHS for cutting spending on homeopathy. "Now, it may well be true that" homeopathy is nonsense "and that the writer honestly believes the words he has written", he wrote, but remained opaque as to why he choose to attack Pollard on this issue. No need to worry though, Neil Clark is a man of great integrity and incredible honesty, but his wife works as a herbalist.

Pat Buchanan ... and Neil Clark

"Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature … Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." Pat Buchanan in the St. Louis Globe – Democrat, 25 August 1977

[on Charles Lindbergh's Des Moines speech, 11 September 1941] "And then he said the Jewish community is beating the drums for war, but this is going to be a disaster for the Jewish community if we get into war. And of course, that was verboten to say, but frankly, no one has said he - what he said was, you know, palpably untrue." The Political Cesspool Radio Show, 29 June 2006 (streamed on Stormfront and other white supremacist websites)

"I write as a committed, and totally unreconstructed, Old Leftist. Yet if Pat Buchanan announced he was standing for president again, I would be on the next plane out to join his campaign team. But how many of my fellow socialists would join me? Until the Left is ready in its hordes to link up electorally with the old antiwar Right, the brutal truth is that we have no chance of defeating the Bush/Blair axis. Buchanan himself has already called for such an alliance." Neil Clark "Why left and right should unite and fight", New Statesman, 17 March 2003

"In the late 1940’s and 1950’s … race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely thought about it …. There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘Negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." Pat Buchanan Right From the Beginning (1990)

"This has been a country built, basically, by white folks." Pat Buchanan The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, 16 July 2009 (at around the minute point)

"Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism … The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is." Pat Buchanan Washington Times, 18 November 1983

"I agree with you about Pat Buchanan - he's certainly more pro-worker than most Clintonian Democrats." Neil Clark's blog comment ("It's time to be radical, Dave") 9 March 2010

"... the left needs to jettison some baggage and spruce up its thinking. Since the 1960s we have picked up several false friends, who have done our cause no good at all. The first of these is political correctness." Neil Clark "Why left and right should unite and fight", New Statesman, 17 March 2003

Neil Clark's Cumbrian sojourn

Neil Clark has no doubt about the murders in Cumbria. "In fact, much can be done to explain it", he rather clumsily writes.

The three incidents over the last quarter century (Hungerford, Dunblane and now Cumbria) Clark sees, in a crude determinist analysis, as being caused by the "Americanisation" of our economy. By drawing on our knowledge of similar incidents in the States he can build on his rather flimsy domestic evidence. According to a criminologist at the LSE cited inter alia by Clark "the egotistic culture of a 'market society' has ushered in a new barbarism."

Curiously Clark misses a trick, the old communist bloc appears from this list at Wikipedia to have been free of spree or serial killers - until the Soviet regime was in the process of disintegration. Usually he leaps to the defence of the old Soviet bloc. Quite possibly he thinks the execution of opponents by governments of the left is a good thing. He advocated such barbarism only last month:

[Gordon] Brown's greatest mistake was to underestimate just how leftwards public opinion had shifted on economic matters during the financial crisis. In 2008-9, people didn't just want speeches denouncing bankers' bonuses, they wanted to see bankers hanging from lamp-posts.

Having gloried in imaginary violent acts in the past, Clark continues with his rather pat analysis:

By encouraging us to be selfish and ultra-competitive, neo-liberalism destroys social cohesion. Other people are seen as threats and rivals, and not as potential comrades.

This from someone who has advocated lynchings. But David Wilson in the Daily Mail of all places, has a more credible explanation: "All three killing sprees took place in small, outwardly friendly communities with a strong spirit of neighbourliness." Still largely maintaining the "social cohesion" Clark thinks existed in "the 1940s, 50s, 60s, or 70s" then. He ends with a plea:

[U]nless we adopt a more humane economic system, one which encourages co-operation and not competition, such bloodbaths are only likely to become more common.

"Co-operation" and "humane" economics on Neil Clark's terms?

A Taxi Driver writes...

Neil Clark (Cab 66, but believed to be an alias of Stephen Byers) comments:

Brown's greatest mistake was to underestimate just how leftwards public opinion had shifted on economic matters during the financial crisis. In 2008-9, people didn't just want speeches denouncing bankers' bonuses, they wanted to see bankers hanging from lamp-posts.

Reader, knowing Clark I think he means it. Saying something threatening half-seriously on twitter resulted in one Paul Chambers (not the long deceased jazz bassist) receiving a punitive fine. Just the kind of behaviour Clark occasionally objects to.

But there is more. In my edits of the Wikipedia article on Clark I was menaced by an editor, soon banned, going under the moniker of 'Citylightsgirl', who thought I was Oliver Kamm or a "close associate" of his. Alas the rest of this demented material has gone from the web, as has the article on Clark from Wikipedia itself, though a late version is preserved elsewhere.

Clark puts up the pretense of being a 'democratic socialist', but much of his writing, and all of the pieces by his wife Zsuzsanna Clark, suggest this is a sham. His comments on the election provided an irresistible opportunity to satirise their politics. Naturally I was rumbled, I had 'forgotten' to log out of Google, but Clark still appears to think Philip Cross is a pseudonym for a prominent person who is out for him. The truth is very prosaic. Clark may assume deceit if I claim never to have been a customer of Tiscali, the internet service provider. But it is a fact, though I know of a public figure who has.

Neil Clark contradicts himself

Neil Clark writing about horse racing enthusiasts identifies two character types. Of the kind he does not favour he claims:

Ben, the model new racegoer, is described as "cool and fresh", "intelligent" and someone who is "athletic" and "speaks many languages" [emphasis added]. To me, Ben sounds like the sort of smug, bumptious know-it-all any sane person would emigrate to avoid, let alone want to meet at the races [also here].

But a search uncovered this at the foot of an article from 2002:

Neil Clark describes himself as: "a politically incorrect conservative socialist". He read History, Law and Government at Brunel University in London and speaks four languages: French, Spanish, German and Hungarian.

So is the old biography a fib or the more recent comment an attempt to ingratiate himself with Daily Express readers? What is the answer?

Neil Clark, libraries, Rushdie and Islam

Time to return to my favourite target: Neil Clark. Always good for light relief combined with nausea, his comments on public libraries was the lead in his latest Morning Star column which was published last Friday. Yet another of his 'good old days' pieces, though he is right to defend public libraries.

The comments section of Clark's blog is always revealing. One of Clark's posters, Mr Piccolo, responding to the piece: "Maybe I am crazy, but I honestly think the neoliberals want regular people to be as ignorant as possible."

Neil Clark @ 21:08 (Monday): "No, you're certainly not crazy: that is exactly what the neoliberals want."

Asked whether he could find find a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satantic Verses at his local library (in Oxford), Neil Clark wrote at 08:59 (Tuesday): "I very much hope not!" One could have guessed he would see this as an positive part of public provision over any private ownership. In other words Neil, it is can be a means of keeping people ignorant of books and authors you disapprove of. Clearly 'that is exactly what [authoritarians] want' too.

Of Rushdie, Clark writes: "He's a neocon pin-up boy because of his attacks on Islam." But I have written before about his attitude to the Sarkozy government's attempts to ban the burqa in France. Neil Clark rather approves.

Neil Clark on the GDR

It had to happen, Neil Clark has defended the defunct German Democratic Republic, more accurately known as East Germany.

After the police monitoring of political protesters was revealed a fortnight ago, Neil Clark's response was to suggest his opponents should be substituted. He is not against police surveillance of legal activity.

Perhaps he should have included an explicit defence of the Stasi in the article.

At Shiraz Socialist

About the trial of Radovan Karadžić Jim Denham wrote a few days ago:

It will be interesting to see whether the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” school of supposed “left-wingers” rally to the genocidal Karadzic, as they did to Milosevic. The loathsome Neil Clark, in the Morning Star (September 21 2009), for instance, listed 10 “leftist leaders who did not betray“, including “Some, such as Salvadore Allende and Slobodan Milosevic (who) ended up losing their lives on account of not sacrificing their principles…”

Clark is a particularly crass and disgusting power-worshipper who seems to get a kick out of glorifying mass murder and genocide. But the Morning Star is a quite widely-read publication supported by most British trade unions, regardless of their formal politics. Will the Star (with or without the sicko Clark) be defending Karadzic?

We wait and wonder. So far the latest hearings have only been referred to as part of a "World in Brief" item.

Update: OK, it is a newspaper with limited pagination, but this is equally brief.

Latest - Journalism has declined - Neil Clark

He has not been so unintentionally hilarious for a while. In a new First Post article Neil Clark has a pop at various journalists who have shocked him.

[T]oday, with the very future of print journalism under threat, there is an increased urgency to grab readers' attention. And that means out with mature, reflective and nuanced articles which deal with important issues, and in with gratuitously offensive columns which set out to raise readers' blood pressure. The number of complaints or hostile comments a piece generates doesn't matter - the main thing is that the article, and the newspaper in question, receives the maximum publicity.

Ofcause he is quite right to attack A.A. Gill and Jan Moir, but Clark forgets one journalist whose Comment is Free contribution offended so many people readers' responses had to be ended within three hours of the article being posted.

His own efforts cannot be excluded from what he describes.

Neil Clark's Fleet Street Letter piece from 2002

Further evidence of Neil Clark's ambivalent attitude to the BNP, rather than the hostility one would expect from someone genuinely of the left.

In an article from 2002 entitled "Democracy Is Under Threat From The EU, Not The Far Right" we find the following passage:

All over the continent it seems, so-called extreme rightwing parties are springing up and gaining votes from the older, more established mainstream political groupings. Even at home, the BNP is winning local election seats and increasing its national profile.

And:

It would be easy to accept the liberal elite’s interpretation of these events and seek to dismiss all these so-called ‘new-wave’ parties as racists or even fascists, and crudely try to play on people’s fear of immigrants as the reason for their growing success. To do so would, I believe, be a grave mistake.

His thesis is that far-right parties have gained support because of their 'sovereigntist' inclinations and their support for the death penalty. He concludes:

Far from being indicative of a crisis of democracy, the growth of the new-wave parties may in fact help to save democracy. It may finally jolt the Euro elite into listening to its people and delivering the kind of Europe they want to see.

In Clark's opinion "[n]o longer should we think in simple terms of left and right." To be fair, Václav Havel, one of his bête noires, has said something similar, but Clark's article reads like an attempt at softening opposition to the far-right.

Why is Neil Clark soft on the BNP?

Last June an article by Neil Clark for The First Post contained the following passage:

In the last few weeks in Britain we have been bombarded with articles from the liberal elite and Church leaders lecturing the plebs on the dangers of voting for the BNP. In spite of that - or possibly partly because it - the BNP now has two seats in the European Parliament.

As I have written before, this piece was in no way critic of the BNP. Perhaps Clark assumed his readers would be unaware that opposition to the BNP is not restricted to the "liberal elite". It is a phrase which the BNP leader Nick Griffin is inclined to use too, along with an assortment of right-wing Tories.

Yet Bob Crow, leader of the RMT union and a prominent member of the 800 strong Communist Party of Britain, someone Clark admires, has today put his name to a letter in The Guardian objecting to the appearance of Nick Griffin on tomorrow's edition of the Question Time television programme, a missive in which the politics of the British National Party are also found repugnant. I wonder if Neil Clark will now consider Crow to be a liberal.

Just Fancy That (2)

Last July Oliver Kamm found Neil Clark indulging in plagiarism. Zsuzsanna Clark, Neil's wife, has now done the same in an encomium for her native Hungary during the Soviet period. When the internet makes this practice easier to detect, it is really very, very foolish.

From an article dated 2 November 2002 in The Guardian:

When people ask me what it was like growing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live.

From a Mail on Sunday article published today:

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live.

Clark's still forthcoming book on growing up in Hungary has been in preparation for at least seven years, but she seems unable to check the limited amount she has published on the subject. Very silly. As yet, the book is unlisted on any publisher's website.

In the article itself she manages to imply János Kádár government was the result of the 1956 Revolution rather than a Soviet imposition after the tanks rolled in. Clark almost managed to get this point right in a 2006 First Post article, so why not now? Presumably Mail on Sunday readers can be more easily misled. The most telling omission of her writings is that during détente, Zsuzsanna Clark was born in 1968, the Kádár government was propped up by loans from western banks. The system was unable to sustain itself.

Clark's outline of television in Hungary also has a familiar ring to it. From a New Statesman article of 21 July 2003:

Saturday night when I was growing up meant a Jules Verne adventure, a variety show and a Chekhov drama. Foreign imports included The Forsyte Saga and David Attenborough documentaries. One of the most popular and talked-about programmes of the entire period was Poetry for Everyone, in which, each night, a famous actor or actress would recite a different poem.

Back to the Mail on Sunday:

When I was a teenager, Saturday night primetime viewing typically meant a Jules Verne adventure, a poetry recital, a variety show, a live theatre performance, or an easy Bud Spencer film.

Much of Hungarian television was home-produced, but quality programmes were imported, not just from other Eastern Bloc countries but from the West, too.

Hungarians in the early Seventies followed the trials and tribulations of Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga just as avidly as British viewers had done a few years earlier. The Onedin Line was another popular BBC series I enjoyed watching, along with David Attenborough documentaries.

Admittedly an improvement, but we might assume western imports were restricted to just two series, plus the work of a zoologist? Was 'quality' material from the United States like Ellery Queen, to pick a series at random, never shown?

Just one more comparison from the writings of Zsuzsanna Clark. In a Guardian article from February 26 2007 on the Hungarian Pioneer movement, we find the following:

Our motto as Pioneers was Together for Each Other. It was not an empty slogan: it was how we were encouraged to think.

Back to the Mail on Sunday piece once again:

'Together for each other' was our slogan, and that was how we were encouraged to think.

Oh dear!

Update: Oliver Kamm also finds her account feeble.

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the year

It's the time of year for nominations. This comment caught my eye:

While one plucky soul, Neil Clark, nominates George Galloway for being ‘one of the few MPs not tied to the neocon/neoliberal junta that has dominated British politics for so long and which has embroiled us in a series of catastrophic and very costly wars’. It’s fair to say that Neil’s is a fairly solitary voice in the voting so far.

Clark asked for the mild derision in this suggestion for a Conservative publication's award, though admittedly members of other parties have won in the past. Galloway's voting record is one of the worst of all MPs. Surely Clark is either "solitary" or "almost solitary" rather than "fairly solitary?"

But wait, a day after Clark's "junta" comment was published, an article appeared on The First Post website lamenting the overthrow of Hungarian communism twenty years ago. The author, needless to say, is Neil Clark.

Update: BobFromBrockley gives Galloway a good going over.

Neil Clark on censorship

In a 2003 Daily Telegraph article Neil Clark wrote:

As an up-and-coming Labour backbencher, [Roy] Jenkins had written, in the late 1950s, a tract entitled Is Britain Civilised?, in which he attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on censorship, homosexuality, divorce and abortion

So censorship, interpreting Clark's scare quote, is justified? Actually, Clark is referring to the last chapter (merely p135-140) of Jenkins' short book The Labour Case, one of three Penguin Specials written by representatives of the main parties for the 1959 General Election, rather than a complete work. Clark refers to Jenkins' first period as Home Secretary:

Now it was full steam ahead to give support to private members' Bills to decriminalise abortion and homosexuality, relax censorship and make divorce easier.

The anti-censorship Bill he is thinking of became the Theatres Act 1968; the republican Clark presumably believes a member of the Royal Household should have continued to censor play scripts. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Jenkins had been involved in its parliamentary passage, had already led to suppressed works being published in the UK for the first time, albeit sometimes following a court case.

I bring all this up because Clark has an article in the current New Statesmen in which he complains about new censorship laws in Serbia. Apparently under them, opponents will be blocked from making derogatory comments about the government. Of cause, it is really yet another retrospective defence of his hero, Slobodan Milošević. One recalls the Serbian authorities banning the independent B92 radio station in 1991 and 1996 and other interferences in the operation of a free press. A paper on this subject was written for the hearings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague (.pdf file or Google html conversion). Clark really condemns in order to condone. On p15 of the ICTY document, there is a summary:

A careful review of media coverage in Serbia [from 1987 onwards] demonstrates that the "need" to expel the non-Serbs is a recurrent theme in the media - whether the message is conveyed by politicians, intellectuals, military personnel, journalists etc. The entire press repeated systematically and all together the inflammatory declarations referring to the dangers confronting the Serbian peoples and explicitly or implicitly threatening the non-Serbs with reprisals. [For simplicity, I have removed references from this passage.]

Not exactly a pluralist media.

Strange though how he comes over all liberal when he is defending people he admires. Only last week in the Morning Star, writing about "leftists who didn't sell out", Clark was referring to the "liberal brand of communism" pursued by another of his heroes, János Kádár, who was imposed by the Soviets after their overthrow of the Imre Nagy government in 1956. Clark's article has been rubbished by Andrew Coates and Captainjako of Frank Owen's Paintbrush (here and here).

An appeal

It is important as much information as possible is freely available on the internet, and easily accessible too. In this context I was saddened to discover that the Wikipedia article on the British journalist Neil Clark is up for deletion again. A previous attempt in the summer of 2007 was successful, but the article rightly reappeared a few months later.

I urge readers to oppose the deletion of the article on Neil Clark. If you do not have a Wikipedia account, they can be created quickly. The Afd (Article for deletion) tag was added to the article today, and will be carried out in a week's time unless there is sufficient opposition. A pity if the article should go, because Clark's peculiar politics need to be detailed, and he is more than significant enough to be the subject of one article out of three million. An interest should be declared, the present writer heavily contributed to the article under discussion.

Press TV

Looking for something else online, I stumbled across "Press TV peddles pernicious tosh" by Oliver Kamm in The Jewish Chronicle, which includes this:

In other programmes, the choice of guests extends to the bizarrely insignificant. One recent commentator was a pro-Milosevic blogger known for faking laudatory comments about himself under female pseudonyms on third-party websites.

Now who might that be?

Neil Clark and Aldous Huxley

A passage from yesterday's entry on Neil Clark's blog is an absolute classic:

[Aldous] Huxley also believed that modern marketing techniques, advertising and other forms of brainwashing used by the ruling elite to maintain their control would pose a far greater threat to human freedom- and humanity in general than the ‘old-style’ dictatorships that relied on terror.

Dictatorships relying on terror are still around, and Clark defends quite a few of them. Quite why he finds "modern marketing techniques" worse than "‘old-style’ dictatorships", when his rather naff and populist tastes are a product of them, is inexplicable.

Apparently Clark agrees with Huxley "that intelligence and kindness are inextricably linked"...

The death penalty in Iran and Neil Clark

An excellent piece by Peter Tatchell on the use of this form of state power, unaccompanied by any form of evidence, is on The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' site.

Neil Clark, a supporter of the death penalty and an opponent of Amnesty International's campaign against the practice, wrote the following in 2002:

If we know anything at all about moral issues, it is that they are extremely difficult to resolve, are inevitably marked by disagreement, and that different cultural premises lead to startlingly different moral conclusions. Understanding this is important, as it underlies the whole idea of self-determination by societies, cultural groups or nation states. Only these groupings can determine what political structures they take to be moral and what privileges they acknowledge as rights.

Clark is inclined to dismiss open societies two page earlier, in his attack on Human Rights Watch, so this is really another of his defences of dictatorship, quite apart from being an example of moral relativism. He transposes absolutist assumptions onto his opponents of a kind which he endlessly displays himself.

In an article the previous year, advocating a return to the death penalty, Clark had this to say:

Inevitably, miscarriages of justice did occur when Britain had the death penalty, but their number was tiny and must be set against the considerably larger number of people saved from violent death by the much lower homicide rate. [Hardly as convincing as he thinks.] Now, though, there is the very real breakthrough of DNA-testing, which narrows the odds of wrong conviction to one million to one. That still may not be good enough for Paul Foot and Ludovic Kennedy, but it is for me and, I expect, for most other people.

Obviously not the case in Iran, where 'beyond a reasonable doubt' is not the criteria for executions. Clark objects to a universalist stance on human rights, but 'divide and rule' methods, as Tatchell is basically arguing is the case in Iran, were hardly alien to the Milosevic regime of which Clark is a particularly notorious apologist.

So the likelihood he will cease his advocacy of Ahmadinejad's cause and embrace the abolition of the death penalty is rather remote. The rest of us can therefore continue to question his dubious attitudes.

Neil Clark, the universal franchise and the BNP

This is a very serious post, and it seems appropriate to drop the tag previously applied to Neil Clark.

He might attack New Labour for ignoring the wishes of a majority of the electorate over the war in Iraq. More generally, he might point out the apparent contradiction between polling data in which the public favour the reintroduction of the death penalty and it is resisted by parliamentarians. Despite his claim to be a "democratic socialist", Clark's own commitment to the universal franchise can be doubted. His socialism is actually non-existent.

Not once voicing any criticism of the BNP in his First Post article of June 8 2009, he claimed:

Since the 1960s, as European Left parties have gradually become more middle class, they have gradually lost their link with their indigenous working-class voters.

So the main party of the Left in the UK should not have identified with people of overseas descent who, naturalized or born here, also have the vote? Now constituting about 8% of the population, often in urban seats which Labour will need to hold onto in the 2010 general election, or to whom the Conservatives will need to appeal if they are to form a government, Clark blithely ignores a section of the population which a genuine 'leftie', unreconstructed or otherwise, would not do.

Perhaps he thinks ethnic groups are second class citizens who should not be allowed to vote. This is a fair conclusion to draw as we shall see. Clark supports the attitude peddled by the BNP that it "[combines] traditional left-wing anti-capitalist and anti-globalist economic policies, with unequivocal opposition to mass immigration". This is quite wrong. For 'old Labour', immigration was an economic policy. The British Nationality Act 1948, which allowed the right of settlement, was passed during a labour shortage.

Clark’s opinion of his readers is so low he assumes we will not do some digging, or remember what he has written. He writes uncritically of the Hungarian ‘Jobbik’, as an example of a party reconnecting with the working class. He complains that the self-styled 'Movement for a Better Hungary', is denounced as "'neo-fascist'" by its opponents, and implying the left should be more like this party, wrote that it “attacked finance-driven globalisation and the 'unpatriotic' pro-globalist elite, in a way which clearly resonated with ordinary people”. In fact, it is denounced as "neo-fascist" because there are good grounds to sustain the label. It is an organisation with a paramilitary wing, supposedly being wound up under government order, which is actually being recreated under a new name. It virulently attacks ‘Roma’ in Hungary and also denounces Jews. In a visit to London in May, representatives of the party met Nick Griffin (dubious link) of the BNP. Apparently “similarities between the two parties and their aims are a promising start for co-operation between the BNP and Jobbik in the future.” Since then, according to a report on Channel Four News, relations have cooled and the two parties will not sit in the same group in the European Parliament.

What difference left-wing parties might have from those of the right is unclear, if indeed anything should really separate them at all. So we have a supposed leftist, suggesting means for left-of-centre parties to regain voters, who identifies his politics with a blatantly far-right party, but hopes no one notices. For a long time, Clark has had difficulties with political labels; in order to sustain his argument in favour of the death penalty, he once had to classify Paul Foot, the journalist and revolutionary socialist, as a “left-liberal”. It is about time Clark stopped burning his candle at both ends and dropped his pretence. It is obvious where he is on the political spectrum, and astonishing the Morning Star and the New Statesman are still prepared to publish his copy.

Update: After posting this article, I toned it down slightly to avoid comments which might be difficult to sustain and fearful of libel. I need not have bothered. Clark has an article on the 'Jobbik' website, a reprint of a First Post article on Hungary is here.