The Sun Says It

Under the heading "Sick Smears" a Sun editorial today has this to say:

HOW desperately sad that William Hague is forced to reveal private heartache [his wife's miscarriages] to silence malicious gossip.

Mr Hague, Tory Foreign Secretary and a politician of immense integrity, is the victim of a baseless whispering campaign suggesting a relationship with a male aide.

It is a miserable sign of the debasement of our politics that such rubbish can be peddled.

We can only speculate on who is delighting in smearing Mr Hague.

The innuendo about Mr Hague and his former aide first appeared on the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog, but "we" can assume the writer is implying it originates from the official opposition. But which publication in 1998, following the 'outing' of Peter Mandelson by Matthew Parris, asked whether the Labour government then in power had a "gay mafia" and was forced to apologise within days. This incident came after years of homophobia from Richard Littlejohn, Garry Bushell and other contributors. Readers will recognise the construction, but other Sun haters may smile at the implication that the rag recognises it has published rubbish.

There's gratitude for you

The Press Gazette quotes Boris Johnson:

"They [the press] are regulated by a Press Complaints Commission whose luminaries include the editor of the Daily Mail."

He means Paul Dacre:

"I'm sure that he is a fine fellow in many ways but I think it's a bit like putting the regulation of door-to-door salesmen in the hands of Boston Strangler."

Dacre is Editor in Chief of Associated Newspapers which, at the time of the London Mayoral election in 2008, wholly owned the London Evening Standard. For much of the noughties the Standard gained a reputation for being tough on Ken Livingstone, Johnson's Labour rival. Is something affecting Johnson's memory?

Roy Greenslade points out: "Dacre is chairman of the editors' code committee, which has no say in the day-to-day running of the PCC. Its membership does not overlap with that of the commission itself."

Off topic, but last January spin doctor Alastair Campbell relayed a theory of a psychologist friend that Dacre is secretly in love with him.

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.

Rod Liddle on the Millwall supporters website

Rod Liddle has been outed by the Mail on Sunday as being the poster monkeymfc on a Millwall supporters' website, though Liddle claims to having been the victim of a hacker. Despite this, he is still posting on the site.

In a thread "Internationally notorious 1st 11" we find comments like these:

The problem is always dealing with a mercurial player like Pol Pot. I'd keep him on the bench, use him as an impact player to come on in the last fifteen minutes and kill two million people...

Richard Reid, the shoebomber who forgot to pack a lighter, could be the team's duff signing, unpopular with fans.

Of the "North Korean fella" (a confusion of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il) he responds "yes, he's worth a place, bless him." The name of Brian Clough enters the discussion:

Ooooh, careful with Cloughie. May have been Old Labour but still suggested that there were too many "wogs" in the British game (I think he meant ni**ers) and that he'd join the NF if Africa was allowed two places in the world cup.

Africa now has five places in the world cup, btw.

In a later post, after an intervening reference to "Yids", he returns to his African theme, somewhat inconsistently: "Cloughie was ... pro great big grand schemes for the white working class, but racist. I agree with him about ASfrica [sic] and the world cup though..."

In other threads Liddle has made jokes about a visit to Auschwitz and given what appears to be explicit support for the BNP, after another poster complained that he had not seen the English Defence League beat up Asians:

If you read the last Labour manifesto it will tell you that they are the voice of britain - they want better for you, for your family, for everyone. Utter rollocks. So apply the same criteria to the EDL. The EDL want a ruck, simples. If that's all you want, fair enough. I prefer the BNP to the EDL - they DO support the white working class, even if they are thick as chit, misguided and dislike Islam only because it is practised by wogs (check out their policies - could be Hizbut Tahrir).

Liddle is a journalist who has been noticeably soft on the BNP in the past, so these comments contain nothing which will surprise anyone who "can read between the lines".

Oh no, it's Rod Liddle Independent editor!

If, as expected, Alexander Lebedev takes over The Independent it is forecast Rod Liddle will be the next editor. Taking this hint, I wondered what Yasmin Alibhai Brown has been saying about him.

A "Bad Boy Made Rich", Albhai Brown in 2004 discussed his messy private life, and described the man himself as "physically not unlike a malodorous mop in need of chucking out". Last October, she referred to him as being

a braggadocio now considered frightfully brilliant because he vilifies women, black people, Muslims, the BBC and many others with his anti-PC, cutting observations.

Responding to his unpleasant comments about Harriet Harman, discussed here a few months ago, she asked:

Well would you, male or female readers, would you take Liddle to your bed? He looks as unappetising as a half-eaten fish pie left on a plate, was caught with Viagra in his pocket by his now ex-wife, a woman he then humiliated and left for some young thing at the Spectator. Answers directly to Mr Liddle please. Three cheers for Janet Street Porter, Suzanne Moore and others who have slapped him down.

Street Porter referred to Liddle as "that repulsive shagger" who is "all bluster and no balls" and Moore called him "Liddlerod". Tanya Gold is most to the point:

And so I ask – Rod Liddle, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober.

And I don't mean would you fuck him. I mean – would you believe him?

Thanks: Viv Groskop in the Evening Standard

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.

Tripe

Simon Heffer has been writing about unfashionable foods:

I must admit I have never been able to bring myself to eat tripe, though I did once have the honour of watching the late J Enoch Powell demolish a plate of it in a restaurant about 20 years ago. It had been a much-prized dish in the Black Country in Enoch's childhood, and he never lost the taste for it.

That figures.

Zsuzsanna Clark keeps digging

It is a rare occurrence for an article in the Mail on Sunday, discussed here, to inspire a subsequent piece in the Morning Star.

In Hungary apparently:

Kadar won public support with his liberalising reforms and his likeable [sic], modest manner.

How do we know?

The critics usually claim that their opposition was due to "human rights," but I believe a large part of their anti-communism can be explained by a single word. Snobbery.

That is a novel argument, the most credible reason is the absence of democracy in the former Soviet bloc and the other communist countries. The scare quote is not reassuring.

But for the snobs, the wrong class of people was in charge.

This is supposed to be a defence of a socialist country! Mrs Clark asserts the Chess Grandmaster

[Lajos] Portisch believes that had Kadar not had to leave school and take up an apprenticeship at an early age, he too could have become a chess grand master.

So his own loss was the workers' gain? When the Queen Mother died in 2002, A.N. Wilson came up with a similar argument about how she could have been a significant cultural figure under different circumstances. The word for this kind of approach is hagiography:

I regarded Kadar as a relative, like a favourite uncle or grandfather. I liked the way he talked - he was never pompous or condescending and never arrogant.

Almost a saint then.

As the respected British historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated, Kadar was "the most successful ruler of Hungary in the 20th century."

Hobsbawm is hardly a neutral observer. He was on the 'other' side in the Morning Star-CPB/Marxism Today-CPGB split more than twenty years ago. Which leads me to think describing him as "respected", for this readership, might have been a mistake. If so, what a shame.

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.

Same old BNP!

Following the 'successful' resolution of the E&HRC case over the ban in the BNP's constitution of non-whites from party membership, this article from Comment is Free remains unsurprising.

Who would have thought the BNP capable of double standards?

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.

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).

Peter Hitchens on World War II

This Daily Mail article has to be read to be believed. The counterfactual form takes a ridiculous turn; nowhere does Hitchens' accept that the Third Reich had to be destroyed. And he follows an argument Diana and Oswald Mosley made that leaving Hitler with a free hand in continental Europe would have saved the British Empire. As if it was worth saving.

Incredible.

Does the BBC have a liberal bias?

About time someone took apart the BBC has a 'liberal bias' argument, which Mehdi Hasan does in this week's New Statesman. Responding to a piece on Peter Hitchens' blog, Hasan issued a challenge to him, Hasan has now deconstructed Hitchens' posting.

By the way, Hitchens original article in the Statesman is here.

Stalin and the left

James Marson has a piece on Stalin and the left at 'Comment is Free', which I pretty much agree with. The appeal of Stalin in the UK is limited, but the developments in Russia and the former soviet republics, which Marson mainly discusses, are worrying. This report from last month, concerning the suppression of online material in Russia, is also worth reading. Defenders of the Putin/Medvedev government can be found in the UK's press occasionally.

Marson's conclusion is worth stressing:

It is a bitter pill for some on the left to swallow that what Stalin did in the name of apparently laudable goals was horrific. Maybe some politicians are using the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and comparisons between Stalin and Hitler to smear the left and Russia. But to my mind, if the left, along with the Russian leadership, is still unwilling to face the horrors of Stalinism and the devastation it wrought across central and Eastern Europe, it is smearing itself.

The defence of authoritarian regimes is unlikely to appeal to more than a tiny portion of the electorate here, but enough of the organised left still has the capacity to defend such regimes to prevent the emergence of any credible alternative to New Labour. Some people though, have split loyalties.

The BNP entertains

Two other blogs (here and here) have already discussed this story* from yesterday's News of the World on the BNP's "Red White and Blue 'fun' weekend" event.

One incident described is a mock trial of a golliwog named Winston and the burning of the effigy. The paper offers a link to a BNP video of the burning; the Screws is trying to have it both ways, but that is the way of tabloids on this kind of story.

It does offer more of the 'real' paranoid Nick Griffin though. In this passage he responds to potential anti-discrimination legislation to force the BNP to accept non-white members:

"Since if we want to survive we will be forced to let them in, the key will be before we do so to change the party - to ensure that whoever's coming in doesn't have any control."

Clumsy syntax for a member of the 'master race'. It is not very likely anyone from the groups the BNP detest would join, and Griffin temporarily forgets the history of white moles in the far-right, of which Ray Hill is the best known.

They have contempt for those they claim to represent:

Greater London Authority member Richard Barnbrook joked about BLACKING himself up.

The deputy opposition leader of Barking and Dagenham council boasted: "I've got balls made of steel. In my own ward, if I go around naked, and put boot polish on my face, they'd still love me."

And attempt to normalize their offensive neanderthal attitudes:

"P*ki means pure. So why do you get offended when all that they're doing is calling you pure?" he whined. "You get called a P*ki, how can you get offended by that?"

They do not like non-national whites either, and would-be psycopaths were present:

Marshall said: "The Lithuanians and Czechs are sneaking in because they're white. You find the f***ers on the doorstep."

Bev added: "These guys from Poland came into Cotmanhay and did a car wash. Somebody wrote BNP on their sign - once that was there they were gone . . . guess who that was? Me and Danny. I wrote BNP."

Elsewhere another man moaned: "If things don't become any better, and I become older, so I'm 70 or 75, I'll take a GPMG (machine gun) - seriously, I'm not joking here - and I'm going to f***ing destroy lots of people."

Not the kind of people any real 'law and order' conservative would contrive to defend.

*Apologies if you have stumbled across this piece via Google after Rupert Murdoch's imposition of website charges, but the two other blogs have different quotations from the original article.

Catherine Bennett hits the nail...

One recent particularly telling entry on the Lenin's Tomb blog concerned the threat to the continued publication of The Observer newspaper. Apparently, Richard Seymour considers its closure would not be much of a loss because of the journalists it employs and its demographics, which display a bias towards high earners. One could be mischievous and suggest the reference to its journalists does not allow for the defence of any 'capitalist' newspaper which might be under threat now or in the future. Those newspapers at the top end of the market tend to be the least unreadable, regardless of their politics.

My most incendiary reader (numerous clues in the drop-down lists on the right) will doubtless be surprised that I have had very mixed feelings about Nick Cohen's columns for some years. Usually though, the mouse button is pressed on the link to his articles. One Observer columnist who is invariably readable is Catherine Bennett, who this week writes on John Cleese's recent divorce settlement. Bennett is right to mock Michael Winner's snobbery about Alyce Faye Eichelberger Cleese's former residence in a London council flat ("Perhaps he worries that she will spend all the money on scratch cards and pizza"), and quite rightly choose to highlight Cleese's rather chauvinist response to his ex-wife ("I got off lightly. Think what I’d have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship"). Cleese seems to have lost any connection to the real world: "At least I will know in future if I go out with a lady they will not be after me for my money." He is still worth about £10 million.

Catherine Bennett concludes:

The tale of Mr Cleese and Ms Eichelberger makes Woody Allen look like a really brilliant advertisement for psychotherapy.

Non, c'est moi.

Peter Hitchens and Bob Ainsworth's Trotskyist past

Peter Hitchens was attacking the new Secretary of State for Defence in yesterday's Mail on Sunday for being a 'candidate member' (provisional so to speak) of the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s. Particularly making my Wikipedia acquaintance spit with fury was the IMG's support for the IRA. The IMG was a wholly legal organisation, even if the IRA was not, like the International Socialists (now SWP) of which Hitchens was a member between 1969 and 1975. But what I find in an official 1975 history of the group by Ian Birchall, under the heading "1969-1970: Towards a Workers’ Party", is the following: "IS’s position was always one of unconditional support for the IRA in the struggle against imperialism".

Oh dear!

Cultural internationalism and the dilemmas of liberalism

I wonder if Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday considers it a liberal plot that the Polish film Katyn (2007) has not yet received the level of attention gained by Ashes and Diamonds (1958)? Hitchens tends to elide the whole liberal to left spectrum, the earlier film was made under Communism, so it is not complete facetiousness to put across this suggestion.

The two war films share a director in Andrzej Wajda, but the perpetrators and victims of military action are reversed. Katyn details the massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet troops in 1940, while Ashes and Diamonds concerns the assassination of a Communist in 1945. Hitchens came close to suggesting something sinister in the delayed UK release of Katyn when he first mentioned it last January, though Wajda’s eminence would make its eventual distribution in the UK very likely, and the general release of foreign language films often takes time. Anything to fill space in suggesting something dubious perhaps or maybe Hitchens was pulling a conscious fast one. Alas, a tabloid journalist like Hitchens can safely assume his readers will be unfamiliar with the name of Andrzej Wajda.

Hitchens two references to Katyn have been in passing, but it is remarkable the film is referred to at all in the Mail on Sunday; it is unlikely to appeal to “middle England.” When there is a need to maximise newspaper circulation or the number of viewers in order to maintain profits, the newspaper industry is in decline and satellite stations are ever increasing in number, pluralism in content is likely to be an exception, difference cannot be communicated or known about.

A comparison of the delay between the domestic premiere and its release outside Poland of Katyn with Ashes and Diamonds though, does not suggest the validity of a putative Hitchens’ conspiracy theory. More seriously, the attack by Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the two Mail titles, on the "metropolitan" values of the London media in his Cudlipp lecture in January 2007 was also an attack on the more internationalist culture Londoners enjoy, and Katyn is likely to be seen by a higher proportion of Londoners, still depressingly small, than the population of any other part of the UK. As Hitchens attacks any audio-visual technology later than the film projector, one wonders if he has realised the audience ("the liberal elite") who will see Katyn in his preferred context are the people he most detests?

For those unable to see Katyn in a cinema, the DVD player will be an enabler, but Hitchens has no time for information technology, except when he can promote his appearances on YouTube. As subtitled films, and he refers to them from time to time, are now virtually extinct on terrestrial television channels and scarce on satellite, as television has become a wasteland, the DVD is the main way for many to view something they hope will be of value to them. Years ago, foreign language films were not infrequently screened on BBC2 and Channel 4, and because those channels are "free at the point of use", Katyn would have received a much larger audience than it will today. Yet Hitchens regrets the introduction of television, and evidently thinks it should have been stopped (The Abolition of Britain, 2000 ed., p135-36). In fairness it is the habit of watching television which he finds objectionable, and the habit may legitimize programming of questionable value, but Hitchens sees the quality of programming as no defence. He wrote of Katyn on June 21,2009: “if it is showing near you, I recommend you make the effort to see it”, but Hitchens can suggest no solution if it is not.

Hitchens, the devout anglican, shares the prejudices of his other ultimate boss, and the references to 'Cultural Marxism' in Dacre’s Cudlipp lecture might seem familiar enough to Hitchens’ critical readers to ponder whether he had a hand in it. The provincial populism associated with such Conservative ‘anti-elitists‘ as Dacre and Hitchens does not exactly encourage cultural internationalism, modern “little Englanders” can scarcely be expected to consider it desirable, but the anglocentrism of the liberal Mark Lawson at The Guardian is no better.

The rise of Hollywood relative to the cinema of the rest of the world is much commented upon, and the economic liberalism which has allowed it to do so is in conflict with other liberal values. If 'liberal' can be defined as the limitation of restraint, economic liberalism can become positively illiberal because it restricts people’s openness to new experiences. Of cause, the inverse can also be true: following the liberation of France in 1944, the adolescents who later became the nouvelle vague film makers were inspired by the American movies they had been denied.

Blaming ‘the system’, or less crudely the ‘mainstream media’ for the lack of pluralism, a practice of the editors of the medialens website in their coverage of contemporary events, risks defending or advocating something much worse; they use the Manufacturing Consent model associated with Noam Chomsky which is notably singular, and medialens recent piece criticising the British media’s coverage of North Korea demonstrates its capacity for the perverse.

The objective observer might well conclude that what one defends might bear a remarkable similarity to the policies one would follow given the opportunity. For this reason, it is unsurprising the ‘socialism in one country’ form of economic autarky (leave the EU, antipathy to immigration) still advocated by Bob Crow of the RMT union, which turns into a particularly repugnant form of nationalism on the blog of Neil Clark, received such a derisive level of support in the European Parliamentary elections on June 4.