Judas, the First Socialist, and other issues

I’ll get on to Judas Iscariot in a moment. I am asked how I define poverty. I would define physical poverty as severe want – not enough food to eat, no access to clean water, absence of proper shelter either from great heat or from cold, inadequate clothing, untreated sickness and no possibility of medical help, conditions so squalid that cleanliness is impossible, severe overcrowding. These are the features of poverty that I have seen in various forms on my many travels into remote parts of the world.

 

I had an interesting discussion about this on Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five Live programme a few weeks ago, and was encouraged by a contributor from Africa who agreed with me that poverty of this kind does not really exist in this country. But he added that hardship undoubtedly does exist. Of course much of that hardship stems from not having things that others do have, and from a feeling of injustice and rejection. But this is not poverty, which in my view is an absolute condition of severe material want, not a comparative condition of being worse off than your neighbour. I would add, as I often do, that I suspect that there may be something very close to absolute poverty among the lonely old people of this country, trying to make ends meet on no more than their pensions, regarding any further appeal to the welfare state as a shameful (and therefore unthinkable) form of charity which they are too proud to accept.

Many of these live very pinched and deprived lives, though even they are materially rich beside the rural dwellers of North Korea or millions of the less fortunate in Africa and parts of India. But the measure of poverty as an arbitrary proportion of average income is just a device by which socialists justify their unending raid on the possessions of the wealthy and productive, to finance the unproductive and penniless state in its vote-buying projects. Some of these projects may incidentally do good. But their aim is not to do good, but to make their authors feel good about themselves, while increasing their power. It also incidentally shrinks the power of the productive middle-class to be charitable in their own right, as they have handed over a large part of their charitable duty to the state.

That is why I am so fond of Christ’s rebuke to Judas, and the account as a whole. The passage is as follows: The Gospel according to John, 12th Chapter, beginning at verse iv; Mary (not Mary Magdalene, but Mary, sister of Lazarus), has just taken a pound – or 454 grams in the Rocky Horror Bible - of very costly Spikenard ointment and wiped Jesus’s feet with her hair, ‘and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’. ‘Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him : ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus :’Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always’.

 

As so often, there’s a lot packed into this, notably the realistic recognition that there will always be poor people in the world , and those who wish to help them will always have the opportunity to do so. But it is the biting observation that Judas, like so many since, is pretending a concern for the poor to cover up other, less noble motives, that really goes home with a satisfying thud. There is no new thing under the sun. I’m accused by some of saying that Christianity has no part to play in politics. I’ve no doubt, as it happens, that it does have a part. But that it is an individual part, in that the man or woman who embraces Christian principle may be involved in politics, in any party which is not actually wicked, and use his or her individual influence to good and Christian ends. But I do not think there is such a thing as a ‘Christian policy’ or a Christian party’, or that any grouping should arrogate Christianity to itself as its own possession. This is because Christianity is not about earthly power, but about love. And if you think about it, power is the opposite of love – and the less love there is, the more power you will generally find.

That’s enough religion for this posting (though I plan another contribution on a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral which may be of interest to the atheist fancy). On other comments, Mr McDonald (or ‘McDonald’ as he perhaps prefers to be addressed) is wrong in particular in saying that the MPs’ expenses story was offered first to our sister paper ‘The Daily Mail’ (it wasn’t, though I should point out here yet again that I do not write for the ‘Daily Mail’, but for the ‘Mail on Sunday’ , a separate paper with its own editor and staff) and wrong in general, that the anti-EU rebels were specially spendthrift on the expenses gravy train ( I believe one of them had the lowest claims of any MP, whereas Mr Cameron himself, as I so often point out, was among the highest claimers – quite legally –for his nice country house, despite being personally rich. There’s a book to be written on the selective nature of the coverage of MPs’ expenses, and the selective nature of the way in which some were chosen for the public pillory and others exempted). Many of the rebels are, I believe, newly elected since the rules were changed). So the comment is both incorrect and irrelevant.

 

If people come here to plug the BNP, they must learn that they will earn themselves my utter contempt. I had thought we had got rid of them, but perhaps now the BNP – which is now tiny and very short of money - has emerged from its latest furious inner faction fight, it now has time to start spreading slime again. This revolting grouplet has been thoroughly dealt with here, and the index is full of clear explanations as to why no civilised person should dirty himself by association with such a spectacularly disreputable organisation. Reminder: It was founded by a Judophobe Hitler-worshipper, so pitifully obsessed with Jews that he once launched an investigation into Nicholas Griffin’s ancestry because he thought his (Griffin’s) father had rather a large nose, and still peopled with Holocaust-deniers and similar. The BNP’s noisy flag-wagging patriotism is wholly opportunist. So is its, er, critique of Islam. Mr Griffin, it might be recalled, once travelled to Tripoli to seek aid from the late Colonel Gadaffi. Not long afterwards he was consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. Is there nobody Mr Griffin can’t bring himself to meet? There is nothing to hope for from this squalid and pathetic faction, whose existence does grave damage to every cause it claims to espouse.

 

As for UKIP, I only attack it when I am foolishly urged to support it. I have explained why( again see the index) and only those who want me to attack it should sing its praises here or pointlessly seek my endorsement of it, which is never going to come. I cannot think of a more certain way of ensuring that opposition to EU membership returned to the braying margins of political, life, for the rebel Tories to have anything to do with this hopeless Dad’s Army, a group of people so politically naïve that they thought they could make use of Robert Kilroy-Silk. He tied them up, hand and foot, with their own cravats. The Gang of Four came closer to succeeding than most people realise. Their failure was not predetermined, though Margaret Thatcher bears some responsibility for it, as I shall one day be free to reveal. Oh, and to Howard Medwell ‘Why *not* “Pestilent”?’ It’s a good 18th-century pejorative term, much in need of revival.

Griffin, the BBC and the birth of a 'stab in the back' myth

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Well, that ought to be it. The leader of the BNP has exploded in a great geyser of slime on national TV, leaving nothing behind but a bad smell and a few flakes of pancake make-up.

Short of donning a Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard’s hood and robes or giving a Hitler salute – or both at once – Nicholas Griffin (why should we call him Nick as if we liked him?) could not have done more to alert sensible people to what sort of party he leads.

By refusing to explain his loopy ‘views’ on the Holocaust and by putting in a good word for the Klan, Mr Griffin showed what really drives him, which is race, followed by race and then more race.

It would be pitiful – if we did not know how dangerous such pathetic men can be if their hour strikes. Those great beefy bodyguards would protect him more effectively if they ran forward and clamped a gloved hand over his mouth every time he started to say the word ‘indigenous’.

But thanks to the glories of free speech, he was on his own and linked to the mighty transmitters of the BBC as he simpered, sought and failed to ingratiate himself and demonstrated that he simply does not have the qualities of wit, charm and eloquence that would make him a real menace. And my first response was to be relieved that he had made such a mess of it. Then a doubt began to creep in. As a long-time enemy of the BNP, occasionally targeted by their propaganda machine, I have more experience than anyone wants of the way their supporters think.

And I feel I ought to register a small warning here. I believe there are quite a lot of people who simply don’t care about Mr Griffin’s creepy difficulties over Jews, or his associations with Klansmen. They are unmoved by his own famous quotation (clumsily muffed by the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne) in which he admits that everything he does and says is a front for his real racialist aim.

I can hear them muttering now that their leader didn’t get a fair shake, that the panel and the audience ganged up on him, that he was never allowed to make his points uninterrupted, that the BBC robbed him of his chance. A ‘stab in the back legend’ has been born, and will grow.

Why is this? It is easy. It is because of another equally important story this week, in which we were told that the population of Britain is to rise to 70million, largely because of immigration, even though nobody wants this. It is because Jack Straw also made a colossal fool of himself, by denying the blindingly obvious truth that Labour has helped create the BNP and Mr Griffin, through its callous and incompetent laxness on immigration.

It is because nobody intelligent takes seriously the vague and embarrassed mumblings of the Tories about an unstated limit on non-EU immigration (they can’t stop EU immigration and they know it). A better indication of their politically correct attitude came from David Cameron’s beloved Baroness Warsi of Diversity, who got away with an absurd claim that there is no such thing as a bogus asylum-seeker. Oh yes there is, Baroness.

Mr Griffin is an inadequate and unlovely nobody, without charisma or eloquence. Yet a large chunk of the British people are so sick of being ignored and patronised that even this severely limited man has managed to create a substantial political movement where none existed before. Tremble in case a real charismatic leader, and a real National Socialist movement, ever arise in this country. Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, in their joint scurry to the Left, have abandoned a large space in which such a monster might flourish and even triumph.

A new type of conman is peddling the apocalypse

There have always been cult leaders who have gathered followers around them by warning that the world is about to end and claiming that they have the route to salvation. They usually disappear with the funds just before the due date, leaving their followers in the drizzle on some hilltop, awaiting a non-existent apocalypse.

How all these Victorian frauds would envy the triumph of their 21st Century successors, the Manmade Global Warming maniacs.

The Prime Minister gabbles about our having just weeks to save the world from doom. The Government seeks to scare children into political conformity (as if the schools weren’t doing all they can already) by screening expensive commercials showing drowning puppies and kittens floating to their doom on upturned tables. This unscientific and questionable stuff now has far more influence over our lives than religion. It badly needs to be debunked, though it requires some courage to stand up against its shrieking devotees.

But where are the furious critics of the Church when they are confronted by a real-life intolerant orthodoxy? Silent.

Women at any cost? Far better that these MPs are proper Tories

It is easy to see why David Cameron – or anyone – would want to exterminate the traditional male Tory MP. Who needs any more portly, shifty, braying time-servers in pinstripes, getting the taxpayer to finance their mortgages, conservatives when in opposition, liberal softies once in government?

But why would it be any better to have dozens of female management consultants, bankeresses, social workers and lawyers, clutching briefcases? All of them are bound to be dedicated to the dubious Leftist view that a woman’s place is in the office while her children do hard time in a baby farm – an idea that has done more damage to the country than almost anything except cannabis.

Here’s a non-sexist alternative idea. Don’t select MPs on the grounds of sex. Pick them on the grounds of politics. You could call it an ‘all-conservative shortlist’. The trouble is, if Mr Cameron did that, he’d end up by getting rid of himself.

You'd think they were already in Downing St

Are we being bounced? The entire British media have already decided the result of the next General Election – at least I can think of no other explanation for the appearance of this picture of David and Samantha Cameron at the opening of an envelope – sorry, the tenth anniversary of the opening of the stage musical of The Lion King in London. How do these charming studies of this handsome pair come to be taken, do you think? And why do we never see pictures of David Cameron scowling (I have a fine one, in a drawer next to my copy of the suppressed Bullingdon portrait) or grimacing or standing next to signs marked ‘Exit’? We will, soon enough.

* Sorry, but if Gordon Brown had admitted to liking any particular biscuit, that would have been turned against him. We have reached such a pitch of unreasoning hatred towards this man that he’s to blame if our beer is flat or it rains on the way home. Just imagine the derision if he’d said he liked digestives. Psychiatrists would have been produced to show that this was the choice of the deeply troubled. I don’t blame him for trying to keep his biscuit tastes secret.

In haste

I shall be travelling next week and so will not be posting anything except the column. Normal service should resume during the party conferences. Meanwhile, a few small points and responses. Those who call for the abolition of the BBC show a strange faith in the ability or willingness of commercial broadcasters to attempt serious reporting of news, high culture or religious broadcasting. Without the BBC such things will vanish from the airwaves. They also seem to assume - for reasons I don't grasp - that privately owned monopoly or oligopoly broadcasters will be inclined to support conservative positions. There is no evidence of this. The three main (commercial) networks in the USA are relentlessly liberal, and Fox is neo-conservative, that is to say uninterested in the great moral and cultural issues.

Of course if you want broadcasting to be a howling wilderness, then abolishing the BBC will certainly produce that result. But the BBC will in any case defeat such a campaign, precisely because it is true that commercial broadcasters can't and won't produce broadcasting of the quality of Radios Three and Four, or even that of the old (not current) BBC2 or the better bits of (publicly subsidised) Channel Four. Reform, such as I propose, is both more credible and more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, you may say that it is unlikely (it is) or impossible (it may be) but these are counsels of despair, and if you really believe there is no hope then why bother to enter the debate? Better to cultivate your garden and seek shelter from the coming storm.

What is it that sympathisers of the BNP want to achieve by pestering me? I have not, as they claimed, described all supporters of this organisation as knuckle-draggers. It certainly contains knuckle-draggers, but the ones who write to me could more generally be described as gullible dupes, who associate with knuckle-draggers and either don't know what they are doing, or don't care. They don't deal with that, because they cannot, hence the pretence that I have called them knuckle-draggers, and the assumed air of wounded innocence.

I will never endorse or encourage their squalid party. I have made my differences with it perfectly clear (though they often misrepresent my position). My disagreements with it are real and I am actively hostile to it. I do not secretly support it but suppress my views out of fear, as some seem fondly to imagine. Others falsely suggest that I support, or do not oppose, mass immigration when I am repeatedly on record as believing that it should be immediately halted. And they distort and caricature my argument that no new conservative party can be created until the Tories collapse and split, hoping to spread the idea that there is no alternative to them. Well, anyone who says 'there is no alternative' should be treated with great caution. More often than not, these words really mean: 'There is an alternative. I just hope you don't notice it.’

If Mr Griffin wishes to disown, specifically and unequivocally, the words he spoke to an American audience, about concealing his true objectives for advantage, reproduced here: ‘There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. And the BNP isn’t about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them. That means basically to use the saleable words. As I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.Perhaps one day, once by being rather more subtle we’ve got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, the British people might change their mind and say, “Yes, every last one must go”. But if you offer that as your sole aim to start with, you’re gonna get absolutely nowhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.’

Also, don't you love that word 'control'?

Likewise if he is ready to apologise for, retract and disown, specifically and unequivocally, his remarks at his trial about the Holocaust, in which he compared the belief that six million Jews were murdered to a belief that the earth is flat, then I might be prepared to believe that he has broken with the tradition from which his organisation came. Otherwise not. He has had plenty of chances to do so. Why doesn't he?

Our children can’t hold a knife and fork. So what does UNESCO teach them?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

And still we will not admit that we have made a terrible mistake. This week we learned that growing numbers of children arrive at school unable to hold a knife and fork. I wonder what else they cannot do.

I suspect that, if anyone measured it, we would also find that a lot of them can’t listen or speak as they should be able to because they have spent so much time in front of glowing screens that mesmerise them, but don’t respond to them or care about them.

If we looked further, we would discover that many of them have no manners to speak of, do not understand different tones of voice, have trouble obeying instructions or settling to any serious task.

As they grow older, large numbers of these children, especially the boys, will be drugged with powerful stimulants because it is claimed they are suffering from syndromes or disorders – fancy words for subjective and unproven diagnoses, used by doctors and others who ought to know better.   

Later still they will form a solid, unteachable, disorderly mass at the back of scores of secondary-school classrooms, texting (if they can read enough) during lessons, or simply ignoring or insulting their teachers, uninterested in learning and unable to do so, and preventing others from learning, too.

Then, released on to the streets, they will frighten us all with their blank, pitiless faces and their inability to understand things we take for granted. Consideration for others? What’s that? Restraint? Never heard of it. Manners? What are they? Patience? Who needs it? All classes are affected.But we were not born with these blessings. We learned them in thousands of tiny steps, from parents who were present in our lives from our earliest moments, not for a brief few months before everyone had to go back to the grindstone.

Our schools are terrible, and have been for years – so terrible that even the authorities are beginning to admit it. But the teachers are right when they say that the real problem is in the home. And the problem of the home is actually the problem of an unhinged society that decided to try to change human nature. Women, it said, had to work outside the home to be fulfilled. Raising children was something that would just get done in the intervals between work and sleep.

This idea came from a wild, Leftist coven whose members long ago grew up and got rich. But it just happened to suit a lot of businesses which find women cheaper and more reliable than men, and so it took off. And it has done limitless damage. And it is time that it was reversed. And nobody will do anything.

But comfort yourselves. Children may not know how to handle cutlery, but if UNESCO has its way they will soon be instructed, from the age of five, in the joys of masturbation.

Thus do we make progress. That’s why I’m against it.

Chris Evans, a change too far

Harriet’s always been the real face of Labour

I am baffled by the howls of rage against Harriet Harman’s plans to make us all equal and attack the middle class. This is what Harriet Harman does, and has always done. She doesn’t make any secret of it. Labour did not stop doing it just because it was led by a sort of male Princess Diana with a disarming grin and a trembling lip.

Honestly, I do increasingly think that it is absolutely true that we get the governments we deserve. Anthony Blair’s good fortune was that he didn’t look like his government. Gordon Brown’s misfortune is that he does look like his government. But are we so gullible that we vote on the basis of facial features? Looks like it.


How much are you paying back, Dave?

Rich politicians who announce austerity plans for MPs should be questioned very carefully. Do their plans affect them personally? If not, they don’t amount to anything. If David Cameron is sincere about reducing the public tax burden caused by politicians, two questions for him: Will he pay back the gigantic subsidy we have given him to help him buy his large country house, which he could perfectly well afford himself? And, given that he is now surrounded by dodgy millionaires fluttering cheque books and hoping for favours, will he stop taking taxpayers’ cash to finance the Tory Party? This subsidy is called ‘Short Money’, by the way, but there’s nothing short about it.


* I’m as keen as anyone on not being blown up while flying. In fact, as a moderately frequent flyer, I’m keener than most. But wasn’t there something a little odd about the repeated prosecution of the Lucozade Bombers? It seems to have been aimed much more at justifying the irritating and disproportionate liquids ban than putting wicked people behind bars. We’ve seen lots of demonstrations of what would have happened if the bombs had gone off. I’d also be interested to see a demonstration of how easy, or hard, it would have been to manufacture the bombs in an aeroplane lavatory. Oh, and how did our military presence in Afghanistan affect this crime? We’re always being told it’s supposed to stop such things.

* Just a word on the death of Keith Waterhouse. The news caused me to re-read, for the first time in decades, his beautiful and moving first novel There Is A Happy Land. I could go on about it for pages if there was room. But all I can say here is that everyone should read it.


My questions for the BNP bigot

Yes the BNP leader Nick Griffin should be on Question Time. A few suggestions: The first question should be about his attitude to the Holocaust. The second should be about why his party’s constitution is bigoted. And the third should be about his interesting appearance next to a one-time stalwart of the Ku Klux Klan.

After that, I’d love to see him asked for the details of his economic policy and given all the time in the world to explain it. Oh, and please make sure he is not on a panel with identikit liberal elite politicians from the New and Blue Labour Parties.

It is their silence and evasion over mass immigration, disorder and the EU that have made the BNP as strong as it is. The best way to head off the BNP is for the BBC to give more of a voice to legitimate, civilised people who don’t share the Left-liberal consensus.

* In response to plans to let all kinds of organisations sponsor academy schools, I see a teachers’ union spokesman has said: ‘I defy anyone to suggest that a football club can know more about the running of schools than a local education authority.’ Oh, I don’t know. For a start, football clubs know that it makes sense to select on merit.

Why did the BBC think Chris Evans was the best replacement for Terry Wogan? It is all very well saying that society is changing, and recognising that. But moving from Wogan to Evans is not just accepting that change has happened. It is trying to speed up that change, and taking sides over deep cultural and moral matters.




What on earth did people think they were voting for when they put New Labour in office in 1997, 2001 and 2005? Good weather?

Putting Nick Griffin on Question Time

I suppose it had to come. I believe the BBC have been worrying about this for ages. But since they must base their idea of what is legitimate on the party voting strengths, and it is hard to see how they could avoid this, they really do not have all that much choice about giving Mr Griffin a seat on the Question Time panel.

This need not be a disaster, especially if it is preceded by proper TV and radio grillings of Mr Griffin, by interviewers who have briefed themselves properly about his past, not least his remarks about the Holocaust. I am travelling at present and need to be brief, but I'd like to make a couple of points. First, I suspect Mr Griffin would relish being on a panel with the usual bland robotic party spokesmen and women, who would make his point that the establishment is dominated by elite liberals with no idea of what the world is like. He would have a much harder time against outsider Labour and Tory MPs, ones who have been prepared to speak against multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration, and, for instance, Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, who has for years made an entirely respectable and untainted case for migration control.

I also think his appearance with David Duke, and the words he used there, should be calmly and firmly put to him - the event is available on YouTube, and he should not be allowed to avoid explaining what he meant. That done, I suggest that he should be put on the spot on all the policy areas on which he has little to say, or his policies are mere slogans.

Again, the difficulty here for the BBC is that it is peopled by staff who think the case against Mr Griffin is already obvious and does not need to be made. They have very few interviewers and presenters who recognise that the failure of the establishment to speak or think about immigration, culture and disorder leaves space in which such people can operate.

One other thing. I suspect the current efforts to force the BNP to admit people whose ethnic origins it doesn't like are misguided. The BNP's openly bigoted constitution is the best evidence that we have of its true nature. Forcing it to change its membership rules will not make it into a multi-ethnic party, nor alter what is in the hearts of its leaders, but will make it harder to attack.

BNP's soft sell masks the poison

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Please do not vote for the BNP. I receive a distressing number of letters and emails from seemingly sensible people beguiled by this organisation.

They think it is genuinely concerned with Britain’s problems. I don’t think so. I think it is obsessed with discredited and un-Christian racial theories.

If it cared about Britain and wanted a real part in national life, it would surely get rid of a leader who once jeered that belief in the Nazi massacre of six million Jews was comparable to a belief that the Earth is flat.

It would surely get rid of a clause in its constitution that makes ‘ethnic origin’, not opinions, the key test of membership. It doesn’t do this because these are its core beliefs. Those reassured by Nick Griffin’s smooth salesmanship should realise it is exactly that. Don’t take my word for it. Take Mr Griffin’s.

He himself said, while sharing a platform with one David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan: ‘There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. And the BNP isn’t about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them. That means basically to use the saleable words. As I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy.

‘Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.
‘Perhaps one day, once by being rather more subtle we’ve got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, the British people might change their mind and say, “Yes, every last one must go”.

‘But if you offer that as your sole aim to start with, you’re gonna get absolutely nowhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.’

Don’t believe me? This interesting speech, in which Mr Griffin makes it clear that the BNP has changed its image but not its purpose, can easily be found on YouTube.

I do not think the BNP is on the verge of seizing power. It is small, riven by factions and short of cash.
What I fear is that it damages the good causes it cynically pretends to support, just as it has already somehow tainted the Union Flag by its repeated abuse of it.

Comments on or about the BNP should be made below only. Comments on this subject which are posted on other threads will not be published.

Labour panics about the BNP

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

While the Tories have been crumbling, the Labour Party have also been falling to pieces. The sudden panic among some East London Labour MPs about the BNP is a sign of how bad things have got. They hope that, by shouting loudly about it now, they can prevent or reduce a swing to Nick Griffin's nasty party in the May local elections. The tragedy is that it is thanks to the irresponsibility and dishonesty of both Labour and Tories that the revolting BNP now seems likely to make gains in many areas where they would once have been dismissed with scorn.

Once people have got used to voting for a disreputable and sinister party like this, who knows where it might end? Other European countries - notably France and Germany - now face the growth of similar unpleasant forces in their midst - and in Germany the taxpayer is compelled to subsidise these people under the sort of 'state funding'. We too are now being asked to adopt.

I note that the BNP's Press Officer, who likes to be called Dr Phill Edwards but apparently has another name in private, has been complaining about me. He called me "That *****y Hitchens" in a recent interview with my old friend Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail. He accused me of snobbery towards the BNP, and of more or less agreeing with them while denouncing them.

Permit me to rebut this. I have spent a long time talking to BNP people, including their leader, Nick Griffin. I think they have no serious policies to deal with the problems they pretend they will solve. I think they are rather dim, limited types, who have been handed undue prominence by the refusal of the major parties even to discuss the issue of mass immigration.

By shouting down the many thoughtful and civilised people who have tried to raise this issue in a responsible way, the liberal elite have left the field clear for real  bigots and real Nazis to make political hay. Yet again, their actions have had the opposite consequences to the ones they intended. Will they ever learn?

As for the accusations of snobbery, my great grandfather was a farm labourer who left the land in hungry times, to help build Portsmouth dockyard. His children grew up in one of the toughest, bleakest parts of that city, in an era of hardship unimaginable to us. Yet my grandfather managed to become a headmaster and my father a naval officer. I am no snob. I know where I come from and am proud of it. My contempt for the BNP arises from a straightforward dislike for its unBritish, anti-Christian origins, among Hitler-worshippers, closet Nazis, men of violence, swivel-eyed Judophobes and racial bigots.

Knowing full well how decent British people feel about such things, the BNP has spent much of the last ten years seeking to conceal its real nature behind a new front of smooth, New Labour-type PR. I know that a lot of people have been fooled by this, and I know why. It is because the respectable parties have lied, and lied and lied about immigration, and smeared anyone who has challenged them with outrageous charges of bigotry.

And people are so sick of them and their lies, and so sick of being called ‘racists’ when they are not, that when they see the BNP called the same rude names that they have been called, they think the BNP must be on their side. Sadly for them, the BNP is on nobody's side but its own. It seeks power on their votes but heaven forbid it should ever get any power. It is not fit to run a toy train set, let alone a town hall or a country.

Why has this happened? How did we get into this fix? Mass immigration has suited governments of left and right for many years, not just in Britain but in North America and continental Europe as well. Why? It creates a semi-legal underclass of people who will work for low wages and avoid the strict minimum wage, health and safety and other regulations which have been imposed on employers by governments paying debts to trade union supporters or obeying EU regulations.

It also solves a problem, which would otherwise paralyse society. Once you have a welfare state which pays large numbers of people generously to do nothing, and which educates many of them so badly that no employer will want them, how can you persuade anyone to do the jobs at the bottom, which are both unpleasant and very badly-paid, but which require diligence and initiative even so?

Migrants - who quite reasonably want to better themselves - are encouraged to come to industrialised countries where the low wages seem generous to them. They are used to hard work and do it willingly and well. In the short term, they keep the industries going. In the short term, they are glad of the miserable wages, which are generous in comparison to what they would get in their home countries.

But in the long term, no effort is made to integrate them. They are treated as faceless numbers by both employers and politicians. In fact, it is in the interests of many politicians to keep them in defined areas and to court them as an ethnic block vote. Not that anyone ever openly says this. It just seems to happen again and again. And it is in the interests of others - who loathe our society in general - to use the presence of migrants as an excuse for introducing multicultural education and broadcasting, which sustain and deepen the divisions between migrants and the indigenous people.

Of course, the migrants are not numbers. They are people with hopes and fears and ambitions. They need places to live. They want to bring their families to join them. Their children grow up here and rightly consider themselves as British. They will not put up with the miserable jobs and wages their fathers accepted. They need schools and doctors. Encouraged to maintain their home cultures, they naturally begin to change the areas in which they settle, so as to be more like home for them - and incidentally less like home for those already there.

The elite see this as very adventurous and exotic. They do not have to bring up their children in districts where the schools are multilingual, or where the familiar landmarks of their own childhoods have disappeared. They view multiculturalism as exciting - a matter of restaurants, picturesque zones they can visit for an evening, or live in as young single people when they have few responsibilities. Then they can go back to the comfortable, unchanged places where they grew up.

It is different for those who live there all the time as families and have nowhere else to go. It is also different for those who believed that the welfare state set up after 1945 was for them, built on their contributions, who now see its benefits given generously to new arrivals. I believe a lot of bitterness has been caused by changes in the queuing system for council houses, which once kept established working-class communities together, but has now been adapted to meet the needs of new arrivals. Actually, if we are going to have mass immigration, it is hard to see how this could have been avoided.

The question is whether we should have had the mass immigration, and whether we should have any more.

The poor, not the well-off, have to pay the material price of immigration, which benefits big business by keeping wages low, and helps governments by providing a short-cut to economic growth. It is a tribute to the gentle tolerance of the British people that, by and large, this has happened without major conflict or friction. Both indigenous people and migrants, it seems to me, have made a huge and unsung effort, to cope with a difficult situation, which neither group chose.

Given time and stability, I think they could eventually settle down, and if the official policy of multiculturalism were abandoned, real integration would take place over the next century. But for that to happen the migration would have to slow down so that we could all get used to each other. Which would mean no more cheap labour, and serious welfare reform too.

The immigration we have had since 1950 is already far greater and more unsettling than anything we have experienced since the Norman Conquest. Fashionable claims that this is a 'nation of immigrants' are simply not true. Past migrations, of Huguenots or Jews, have never been on anything like the current scale.

Yet it does not stop or pause. It just seems to go on and on, and the expansion of the European Union to the East means that it is likely to become still more intense. Who can blame young people in search of a better future for coming here if they can? The real question is, is this policy wise for Britain? It may suit business. It may suit governments whose economic policies need endless growth. It may suit the rich who like the wider range of cuisine. It may suit those who have no long-term concern for this as a functioning, unselfish community. There is such a thing as society, but the thoughtless supporters of mass migration do not seem to think so.

How strange that the very people who misquote Margaret Thatcher to suggest that she thought there was no such thing as society behave exactly as if that is what they believed. For it goes on, largely undiscussed. It goes on despite countless fake ‘crackdowns’. Ministers do not even seem to know how extensive it is. They openly admit they do not know who is in this country, and then take this abject failure out on us by making us carry identity cards.

It is still dangerous for anyone in mainstream politics or journalism to criticise immigration. The liberals have screamed 'racist' at such critics so many times that almost nobody except actual racists is prepared to get involved.

Once again, the remorseless logic leads to the same conclusion. The Tory and Labour Parties are no longer, in their own jargon, 'fit for purpose'. They don't represent the country or its people, just selfish elites with short-term aims. And if we do not rapidly replace them with something better, then the dismal BNP will become a serious danger to the country. Vote 'None of the Above’. If enough people do this, then the way will be opened for the founding of decent new parties, neither bigoted nor politically correct; who will honestly address the problems of this country.