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 Comments on this subject which are posted on other threads will not be published.

Like rusting General Motors hulks, our parties are nothing but scrap

... and on Thursday we can finally send them where they belong

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column


Imagine this. In the depth of night you are startled from sleep by footsteps in your home where no footsteps ought to be. Grabbing your heaviest torch, you tiptoe downstairs and find a burglar going through your possessions. He turns to you and smiles.

‘Very sorry about this,’ he says. ‘But there’s no need to call the police. We can sort this out between ourselves.

‘I’ll give you back the things you can actually see hanging out of my sack and hang on to the ones you can’t see. Deal?’

Shaking with rage and shock, you stammer a protest. He smiles again, realises this isn’t working, then adopts a serious expression and says: ‘Tell you what. Why don’t we solve the whole problem by having fixed-term Parliaments and sending people text messages about the progress of Bills through the committee stage? Good, eh?’

At this point, I rather suspect you might be tempted to do what the police irritatingly call ‘taking the law into your own hands’.

I gasp at the sheer nerve of the political class, and of their media friends, this week. Caught with their collective hands thrust deep into our collective pockets, the leaderships of all three major parties haul out various ancient (and awful) schemes to make government even more remote and safe from the people than it is. There is, quite simply, no connection of any kind at all between the one and the other.

And when they do this, instead of jeering, the ‘serious’ media, especially the New Tory Guardian and the New Tory BBC, reverently spread this garbage over pages of print and hours of valuable radio and TV time.

There is only one kind of reform we need: end, instantly, the State support (including the semi-secret ‘Short Money’) given to the main parties. Cancel their guaranteed rights to party political broadcasts.

 Ban any donation bigger than £50. Within weeks, these empty, arrogant, elite organisations would collapse.
No longer could they dismiss the rest of us as ‘xenophobes’ or ‘fruitcakes’ for wanting national independence and properly enforced borders. Nor would they be able to sneer from their subsidised second homes that our daily experience of coarseness and disorder was exaggerated and caused by ‘moral panic’.

This is the real reason for the livid rage now abroad. It is not just the money. It is the way the money has insulated these parasites and intellectual snobs from the reality of the country they govern so badly.
Funny, isn’t it, that the Parliament which tried to abolish fox-hunting has helped create a new bloodsport of ‘Hunt the MP’ – though I’m baffled at the way some prominent figures get away with it, while others are dragged under.

Enjoyable as this is, we need to do something constructive or nothing will be gained.

This is our opportunity. The Tory, Labour and Lib Dem parties are as finished as General Motors, rusting remnants from another age.

If we refuse to vote for any of them on Thursday, we can cause them to collapse and make room for the foundation of proper new parties that speak for us, rather than for the liberal elite.

What if Blair came back from the dead?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

As I watched Night At The Museum 2, in which monsters and villains of the past come to life again, I wondered if anything could possibly bring back Anthony Blair, who passed into oblivion so recently.

I fear it may happen, especially if the Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified and he tries to resurrect himself as Euro President. If so, I hope they can also reconstruct his parliamentary expenses claim forms, which were shredded by Commons officials in a tragic accident.

* If you can work out how they fiddle the figures on train punctuality, you can crack the code of most British statistics, which are almost invariably lies.

The trick is to change the facts before you assemble the figures. So, if your trains are late, you change the timetables, allowing them much longer to get to their destinations. If by any chance your train runs smoothly, you will find yourself spending long minutes idling at stations, waiting for the official departure time. And presto! Punctuality improves.

It’s much the same with education. Examinations are made ludicrously easy and more people pass them. As for crime, you reclassify theft as ‘lost property’, or count ten burglaries in one street as a single crime and, wonder of wonders, crime falls.

The only mystery is why anyone believes this stuff.

The conversation continues, not always politely

Do I like being insulted? Not specially. But, having been insulted by experts over the years, and having handed out a fair amount of raillery and abuse, I take it as part of what I do and am largely unaffected by it. What is much, much worse is to meet blank walls of what seems to be a deliberate desire not to grasp what I am saying. Or to come across wearisome standard-issue, conventional wisdom arguments, so feeble that no thinking person could accept them, put forward by people who imagine that these off-the-peg formulae are original, and their own.

What's also provoking is the 'you never explain such and such, or never say what you're in favour of' approach. As I've said before, I've now written many hundreds of thousands of words in the Mail on Sunday, on this site and elsewhere, plus three substantial books on public policy, plus a specific manifesto (Google ‘Peter Hitchens’ and ‘manifesto of sorts’) Anyone who has read all this knows what I propose, and what I like. Anybody who hasn't cannot use the word 'never'. If they've never seen it (another matter) those are hints as to where they may find it.

Just thought you might like to know.

Now to some of the more recent comments. A person calling himself 'Crumblekid' (oh dear) produces the ancient, rust-streaked EU propaganda claim that the EU has somehow prevented a European War since 1945. I've asked before, and I'll ask again, which potential armed conflict has been in any way prevented by the EU? The only European power-struggle during this era was that between the USSR and the Western European free countries. The EU played no part in preventing that developing into war. That task was achieved by NATO (in its first, genuine, incarnation).

There is a strong argument for suggesting that the EU (largely under German pressure) actively caused the various armed conflicts in former Yugoslavia by pushing forward with the recognition of Croatia as an independent state. It is widely believed, for instance, that Britain's opt-out from the Euro had to be 'paid for' by British recognition of Croatia. It is true that the Franco-German conflict has been institutionalised by the EU. But that was made possible by France's humiliating and permanent defeat at the hands of Germany in 1940. No new war was ever likely. Vichy France (in which Francois Mitterrand was deeply involved) was in a way the prototype for the new Franco-German relationship. Germany had by then defeated France three times, (though initially it had not yet become a fully-fledged nation) playing a decisive part in the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig in 1813, and again in the Anglo-Prussian victory at Waterloo in 1815, the debacle of 1870 and the second debacle of 1940. The French elite realised in 1940 that they would never again be able to seek military supremacy over Germany, and thought deeply about what sort of new relationship they could have with their Eastern neighbour. The original ECSC was based upon a French recognition that France could no longer contemplate war with Germany, and must come to a permanent accommodation (the Elysee Treaty of 1963, signed by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, is the real political basis of the modern EU, codifying a Franco-German axis under which Germany is the unacknowledged European superpower, while France maintains its international prestige, nuclear weapons etc, has its agriculture lavishly subsidised, and that the two countries consult before any EU summit to ensure that they present a united face).

Mr Kid, or may I call him 'Crumble', goes on to warn: ‘Loosen the political ties that bind us and all those ancient tribalisms may well yet emerge. Have you thought this through? Being tied up in red tape is a small price for peace.’

Not sure about the logic of this. One of the most destructive and cruel wars of modern history was fought in the United States from 1860 to 1865 because of Abraham Lincoln's belief that the ties which bound the original states were too loose.

Yes, yes, I know that the pretext for the war was slavery, and that the South fought to keep slavery, and shouldn't be allowed to claim it was just a matter of state's rights. Even so, the point that the underlying issue was the freedom of states to decide their own destiny is correct. Gore Vidal's superb historical novel 'Lincoln' reminds us just how divided the North was on the abolition of slavery, and that Lincoln himself wanted Black Americans to leave the country, because he thought they could never be integrated.

It was the tightening of those ties that led to war. The moves towards ever-narrower union, which is stipulated as the EU's aim in the Treaty of Rome, might conceivably cause conflicts in Europe that could lead to war. They are at least as likely to do so as they are to prevent it. Those who seek to justify British membership of the EU will have to do better than this. In any case, secessionists like me do not want to break up the EU. We just want to leave it, and negotiate a civilised relationship with it as an independent nation. If other countries are happy with it, that's their affair. Most, I think are. The fundamental difficulty for Britain is twofold. One, its Common Law presumption of innocence tradition is incompatible with EU law and two, its outward-looking global trading engagement is unsuited to membership of a continental protectionist bloc. Adversarial government is also pretty much unknown in continental countries, and our strong, independent national press is pretty much unique as well.

If 'je' would say what was 'tiresome' about my writing, I might be able to answer the charge. My columns and reports from abroad range over many, many subjects and places. At present, all subjects are overshadowed by the biggest political scandal of our generation, and by the coming elections. I could hardly ignore them. If he is just saying he disagrees with me, then he should say that. And why.

I have never said that the BNP are going to build gas chambers. Everything I have said about them, mainly that their constitution is explicitly racialist, that their origins are disreputable and that Judophobia is rife in their ranks, is true. None of their defenders on this site has been able to fault my facts, or those of other critics of the BNP who have posted here (not least the interesting connection between Nick Griffin and David Duke, and the words spoken when they met).

No, it hasn't occurred to me that the closeness between David Cameron and the Guardian is symptomatic of his appealing to a wider audience. Nor is the Guardian's schmoozing of Mr Cameron (or the BBC's) 'occasional'. It is virtually constant. Mr Cameron already had a wide audience. What he wanted was a different audience, and a different kind of voter and supporter. He also wanted to seek the endorsement and permission to stand, which he believes he needs, from the BBC - which long ago adopted the Guardian as its house newspaper. He chose, quite deliberately and consciously, to appeal to Liberal Democrat voters, if necessary at the cost of losing some conservative ones. This lay behind his adoption of 'Green' policies, his husky moment, his 'hug a hoodie' moment, his endorsement of homosexual civil partnerships, his denunciation of those who 'bang on' about Europe and his dismissal of UKIP supporters as 'fruitcakes', along with his endorsement of comprehensive schools, his sending of his own child to a state primary (though of course a wholly untypical one) when he could easily have afforded independent school fees, and his official abandonment of grammars. I think he probably assumed that he would not lose many votes by doing this. In this, I think he was mistaken.

Of course the Guardian and the other left-wing papers have plenty of writers who loathe the Tories because they are Tories, and are not interested in getting close to Mr Cameron. But the central policy-making core of the paper is increasingly convinced that Mr Cameron is their man, and that Blairism is safe in his hands. Just look at the way in which they presented his 'constitutional reform' plans on Tuesday. Even The Times was more critical. This development, and its significance, is explored at more length in my book 'The Broken Compass'. I commend it to 'Adam' of London. And I thank him for his permission for me to have my own views. I'd also say to 'Adam' that Mr Cameron's ditching of grammar schools is not just a small thing, to be taken by itself, and disagreed with while supporting everything else he does. It is symptomatic of his general move of the party towards the egalitarian left. Comprehensive education (for the benighted poor) and secretly selective education for the rich and powerful is the real and unshiftable Clause Four of the Labour Party, and has now been officially adopted by the Tories too. Why? Because it is the key to the leftist egalitarian policy of the political class.

Adam also says : ‘The argument you make for a 'Tory Collapse' at the election is seriously flawed. You seem to imply that this could bring the Conservatives round to your way of thinking.’

How can he have missed the point so completely? I have never thought or said any such thing. I wish the Tory Party to collapse and split. I do not think it is saveable, or worth saving, let alone that it can be 'brought round to my way of thinking.'

He adds: ‘Seems you have a short memory, as after the collapse of ’97, a swing to the right got us nowhere.’ My memory is rather good. This rubbish about a post-1997 'swing to the right' is repeated again and again. Can one person please tell me what this 'swing' involved? Did the Tory Party favour leaving the EU? (No, it wouldn't even promise to stay out of the Euro.) Did it say it would bring back capital punishment, or indeed any punishment? (No.) Did it say it would halt mass immigration? (No.) Did it say it would return to selective education? (No.) Did it propose to purge the welfare state and the vast social services bureaucracy? (No.) Did it set its face against political correctness? (No.) In any case, my position has long been that the Tory Party is too worn out and loathed to be saved. It must split and collapse, and then it will be possible to replace it. I refer him to the posting which can be found by Googling ‘Peter Hitchens’ and ‘The Tories are still useless.’

‘Mev’ (sounds like an ice lolly) asks: ‘You say you do not agree with mass immigration and multiculturalism - whilst attacking the BNP for similar policies because they place racial differences at the centre of the reasoning - but can you tell us then the reason why you do not support these things? Yes, I can, though my book 'The Abolition of Britain' sets it out at greater length. A nation is the largest organisation in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, which is the fundamental reason for desiring the existence of a nation, and wishing to live in one. To be a nation it must have one language, one culture, one law. A country which does not demand acceptance of a monoculture will become a series of hostile solitudes, and eventually ungovernable and unworkable as a society. Integration and the inculcation of a single culture cannot be successfully achieved if there is a constant high level of immigration. Migrants already here need time to integrate, and can most effectively be enabled to do so when immigration is low or non-existent. The levels of migration into this country at present are qualitatively higher than anything previously experienced, and endanger the culture of which I speak. The evidence of history is that this country has absorbed people from different cultures (and non-Christian religions) in the past. But only under conditions of controlled immigration, and only when a monoculture was generally supported. The same is largely true of the USA, which before the 1960s ensured that migrants became American, learned English etc.

Somebody called 'George' (one of those irritating people who feels the need to remind me of my own name), asks : ‘Peter, please could you explain why you think it is wrong for those of English ethnicity to wish to remain a majority in their own country?’ Well, ‘George’, I am not specially concerned about the 'ethnicity' of the people in this country. I am concerned about whether they are British, and I do not think, ‘George’, that their Britishness is a product of their ‘ethnicity’ but of a thousand years of law, liberty, faith, culture, landscape, memory, music, architecture, humour, self-sacrifice, martial valour, conscience, self-restraint, and all the things that go to make us what we are. There are, ‘George’, plenty of people in this country whose 'ethnicity' may be British (if by that you mean the colour of their hides) but who have, thanks to multiculturalism and other demoralising forces, entirely ceased to be British in any recognisable sense. Whereas there are people here whose skins are black or brown who honour and value those traditions greatly, and seek to uphold them. Therefore, ‘George’, 'ethnicity' cannot be the defining matter. I hope this helps, ‘George’.

Paul Embery makes a welcome return (presumably busy hunting for a good non-Church school in the countryside) to ask: ‘Mr Hitchens argues against an elected House of Lords. Are we to assume he is a unicameralist, because I can't imagine for a moment that he is in favour of a fully-appointed second chamber (and no sane person nowadays argues for membership by bloodline)?’ The famed tolerance of the liberal rationalist is on display once again. Any idea he can't stomach is automatically mad, and the person who puts it forward is not fully human. Does Mr Embery ever wonder where his ideas lead?

It is perfectly reasonable to argue, as I do, for a hereditary chamber. A hereditary chamber is entirely independent of the executive, owes it no favours, and is not subject to its pressure or corruption. Likewise, it owes nothing to the party machines which dominate selection to the Commons. Its members, brought up from their earliest youth with the knowledge that they will inherit a great responsibility and a great tradition, seem to me to be at least as likely to be good legislators as babbling party hacks kicking their way up the greasy pole of professional politics. We should never have spat on our luck by abolishing it. It's not too late to bring it back, and a lot of people would be very glad to see it so. And no, I am not a 'unicameralist', which sounds faintly rude, nor yet a unicameronist.

Dialogue, retorts, answers and general conversation

I shall be travelling again soon, and so will be posting only the weekly column for a short while. Before setting off, I'd like to respond to a number of points made on all the current threads.

But first of all, a restatement of my simple advice on voting. My apologies to those of you who are long-standing readers and have seen this point made severaI times, but I have to explain this to new readers. If I'm accused of being repetitive, it's because I keep being asked the same questions, and keep answering them, and then get asked them again. What am I to do? Say, sulkily that I've already answered? The temptation is strong, and sometimes not resisted as strongly as it might be. Even so, here we go again.

Others, who have heard it before, should skip to the next section.

I'll do this as a Question and Answer, as I believe this is the crispest way of dealing with the matter.

New readers start here...
1. Q. How do you advise people to vote?
A..I advise people not to vote Tory, and not to vote BNP.

2. Q. Who do you think you are, you pompous, arrogant nobody, advising people how to vote?
A. Actually, I'm responding to the questions of many, many people who tell me they agree with my diagnosis of the country's ills, but complain that I have no solution. This is my solution. Nobody's obliged to follow it. But I hope they do.

3. Q. All right then, I'm sick to death of Gordon Brown and want to get rid of him. How on earth can you suggest that we should keep him in office?

A. You may be sick of Gordon Brown personally, but I don't really care about personalities. I don't like Mr Brown and he doesn't like me, but I would regard it as petty self-indulgence to cast a vote on this basis.

Mr Brown has the bad luck to look like his party and like his government, ie not very nice. But he is no worse than Anthony Blair, who was voted for and tolerated by many of the people who are now so enraged about Gordon Brown. There is no significant difference, apart from public relations skill and the physical features of the Prime Minister, between a government led by Gordon Brown, Anthony Blair and David Cameron. Labour's poll ratings and popularity collapsed not when it changed its policies (for it never did) but when it swapped a Prime Minister who could smile but not read, for one who could read but not smile.

The Tory Party, meanwhile, won the support of the Guardian and the BBC when it chose a leader who says he likes crime-infested, ill-educated, EU-ruled, politically correct, borderless Britain 'as it is 'and has pledged to strip his party of its last remaining traces of conservatism. People who don't read the Guardian should be aware of how this anti-British paper now fawns and simpers at Mr Cameron's feet. The same goes for the leftist BBC. Why do these people like Mr Cameron so much, and constantly clear their pages and airwaves so as to give him uncritical coverage? Would they really do so if he were a British patriot? Don't be silly. They like him because they know the Blair project would be safe in his hands. He has even said so, declaring to a group of Daily Telegraph journalists that he is 'the heir to Blair'.

If he wins the election, the remaining proper conservatives in the party (already desperate, powerless, miserable and isolated) will be utterly crushed. Mr Cameron will tell them that he won by being liberal, and their views are now utterly discredited. The demonstrable lie, that the Tories ran a 'right-wing' campaign' in 2001 and 2005, and lost as a result, is already being spread by Cameron supporters. If you vote Tory, you will reinforce this lie, and help to flatten what remains of British political conservatism. If he loses, the many real conservatives trapped in the Tory Party will be liberated and allowed to speak their minds.

Are we really all such suckers that we choose our governments on personal grounds, gripes and appearances? If so, we deserve everything we get, and ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

All three main parties support the same basic policies, all agree that Britain should be a member of the EU, and so should not control its own borders, all favour mass immigration, both major ones backed the Iraq war, all are in favour of our current grotesquely swollen welfare state and penal levels of taxation, all believe crime is the consequence of social conditions rather than the result of human wickedness, all support bad schools for the poor, and better schools for the rich. All have parties deeply implicated in the expenses scandal.

Voting Tory to 'get rid of Gordon Brown' is about as sensible and useful as coming off Heroin and going on to Methadone, giving up gin and switching to vodka, or giving up one brand of cigarettes, and taking up another. The brand name and the smell may be different, the toxic, destructive substance is effectively the same.

If you care about your country, rather than just wanting to make yourself feel good for a few fleeting minutes, then you should recognise that you have one power, and one power only, at the next election. You cannot sack the government, because it will be the same whatever you do. But you can actually sack the Opposition. The Tory party simply could not survive a fourth successive election defeat.

4. Q. What's so good about a Tory collapse?
A. Most people - as is demonstrated week by week on this site, can't be reasoned out of a party loyalty they weren't reasoned into in the first place. A loyal Tory, confronted with the undoubted facts that his or her party has for the past 40 years been actively wrecking the country, undermining its laws, ravaging its countryside, dismantling its armed services, trashing its schools and debauching its economy, while selling it to foreign rule, continues to vote Tory. Baffling, but true. Millions of votes which ought to be available to a new, pro-British party are thus trapped, immobile, in the possession of the Tory Party. This monopoly can only be broken by the disintegration of the Tory Party. Those votes would then be available for a new party. Until they are available, new parties, however wonderful, are a futile waste of time. You might as well play 'Snap' as engage in them. But once the Tories are gone, then we have the conditions in which a proper pro-British party can be created. Can be, not will be. You will have to do some work. But it can be done.

5. Q. But this will never happen, will it?
A. This is the crudest basis for unreasoning propaganda. No intelligent person should fall for it. Remember how, a few years ago, supporters of abolishing the Pound Sterling used to say ‘The Euro is inevitable. It's bound to happen.’ Was it? Did it? Tell someone something is bound to happen (or impossible) and you can persuade them to support or oppose it without ever having to argue your case. In fact, this argument is a sign of someone on shaky ground trying to conceal that his case is weak or non-existent. Please don't fall for this simple-minded con-trick. It won't happen if you keep saying it won't. But as soon as you accept that it could happen, then you can make it happen, by the simple act of refusing to vote for a party that has, for half a century, spat upon its supporters from a great height. The question is, do you really want to save the country, or do you just want to make a purely symbolic change in personnel, which will leave the country in the same plight it was in before?

6. Q. So do you actually want Labour to win the next election?
A. No. I want the Tories to lose. That will be the significant event, the one that will trigger actual change. Whether Labour or Tory ministers sit in Whitehall offices, pursuing political correctness and obeying EU directives, is of little interest to me. I loathe Labour and all its works, and have been - without exception - the most consistent and unrelenting press critic of New Labour for a dozen and more years. Why then should I want yet another New Labour government, headed by David Cameron instead of Gordon Brown and secure in office for at least eight years? A tottering, exhausted, demoralised Labour minority government, dead in the water, would be incapable of much damage anyway, and could be thrown into the sea within two or three years **if*** we can create a new opposition that really does oppose what New Labour stands for. It's a matter of patience and strategy, versus self-indulgent impulsiveness.

7. Q What about the BNP? Surely they say many of the things you say?
A. Yes, alas, they do, in public, though I wonder if they say them because they mean them or simply because they have realised they are popular. The thing is that they also, in private, say several things that I deeply disagree with. Their party constitution, as nobody disputes, is explicitly racially prejudiced. A black Briton who supports all their 'policies' cannot join because he has the wrong 'origin'. Many of their senior members have what might be politely described as a 'problem' about Jews and about acknowledging the full extent of the gross crimes of National Socialist Germany. This is not surprising given the origin of the party, and the open National Socialist sympathies of its founder, John Tyndall. I believe some of their current senior members have also put in the occasional good word for the Waffen SS. The real problem with the BNP is that they damage the cause of patriotism by hi-jacking it. This is, apart from anything else, gross selfishness. BNP members taint every cause they support. Look what they have done to the Union Flag by using it as their symbol. It is perfectly possible to be a patriotic conservative, opposed to multiculturalism and mass immigration, in favour of leaving the EU, in favour of punishing criminals and reintroducing rigour and discipline into schools, in favour of re-establishing the married family, without being some sort of Nazi. And if the people who really love this country are to get anywhere, they need to emphasise, at every opportunity, that the BNP is not welcome in their number. So I do.

I hope that helps.

Now, to the general conversation, taken more or less at random.

‘JW’ asks why I don't urge readers to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat. I don't do this because I believe that it would (rightly) disgust good conservative people, who would regard such a vote as a personal betrayal. I think it might also disgust many Labour patriots and Christians, who have learned in detail how much their party despises them I don't myself regard voting as a specially sacred act, but many people do have a great reverence for it, and I am not prepared to insult them by urging such cynical behaviour. Also, I think advice on how to vote is considerably more of an intrusion in people's thoughts and wills than advice on how **not** to vote. One of the lessons I learned when I abandoned Marxism-Leninism was that normal, living breathing people have hearts as well as heads, and that only machines take things all the way to their logical conclusions.

D. Smith argues that I contradict myself when I say that Mr Cameron's plan is cynical, because I have also argued that we should have fewer professional politicians. My answer is that the Cameron plan is intended to give the illusion of de-professionalising politics, while actually leaving it in the hands of the professionals as it is now. Look carefully at what he said, and you will see that he speaks of allowing more freedom on 'non-manifesto' issues. But that is no freedom at all. Most legislation is on manifesto issues, and will continue to be whipped, hard. The 'outsiders' Mr Cameron says he wants won't have any real freedom on anything important. They will be window-dressing. Support for leaving the EU, for instance, would still be met with frozen hostility and the denial of all preferment, as it is now. Also, proper successful working businessmen won't want to be MPs as long as it is a full-time job. The real solution is to return to the days when an MP could continue his profession and represent his constituency. But that's a long, long story, involving (amongst other things) the real rebirth of local government. MPs spend much of their time these days doing what city and county councillors ought to do, and used to do. They busy themselves looking at the word up the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. That's why they missed it when the government confected an illegal war out of a few bits of paper.

New parties wouldn't solve the problem of MPs having independent views. Nothing can fully solve this, as the two-party system requires a certain amount of whipping and adversarialism to work at all. What it would do would be to re-legitimise a whole set of opinions which are currently excluded from debate because the self-appointed 'centre' doesn't want to talk about them. Here are four examples:

Bringing back academic selection in schools
Hanging heinous and grievous murderers
Leaving the EU
Halting mass immigration

Leonard Arnold asks about the powers of passport officers to question us on where we have been. I am endeavouring (I have tried before but my attempt dissolved in vague, evasive and sometimes incorrect answers) to get an answer on this from the Home Office. They make great play of a merger between passport control and customs, but I'm afraid I find this unconvincing. Passport control takes place before travellers are reunited with their luggage, and even if questions about where you have been might be justified as you take your luggage through customs, they are futile at passport control. What is the officer supposed to do? Follow you about if he thinks you've come from somewhere suspicious, waiting next to you at the carousel and then searching you? If he is suspicious, why alert you when you've time to abandon your checked bags and walk out without them? Most people have returned to this country for many years without ever even meeting a British customs officer (I used to be searched quite often when I had a beard, but not since I got rid of it). The rule was, they picked on you if they had reason to suspect you (or if you had a beard). Is everyone now to be a suspect, beard or no? That is what I think is happening. In any case, the great majority of travellers are now arriving from EU countries, with which we have no customs border, so the excuse doesn't wash.

But the general principle of dealing with officials in a free country, or a theoretically free country, is this: The burden is on them to show they are entitled to act as they are, not on you to show they're not. They have to explain the legal basis of their actions if challenged. If they can't, they're exceeding their powers. You don't have to produce a piece of paper saying you're free. It's safely written down. It’s called Magna Carta, and the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights, and the Habeas Corpus Act. In general, it's known as the presumption of innocence. And it is what we shall lose if we allow the introduction of identity cards.

I am extraordinarily grateful for Peter Bellamy's kind and able defence of my positions from ignorant abuse. I do not know Mr Bellamy, but he has saved me a great deal of time and trouble.

J. Wright embodies a major Tory Loyalist misunderstanding, by saying that I should 'peddle' my 'dross' attacking David Cameron to 'The Guardian'. Mr Wright really ought to read the 'Guardian' sometimes. It is in love with Mr Cameron, and on Tuesday uncritically and lavishly published his ridiculous and irrelevant scheme for 'constitutional change' as if it had been some great work of advanced political philosophy. Its leader columns are endlessly sympathetic to him. I suspect its columnists of consorting with him.

Next, I'm told that my attacks on Mr Cameron are 'nasty' and 'bitter' and 'twisted'. I'd like evidence of this. I have no personal animus against Mr Cameron. We are civil to each other when we meet, if cool. I don't believe I'm personally abusive. If my display of the facts about him damages him, that is because the facts are damaging. I am deeply hostile to his political project, as I freely admit. I also explain why, on the basis of causes and issues, not personal matters. As for being 'obsessed', I think that any political commentator who was not deeply interested in Mr Cameron , when he is being proposed as our next Prime Minister, would have something wrong with him. Why wait till too late to find out what he's really like? We did that with Mr Blair. And Mr Brown.

Where did the expression 'get a life' come from? Why is it supposed to be such a crushing rejoinder? What do people who urge me to do this thing know about my life? Could it be that I already have one?

The posting from Keith Spencer (‘How to hold an open meeting in private’, 26th May 1.35 pm) is really quite funny. Nobody disputes that Mr Cameron's chimney needed fixing. What is at issue, as Mr Cameron clearly conceded, was whether you and I should have paid for it to be fixed, or whether he should have done so. I suspect Mr Cameron privately thinks he should have, but realises it looks bad and so has decided to pay up. Mr Spencer appears to be more Cameroon than Mr Cameron about this, and presumably wants the Opposition leader to hang on to our £680. Bravo, I say. Loyalism of this depth and power is touching, but not good for the process of logic, guided by facts.

Here's an example. He suggests I'm happy with New Labour. Who is this man? Where has he been? Why do people think that politics is like football, and that if you don't support the Tories you must support Labour, just as if you don't support Liverpool, you have to support Manchester United, etc? Doesn't he think ten seconds research worthwhile before making accusations against me? I opposed New Labour from the very start, and before, when 'conservative' newspapers were trilling his praises, and other 'conservative' commentators were having their tummies tickled by Downing Street, I was firmly established on the Blair enemies list. They (literally) slammed the doors in my face to try to keep me out of their manifesto launch in 1997. Blair himself refused to take questions from me and, after finally allowing me one, told me to 'sit down and stop being bad'. My book 'The Abolition of Britain’, published ten years ago, was described by Andrew Marr (who should know) as ‘the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works’. It is precisely because I loathed New Labour in 1997 that I loathe it still, when it presents itself to us again in the guise of David Cameron's 'modernised' Tory Party. Perhaps Mr Spencer would care to give that some 'unbiased consideration'.

Yes 'Tigerail' has missed something. In fact he or she appears to have missed almost everything I have written or done, ever, anywhere. But this blog has substantial archives, and Mr Bellamy's posting might also be helpful.

As to Chris Rodwell, I am sorry but I simply cannot understand why the exposure of MPs' grasping expenses claims should make us want an elected House of Lords, four-term parliaments or any of these things, let alone state subsidies for political parties which otherwise couldn't survive and obviously ought to be allowed to die naturally. What is the connection between the one and the other?

I'm grateful for her account of the Michael Gove meeting. I'm admittedly torn by the fact that I know and like Michael Gove, despite or perhaps because of our considerable political differences (we were once more or less on the same side, before he fell in love with Mr Blair, as described in my recent book), and that he does seem to be in a bit of a fix. I'll leave his problems to others, and openly declare my interest. But bear in mind, as you study the reporting of these events, how many political journalists are likewise staying their hands because of friendships, or at least acquaintanceships, with the politicians they spend their lives with. And not saying so.

One other tiny thing. A person majestically calling himself or herself 'Lantern' asks why it is wrong for the BNP to be racially bigoted, whereas organisations (he names another, but the point is the same) such as the Black Police Association exist, and government forms demand ethnic information, etc. If I supported the Black Police Association (whereas I have in fact criticised it) or if I supported this government behaviour, this would be a strike against me. However, Mr (or Mrs) 'Lantern' should realise that I am consistently against **all** these things. A BNP supporter cannot be. For if he (or she) supports the BNP constitution, he is doing the same as the PC people he affects to criticise, only the other way round. It is odd the way the BNP supporters can't work out their line of attack. One minute I'm so like them that they can't see why I won't join them. The next, when it's clear I won't join them, they assume that I'm a PC liberal.

Don't do it, Joanna

David Cameron's weird appeal to non-political people to join the Tory candidates list is one of those media stories that doesn't pass the ‘Try it the other way round’ test. This test is very easy to apply. Imagine what would happen if the other lot said the same thing. If Gordon Brown came up with anything so bottomlessly stupid, everyone would say so, and there would be pictures of the Prime Minister running his bitten nails through his greying hair with a look of doom on his ravaged face.

He would be accused of trying to hide behind the glamour or prestige of people like Joanna Lumley (a name which came up during David Cameron's softball conversation, you can hardly call it an interview, with Andrew Marr on Sunday). He would be accused of desperation, of diluting his party. Labour candidates would be found to protest against the threat the idea posed to long-standing hard-working people etc etc, who had fought their way to nomination.

And quite right too. The idea is patently an unworkable publicity stunt. If Joanna Lumley (say) put herself forward as a Tory candidate, who would be doing who a favour? As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the ultimate political cynic, used to ask, ‘Kto Kavor? (Who whom?). Would Miss Lumley be adorning the Tory Party, or the Tory Party adorning Miss Lumley? And after a few months of taking the Tory whip, and being forced by this to show what her opinions are on everything from the NHS to railway privatisation, Miss Lumley would have lost the magical glow she now has, and been reduced to the level of all the other Tory MPs. Either that, or she would have had to part company with Mr Cameron pretty quickly.

Leave aside celebrities. Businessmen or head teachers (as suggested by Mr Cameron) are being asked to give up proper productive careers to go and be lobby fodder for the Tories. It won't work. Alas, businessmen have a miserable record in parliamentary politics, and state sector head teachers have laboured so long in the vineyards of political correctness that I doubt they can shake it off. Either such people will have minds of their own, in which case Mr Cameron will have to crush them or sack them, or they will turn out to be obedient party servants just like everyone else. It's not new faces we need. It's a new political alignment.

How to hold an open meeting in private

What follows is an expanded version of an account I wrote (for the Mail on Sunday of 24th May) of David Cameron's supposed open meeting with the voters on the subject of the Commons scandal. I don't live in Mr Cameron's constituency, but I do live close enough to it to have bicycled to his Friday meeting in Witney, which is being portrayed, in my view misleadingly, as David Cameron braving the people on the subject of MPs' expenses.

Here's the article:

‘You might think that David Cameron had subjected himself to the wrath of the voters on Friday and come away unscathed. Reports and pictures have appeared of Mr Cameron facing an allegedly open meeting in the Witney Corn Exchange. The Leader of the Opposition - unlike Andrew MacKay - escaped without any angry heckling.

This is despite the fact that Mr Cameron is far from being in the clear. He admits to having wrongly claimed £680 to clear wisteria from the chimney of his spacious country home. And he got us taxpayers to pay the interest (£1,700 a month for most of the last eight years) on his £350,000 mortgage, a mortgage he may not actually need. But why spend your own money when the public will pay for you to have an interest-free loan?

Well, I was there and I can tell you how Mr Cameron managed to get such a smooth ride. First of all, the meeting was at noon on a Friday, a time when most people with jobs haven't time to go to meetings.

Second, the local Tories did what they could to hold a supposedly public occasion in private. I only knew of it because of a brief mention of it in my local paper, the 'Oxford Mail'. The website of Witney Conservatives seems to be frozen in time, and doesn't deal with any of Mr Cameron's engagements since 24th April.

When I turned up on the doorstep, it was guarded by various apparatchiks sitting at desks with lists, and making it look as if it was in some way a members-only function. An inexperienced person, new to politics, might easily have been put off. The aides gulped visibly when they saw me, but had more sense than to try to keep me out.

A freelance TV truck was parked outside, but nothing from Sky or the BBC. When, I wonder, were the big broadcasters informed of the event? And who decided which clips of the occasion they saw? Mr Cameron had a mike clipped to his tie, so anything he said could be recorded, but questioners were not offered a microphone and any heckling or hostility - had it happened - would have been indistinct on videotape.

Once the meeting started, it was clear that the local loyalists had been summoned to fill most of the 200 seats. The average age was well over 50. Mr Cameron recognised almost every questioner by name, and most of them addressed him familiarly as ‘David’. Every trick in the Tony Blair Fake Sincerity Handbook was used. There was no lectern, so Mr Cameron looked defenceless and vulnerable. He took off his jacket as soon as questions began, and he deployed his (absent) wife as a human shield when awkward questions - about how rich they are - came up. Do we have a £30 million fortune? Chuckle. Samantha must have spent it all, ha ha. No specific answer, though.

Apart from me, the only seriously troublesome questioner was a lone Liberal Democrat. And after Mr Cameron eventually allowed me to ask my question (which he didn't answer), the final say was given to a fervent Cameron fan, who decried any suggestions that Mr Cameron had done anything wrong.

The Tory leader knew he was safe. He was so sure he was among friends that he used a rude word beginning with 'a', and offered, rashly to work for half the pay.

If Mr Cameron really wants to find out what the people of West Oxfordshire think about him, his mortgage and his chimney, I suggest he hires a bigger hall, advertises the event both to local people and the national media, and holds it when normal men and women won't be at work.’

And here are some extracts from what he said, with my thoughts on them. I can't provide a complete transcript and don't claim this is one. But I have selected some parts which I think were specially interesting. He insisted he needed two homes, even though he admitted it was possible to commute the distance (many in his constituency do, and it is about 75 miles each way). He said that his children were educated in London (which is true) and that Parliament still sits late on Monday or Tuesday night. Well, yes, but I would say that a constituency home is a convenience rather than an absolute necessity. If his children are at school in London, then he will in any case be in London on Monday or Tuesday, the only days when the Commons usually sits late. He only really needs to be in his constituency all day on Fridays and perhaps Saturdays - a need that could be met, in my view, by a comfortable bed and breakfast or at most a small house or flat. I am still unconvinced by the idea that MPs with seats outside London need two homes as a matter of course. Members with remote constituencies obviously need a toehold in London, an expensive place to live. MPs with seats in or very close to London obviously don't need two homes at all. I do wonder, if Mr Cameron sat for a less picturesque part of the country (and west Oxfordshire is delightful), around the same distance from Notting Hill, whether he would be so keen to have a weekend home there, and take his family there so often.

I've put in the occasional 'er' or 'erm' where I think it adds to the account, ie in showing hesitation, but not all of them. And I've also mentioned audience laughter, to illustrate the general sympathy of the curiously assembled audience with Mr Cameron, which I believe is explained above. I've also inserted some commentary of my own.

Mr Cameron explained his rules: ‘What I claim for, I always tried to ask myself 'What is it reasonable to claim for ... not what the rules say, but what is reasonable?’

He then set out what he regarded as reasonable. ’From 2001 to 2007 the only thing I really claimed for in respect of my second home was the interest on a mortgage, not the repayments but the interest. It was a very large mortgage, it was £350,000 worth of mortgage, it was about £1,700 a month that I was claiming. That was quite close to the maximum you could claim at the time but I did not at that stage claim for anything else...’

My comment: To me, £350,000 seems to be a colossal mortgage, especially for someone on a Parliamentary salary, as he was when he first took it on, or even the Leader of the Opposition's salary, which he is now drawing. We do not know whether this sum paid in full for the Camerons' country home. I would suspect that it probably didn't, since large properties in pleasant Oxfordshire villages generally went, even eight years ago, for rather more than that. Several questions arise. Could he have paid for the property out of his own resources? Did he need such a large house? Did he, before the current scandal, assume that he was bound to benefit in the long term from the likely increase in the price of the house during what promised to be a long political career? Now, of course, this is ruled out, but was it then? And £1,700 a month, tax free, is a lot of money, more than the total that comes into quite a few households. How urgent would the need be to justify this?

Mr Cameron continued: ’....In 2007 I was able to pay down the mortgage a little bit, so it was a £250,000 mortgage, paying about £1,000 in mortgage interest every month, and so I also claimed for what I would call some pretty straightforward household bills, council tax, oil, gas, erm, and other utility type bills and insurance on the property. And that has been the case from the beginning of 2007 right through to now. I now claim less than the maximum allowed, I don't claim all of those utility bills, I claim a percentage of them, because I think that's right and fair.’

My comment: He 'paid down' the mortgage' a 'little bit'. That 'little bit' turns out to be £100,000, once again a very large sum by most people's standards. And also, if you choose to run a second home, shouldn't you accept that it's up to you to insure it, pay the fuel bills and council tax on it? And wouldn't it be prudent to choose such a home on the basis that you would want to keep such bills low, rather than expect others to defray them?

‘But I have claimed one bill that I thought was questionable, and so I decided to pay it back. This is the infamous wisteria bill (laughter) as it will now always be known. It was actually a maintenance bill. It was a bill for £680 and it was a bill I claimed at the time because I judged it was about maintenance not about decoration or improvement. It was to mend a leaky roof, it was to put some outside lights on the property for security and mend some ones that were broken and it was to remove this infamous wisteria which was nothing to do with pruning a plant. It was because I have a chimney with a fan on it to get the smoke out so I can light a fire. It had stopped working and the wisteria needed to be removed from it. I claimed for that bill because I thought it was maintenance not decoration but I think MPs have got to show a lead and have got to show some responsibility and have got to take any bill that is frankly questionable or borderline and pay it back. So that is what I am going to do. I am not aware of any other bill for my second home that is inappropriate or should be paid back but were one to emerge in this great process I will happily do that.‘

My comment: It is not clear from this whether Mr Cameron really thinks he ought to have paid back the wisteria money. It sounds to me as if he thinks he was justified in claiming it but announced he would pay it back for the sake of appearances. Otherwise, why the long, long justification? Why should we worry about whether he can light a fire or not?

He gave a long explanation in defence of MPs' office expenses, and promised to look through his office expenses in case there were any questionable payments, which he promised to pay back.

He made it clear that he had done no 'flipping', switching the designation of his 'second home' so as to maximise claims. And he added:

‘I always try to ask what is reasonable to claim, not what can you claim. I have never claimed for cleaners, gardeners, furniture, food, decorations, duck houses (laughter), moats (laughter), swimming pools or anything like that. I am not putting up my hand and saying I am whiter than white - that didn't get Tony Blair anywhere (laughter) or saying I am better than anybody else but it's just a judgement I took that there were sensible things to claim - that I did claim even though I am relatively well off because the claim was there if you needed to maintain a second home - and I think to do my job properly I need to maintain a second home.’

My comment: How do these rules apply? If this is right for him, what about other MPs, especially Tory frontbenchers, who have claimed for some or all of the things above? Should they go, without exception? If not, what does it mean that Mr Cameron thinks it is wrong to claim these things? Also, his statement that he is ‘relatively well off’ raises the question of how well off he is. He has brushed aside the suggestion, made by the wealth expert Philip Beresford, that Mr and Mrs Cameron together are worth £30 million, and said it was untrue on the Andrew Marr programme. Very well then. I think he's entitled to reasonable privacy on this, and doesn't have to reveal the exact contents of his bank accounts. But can someone please put to him the question in a public place: ’Could you have afforded to pay for your Oxfordshire home yourself?’

Listening to my tape of the Question and Answer session I notice that almost all the questions are general, addressed to Mr Cameron as Opposition Leader or political pundit, not as an individual MP who might himself have gone too far in living on the public payroll. That's not surprising, if my analysis above is right. I've also begun to notice that Mr Cameron now makes much of the fact that Parliament has lost much of its power to ‘Europe’ and the Judges. He speaks as if he plans to correct this. But he knows perfectly well that unless Britain leaves the EU, most of our legislation will be imposed on us by the European Commission. So this seems to me to be just talk. A small digression here. Vikki Boynton posted last week that the Tory position on Lisbon is: ’If the Lisbon Treaty is not yet in force at the time of the next general election, and a Conservative Government is elected, we would put the Treaty to a referendum of the British people, recommending a 'no' vote. If the British people rejected the Treaty, we would withdraw Britain's ratification of it.’ Seems clear.‘

Yes, it does *seem* clear. It is meant to seem clear. But it is not. A British withdrawal of ratification would be followed by immense pressure from the EU to change that position. There is a great appetite in Brussels to get on with ratification. How would a Cameron government respond to that pressure? I believe it would 'negotiate' a 'compromise' that would end with Lisbon coming into force more or less as it is. That is the key question, and one you won't get an answer to. Only a government which clearly wished to leave the EU could possibly escape from this bind.

One other small point about Mr Cameron's performance. At one stage he spoke repeatedly about how many peers (or rather how few) he had 'created'. So far as I know, it is the Queen who creates political peers, on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Leader of the Opposition, by convention, may usually suggest names, but (as happened to William Hague over one controversial nomination) the Prime Minister may decline to take his advice. It passed me by at the time, numbed as I was by the general sycophancy, but the person sitting next to me (a distinguished commentator who shall remain nameless) pointed it out and I thought I would share it with you.

Journey into Fear

I would just like to congratulate Penguin for reissuing several of the wonderful thrillers written by Eric Ambler. Ambler's books were the forerunners of John le Carre, Alan Furst and the new star in the thriller firmament, David Downing, whose books about Nazi Berlin are excellent. They were intelligently written, pessimistic, realistic and yet still absolutely gripping, When he started writing, Ambler was a left-wing sympathiser, and three of the books reissued by Penguin - Uncommon Danger, Cause for Alarm and Epitaph for a Spy - reflect this. The first two both feature Andreas and Tamara Zaleshoff, Soviet NKVD agents portrayed sympathetically.

Like many leftist sympathisers of the 1930s, Ambler found out in detail where he had gone wrong. And I hope Penguin will also reissue 'Judgement on Deltchev', a book based upon the Communist show trials of 1940s Eastern Europe and one of the most atmospheric accounts of such an event now available, given that Costa Gavras's bitter film about the Slansky trial, 'L'Aveu' (the Confession) seems to be virtually unavailable and doesn't get shown on TV even in the middle of the night. Ambler went on to write many more books, all of them good, some superb, and was also involved in writing the script for 'the Cruel Sea', perhaps the best of the Second World War films. I think good thrillers, like good detective stories, deserve to be taken much more seriously than they are. And Ambler's are certainly good.

Not quite boring us into submission, the BNP's sad, deluded army of mug punters drone on

I have pledged that as long as BNP members continue to target this site with their unresponsive, repetitive, brain-dead bombardment of e-mails, I will not be cowed - or bored - into silence. It is clearly their aim to silence me, so it is one of my aims not give into it. I ask for the patience and tolerance (and, if they feel able, the support) of readers who feel (as I do) that this argument has been concluded to the satisfaction of anyone capable of reasoned thought, and that the BNP is a bigoted and disreputable party. I am grateful for the many, by no means all of them sympathisers with my main positions, who have helped defend this site from this assault.

So let me just repeat here (and believe me, I shall not stop doing this) that no patriotic or Christian person should vote for this disreputable party. Its 'policies' are a changeable salad of borrowed ideas. Its real and unchangeable nature is revealed in its explicitly racially bigoted constitution.

The reason that I am attacked so insistently (and dimly) for saying this is that I am a genuine opponent of British membership of the EU, a genuine opponent of mass immigration, a genuine opponent of multiculturalism and political correctness, a genuine supporter of the punishment of criminals and the deterrence of crime, a genuine enthusiast for rigour and discipline in education, a genuine campaigner for the married family. And yet I am not one of them. By not being one of them, I show that it is quite possible to hold serious conservative views without tumbling into the pit of unreason in which they scrabble and squawk. This truth is unwelcome to them. Oddly enough, it is equally unwelcome to the other people who hate me, the Guardian-reading liberals who likewise believe that all conservatives are bigots, and that to be a conservative is to be a bigot. It isn't true, and it is vital for the future of proper politics in this country that we continue to demonstrate that it is not true.

One of the techniques of the campaign against me, which I must assume is inspired by someone somewhere, is to tell lies about me, suggesting (for instance) that I am a supporter of multiculturalism or mass immigration, or a secret Labour sympathiser.

These falsehoods levelled against me are (I must be forgiving here) presumably caused by the ‘none so blind as will not see’ problem which bedevils so many debates. People become so gripped by an enthusiasm, and enjoy it so much, that they are actively upset by anyone who dares cast doubt upon it. Rather than responding with reason, because secretly they suspect the critic is right, they respond with abuse and misrepresentation. A lot of political activity is, alas, self-indulgent, aimed at making the participant feel happy about himself rather than aimed at doing any manner of good.

They assume that a person who holds these views must also be like them, gullible, inclined for hysterical, oversimplified solutions, assuming everyone is what he appears to be, afraid to look too deeply into the nature of the leaders they have decided, for their own self-indulgent joy, to support. In truth, they're not quite sure about this. They feel, deep down, a little uncomfortable with the company that they keep, and are (as people with doubts invariably are) angered by any outsider who voices the doubts they are trying to suppress. In this, I feel sorry for them.

I note also that none of them offers any argument at all to deal with the unquestionable fact that the BNP's constitution, apparently as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians, is specifically racialist. Why can this not be changed, if the BNP has truly changed? Nor do any of them seem to be able to cope with the idea that any person can, with a good will and the necessary encouragement, become British. I am sorry about this. But in fact this inability to accept this possibility is a perfect example of the racially determinist view, as adopted by such people as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and leading, as all such blasphemous rubbish does lead, to the most terrible injustice and the most contemptible intellectual drivel. Mr Chamberlain, by the way, convinced himself that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, but an Aryan. This was at least preferable to the attitude of the German National Socialists, who came to hate Christ because he was a Jew, but you see where this sort of stuff can get you, and it is not nice.

I am insistently told that there are Jews in prominent positions in the BNP. Somehow (I wonder why not? Don't you?) these persons have never encountered any evidence of Judophobia in the ranks of the BNP. So what? This proves nothing other than that Jews are just as capable of being gullible as anyone else. Have these people never heard the phrase 'Potemkin Village' or understood its meaning? Also I am informed that there are people in the BNP with Japanese or Asian wives, etc.

The important fact, which could not be altered by whole squads of Jewish BNP councillors, or regiments of Japanese or Asian BNP spouses, is that the BNP leadership and membership are still rife with people who are racial determinists, and/or who 'doubt' the truth of the Holocaust, or who seek to belittle it - though these days such people tend to indulge their odd, pathetic little hobby in private rather than in public, just as the BNP leadership wears suits. The change is superficial. I feel as sorry for any Jewish person taken in by it as I do for any non-Jewish person taken in by it.

I am asked (anonymously of course) ‘Why do some people find it so difficult to distinguish between racial bigotry, on the one hand, and an entirely natural desire to prevent one's country being transformed into something unrecognisably alien, on the other?‘

On the contrary, I find it very easy to distinguish between the two. A person who can subscribe to the BNP constitution is clearly a racial bigot. A person who views the BNP constitution with distaste and refuses to have anything to do with it is not. But a person who subscribes to that constitution and then claims to be interested only in defending the national culture is plainly on shaky terms with the truth. Race and culture are two different things.

Yet this nameless contributor dares to assert: ’That is not racism, but good, old-fashioned conservatism. It is remarkable that even highly educated members of the metropolitan elite, as represented by Peter Hitchens, cannot grasp this simple distinction.‘

Highly educated? How kind of him to think so. But I am not, by any standard, a ‘member of the metropolitan elite’, a group of people that rejects and dislikes me. As to grasping the simple distinction, I think I grasp it very well. That is exactly why I have opposed multiculturalism for many years, why I call for the end of mass immigration and why I (and many others with similar views) wish to have nothing to do with the BNP. It is precisely because I think that those here can become British that I think it necessary to fight on both these fronts.

And so I continue to advise all persons of conscience and intelligence to shun it and refuse any temptation to vote for the BNP. The more I am pestered by the logic-free bores of the BNP, the more frequently and the more loudly will I say this. A different posting on an entirely different topic will follow.

The last thing we need now is a General Election... not with the next Hazel Blears and the next Geoff Hoon lurking on the Tory benches

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Just how stupid do they think we are?

They bundle off that bemused old booby, Michael Martin, and imagine that we will regard this grudging, trivial gesture as a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole political class. Ho ho.

The Tories, sunk right up to their bald patches in the swamp of self-enrichment and soul-selling, babble urgently about a General Election.

Do not pay any heed to this self-serving diversionary tactic.

They do this because they hope to win it by default, even though they know they don’t deserve to.

They intend to govern the country just as the Blairites did, and hope you won’t realise this until it is too late.

They are wildly over-confident about this. Conservative constituency associations are arrogantly rallying round their discredited MPs.

One overpraised Tory, the noisy Nadine Dorries, has even had the nerve to claim that MPs are the targets of a ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’ and to snivel that the poor persecuted things will do away with themselves if things go on like this.

The stomach heaves.

Hundreds of thousands of homes are hard-pressed by debt and redundancy through no fault of their own, and bravely making the best of it, and this spoiled woman dares to suggest that the exposure of someone’s grotesque expenses claims is a reason for suicide. God forgive her.

I know that it is fun to concentrate on the woes of the ghastly automaton Hazel Blears, or that smooth old time-server Geoff Hoon, but these people are all used up anyway.

As it happens, I warned you against them 12 years ago, but you wouldn’t listen. Nothing can save them.

What you have to realise is that the next Hazel Blears and the next Geoff Hoon are lurking now on the Tory benches, ready to ignore us and laugh at us once they are safely back in power.

If they can fool enough people into thinking this is a mainly Labour problem, then they may just get away with it. They shouldn’t.

The last thing we need now is a General Election which would bury the real problem under the slurry of Lib-Lab-Con politics, with the three near-identical parties pretending to be different for a few noisy, dishonest weeks.

Once they’ve had their election, they will instantly be able to stop caring about what we think.

They’ll be safe for five years, by which time we’ll have forgotten all about the swimming pools, moats and dog food.

On the principle of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’, all the very same people who have helped to wreck the country are now using the expenses scandal as a pretext for more of the same.

We get thoughtless drivel about turning the House of Lords into a copy of the Commons - how could that possibly be the answer? Bringing back the incorruptible old hereditaries would make more sense.

Do not be fooled by this. The problem is quite simple and it is one they do not wish us to notice.

It is that most Members of Parliament have been purchased by the European Union and the liberal elite.

They know that their absurdly padded lifestyles are their reward for selling their souls to power, for concealing that 80 per cent of what they do is rubber-stamping European law, and most of the rest is pursuing the relentless agendas of political correctness.

They dared not ask us for more pay, because they feared we would enquire too deeply into what they do and what they don’t do.

So they fiddled themselves more money in secret complicity with their true masters.

There should be no General Election until most of them - and I mean most of them - have retreated in shame into private life.

New parties are the answer, not Esther Rantzen

Oh please, please let us not have Esther Rantzen as an MP.

 I quite like her but, like so many celebs, she is clueless about politics. I nearly curled up and died when I heard her ‘ideas’ for Middle East peace on a TV show a few months ago.

A few independent MPs, or even a lot of them, are not the answer.

Even if I could get into Parliament - as some of you urge me - I’d be powerless unless I belonged to a party that I more or less agreed with.

What we need are two new parties.

One should be a proper pro-British one that believes in quitting the EU, leaving good people alone, punishing criminals, slashing the corruption out of the welfare state, proper schools and an end to mass immigration.

The other should be one that argues openly for what the existing three now do - the dissolution of this country into the EU, making excuses for crime, putting egalitarian dogma before education, flinging wide our borders and taxing the productive to pay for the idle.

Wouldn’t you just love to have a General Election fought on these arguments? And who do you think would win?

But I’m not sure where it would leave Esther or Martin Bell.

Like a Pipling, they think we'll believe anything ...

We now have a pretty good picture of what an MP is like - a rich person who thinks he can make you pay for his chimney to be fixed, while you help him buy a second home on an interest-free loan.

But what do they think we are like?

I suspect they think we are rather like the Piplings - the BBC’s new Teletubbies: wide-eyed, simpering little creatures who will believe anything provided it comes from their own party leaders.

They live in the world of Nara; a land of happiness, laughter and friendship.

When Piplings experience pure happiness they achieve ‘Buloo’ and rise gently into the air.

Yes, ‘Buloo’ is not a bad word for what we will achieve if we all vote Tory next time.

 

After Waterhouse the great, we all have to mind our language

I am sorry to hear of the retirement of the genius Keith Waterhouse.

I still remember reading Billy Liar for the first time in the middle of a teenage illness, and laughing so much that by the time I had finished it, I had forgotten I was ill.

But as well as being astonishingly funny, he has always loved and defended the hard and beautiful English language against its many enemies.

The rest of us will now have to take over this task as best we can.