The JC's splash this week is the news that Barking and Dagenham Council could fall to the BNP next year. This follows the news that the party's leader will take on Margaret Hodge at the next general election.

I also wrote a comment piece arguing that there should be a new anti-fascist alliance in east London to tackle the twin threat of the Islamist extreme right and the BNP. 

We already have Britain's first neo-Nazi MEP and the first London Assembly member from the far right. By next year we could have the first BNP MP and first BNP-controlled council. What a terrible legacy this is for a Labour government. 

Jackie Ashley's column in today's Guardian complements Janet Daley's in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. From opposing political perspectives they say the same thing: the two major parties are beginning to develop distinct political visions, which will allow the British public to make a genuine choice at next year's general election. Ashley suggests that David Cameron's speech on the role of the state and Ed Miliband's grasping of the environmental nettle mean that we are beginning to see arguments of substance about the key political issues of the day. "For the first time in ages it seems that a real politcal debate is starting," she says.

Janet Daley gets very close to unfettered praise for Cameron when she suggests that he is developing at least the rhetoric for "a fully-fledged reassessment of the relationship between government and the individual". She is recognising what some on the left have realised for some time: that David Cameron is a conventional post-Thatcherite Conservative.]]> Martin Bright 2009-11-17T00:08:37+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5534896/brights-blog-the-comeback.thtml Apologies that the blog hasn't been as regular as it should have been recently. The Jewish Chronicle has worked me hard in my first few weeks and I have been unable to keep posting as often as I would have liked.

I have now decided to blog at regular times during the week. 

I therefore intend to begin the week with a political round-up after the Sunday papers. I will post again on Tuesday and Thursday with updates on the crisis on the left as I perceive it. I reserve the right to comment on other aspects of politics (or indeed other matters) around those fixed points.

I look forward, as ever, to reading your views.

Meanwhile, you might be interested to read my latest articles for the JC. This week I covered the Labour Party's planned charm offensive towards the Jews, the spat between the Spectator's Melanie Phillips and anti-Islamist campaigner Ed Husain and the growing concern in Whitehall over the ideology of its Muslim advisers.

I tweeted this on October 23rd. I even teased Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie about Ashcroft now dominating Tory foreign policy as well as domestic policy. 

Does this count as a micro-scoop? 

Whoever it was, they were cheering at the expense of David Cameron. The Tory leader's twin strategy for appeasing the eurosceptic wing of the modern Tory Party has left him isolated at home and in Europe. His promise of a referendum is dead and his decision to leave the European People's Party is looking increasingly eccentric. 

i always get soppy about this first half term of the school year.  It takes me right back to my west country primary school in the 1970s, kicking through the autumn leaves as the nights drew in. The excitement of the new term has gone and the long winter lies ahead. (You can already feel this small-scale sense of dread on Westminster). 

This first half-term always reminds of one of my classmates. He was not the brightest lad: let's call him Craig or Andrew or Michael or Mark or Simon (popular names at the time, but now long abandoned). OK Simon. Simon left school at 16 and went to work at the Gordano Services on the M5. We all did our stint there and I heard this story when I had a holiday job there during one long university summer. 

A few years earlier, I was told, my old primary school classmate had started work at the filling station in the services: not a bad job in the hierarchy of the services. He was a]]> Martin Bright 2009-11-03T21:30:26+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5472401/my-bbc-radio-4-analysis-programme-on-secrecy.thtml

But over recent years I have become worried that the cost whistleblowers pay for their disclosures is too high. I worked closely with two high-profile leakers, Katharine Gun from the government’s secret surveillance centre, GCHQ, and Derek Pasquill, a former Foreign Office civil servant. Both ended up being hauled in front of the courts and both have found it difficult to find work since.

In each case, there was an argument for disclosure in the public interest. Gun revealed details of a spying operation on the United Nations Security Council in advance of the Iraq War and Derek Pasquill disclosed the UK government’s policy towards radical Islamist groups.

Gun and Pasquill both say they have no regrets about what they did. I believe they are both courageous individuals who put their own careers and livelihoods on the line in the interests of the wider public. But the]]> Martin Bright 2009-10-25T21:32:30+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5467586/how-question-time-became-important.thtml I can't expect anyone to bother reading another piece about Question Time, but bear with me here. In the build-up to Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, I was convinced it was a fuss about nothing. I still can't quite understand Peter Hain's objection to allowing an unpleasant fascist hang himself live on TV. Good box office, sure, but surely a spectacle worth paying good money to see.

My only concern was the quality of the panel. But when it came to it,  I was pleasantly surprised. I thought Huhne, Warsi, Straw and Greer were really rather good. I have my doubts about Sayeeda Warsi's record on radical Islam and homosexuality but I was impressed by her performance. (Griffin didn't even bother to get in the point that he had been elected and Warsi hadn't, but then I don't get the feeling he's that much of a democrat). For me, Warsi was the only panelist who really skewered Griffin when she said how appalling it was to describe the plight of white British people in terms of genocide.

It was also good to flush out the BNP leader on the Holocaust. His equivocation was a disgrace. 

Sadie's Tavern has]]> Martin Bright 2009-10-23T21:57:12+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5456836/now-the-tories-need-to-get-serious-about-their-euroallies.thtml The Guardian splash today puts some serious meat on my story in last week's Jewish Chronicle about growing US unhappiness about the Tories' new friends in Europe. Jonathan Freedland adds some important analysis.

When I first put it to the Conservative Party press office that there might be an issue here I was told that it was unlikely the Obama government was troubling itself with such a parochial British issue. To me this demonstrates a fundamental failure of understanding that stretches right up to David Cameron himself. There has always been the suspicion that, for Cameron and his circle, politics is a game. The original ruse to leave the European People's Party was a ruse to attract the Eurosceptic ultras to his leadership campaign. A mature leader would have abandoned this daft idea when he realised what the consequences would be. If he had taken the trouble to do as much a Google search on his new allies he would have been able to predict that this would become a serious problem for him in America.

William Hague will have some big questions to answer about the new European Conservatives and Reformists group when he meets Hillary Clinton today. 

The]]> Martin Bright 2009-10-21T07:23:09+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5453536/thanks-to-bruce-anderson.thtml I didn't think I'd ever find myself uttering the words in that headline, but I'm afraid those looking for further evidence of my ideological drift to the dark side will be disappointed. I do have to express my heartfelt gratitude to the old curmudgeon, however it's for his guidance as a literary rather than an ideological mentor.

Shortly after I left the New Statesman, I found myself wandering through Waterstones on Trafalgar Square. I find bookshops very comforting in times of trouble. I was in something of a daze and found myself in the detective fiction department. Now this something unusual for me, as I rarely read the stuff, considering myself a little more high brow in my tastes. 

It was at this moment, lost and directionless in a part of a bookshop where I rarely tread, that I bumped into big Bruce. "Hello, Martin," he boomed, full of the bonhomie my comrades on the left seem to find so difficult to muster at the moment. We discussed briefly his genius at his early championing of the cause of David Cameron, I told him of my sadness at leaving the NS and then he noticed where we were.

"Aha," he]]> 2009-10-20T06:38:08+00:00