The Tory Party’s Secret Weapon

Ian Walker

I have a long-standing policy of ignoring any mass protest with pre-printed banners.

When people get a tin of paint and daub it on a plank of wood - that's the time to sit up and take notice.

Erica Blair

I was wondering how Nick Cohen would shoehorn 'The Mooslims' into a piece about anarchists, but this is pathetic.

Poor show Nick, you can do better than this.

TrevorsDen

Its likely the numbers were well under 150,000.

John HW

Some telling points Nick and particularly about the blindness of the 'soft' Left to its extremes. High time they woke up to the unpleasantness of the fascistic left in all its forms

Tron

Where does all this Class War and hate come from? Under New Labour it was "we are all middle class". "I am relaxed about the filthy rich". John Prescott was playing croquet in his Country House. Mandleson was relaxing on a billionaire's yacht.Then last May everything changed.
Now every-time I listen to a radio phone-in I hear "I hate the Rich , the Toffs, the bankers ,the successful, the well educated, people in nice houses, people who employ people .Hate, hate, hate. Harman, Mandleson, Prescott and Brown are all rich and live in nice houses. Did the TUC march against them or did they give Labour more money?
Where does all this hate come from? Do they teach it at school? Where was all this hate for 13 years under Labour?
I have never heard anyone say they hate the poor and the unsuccessful on TV or Radio.
Why are the Left so nasty and bitter? Is it because they lost a democratic election after running the economy into the ground and they cannot accept the will of the people? They could not get 30% of the population to vote for them so they stick their fingers in their ears and shout "hate the rich."

Commentator

Nick, how can the left dissassociate itself from violence? It loves the practitioners of violence: Gerry Adams, the ANC, Robert Mugabe. In any case, the Tories won't do waht you say because the Vichy wing of the Tory Party (to which Cameron belongs) are willing accomplices of the hard left.

Jpowls

An excellent take on the weekends event Nick.

The problem that I had with the media's coverage during and after Saturday's event was not just the over-hyped nature it. It was the way in which the events of groups outside of both the Labour Party and the TUC were juxtaposed with the rally, with particular focus on Ed Miliband's speech.

This is not political pro-Tory bias but an example of an over-simplified and tabloid orientated news channels, who are too interested in BREAKING NEWS events than to portray an genuine depiction of the day.

As you say, if the BNP hijacked a Countryside alliance march the reaction would not be the same.

Sir Graphus

Milliband didn't walk with the main demonstration because he, like all modern leaders, doesn't have anything in common with the people they govern, nor does he wish to.

You've made this observation before, explaining why leaders (Blair, Mandleson) feel unembarrassed to go on holiday with Berlusconi or Gaddafi. Now that, supposedly for security reasons, they no longer interact with ordinary people, they have formed their own ruling class, and live in a land of official cars and secure compounds. Elected politicians share lifestyles more with dictators than with their electorates. Milliband's behaviour demonstrates your observation from the other end.

Bugedone

I'd have thought that the "Vichy" tag would better suit the wing of the Tory party forever willing to be apologists for fascists the world over, from Suharto to Pinochet via the House of Saud and Ian Smith...

Hugo Chav

Hi Nick,

Just wanted to share this dose of economic realism with you:

Tom Winnifrith:

"Right now the UK owes c£867 billion. Actually it owes more if you include all its off-balance sheet debts. Despite all the talk of cuts the deficit has actually increased by c£150 billion over the past year. Yes. That is correct. The Coalition is spending even more than Labour did and right now the deficit increases by c£3billion a week. That is c£50 for every person in the UK.

George Osborne expects tax receipts to increase steadily thanks to inflation and new taxes. I am pretty sure that he is correct on the former but on the latter I am, not so sure as in an era of international mobility those who pay the lion’s share of tax can move if they want and the net movement of big earners (PLCs/high earners/entrepreneurs facing CGT bills) is not into Britain it is out and it is accelerating.

Meanwhile Osborne is not actually cutting Government spending in nominal terms but merely reducing the rate of increase. So much for savage cuts. His hope is that by 2015 the UK Government will be running at break even. But that will still leave it owing at least £1.2 trillion. How do the marchers expect that to be repaid? Are the marchers aware that for every £1 of tax taken in 2015 somewhere between 10p and 15p will go on interest on that debt? I think the number will be higher and that the 2015 target will not be met.

Quite simply the marchers are living in fantasy land. If one adopts their alternative proposals (maintain planned increases in public spending & increase taxes on the evil rich who are already paying the 4th highest marginal taxes on this planet) then tax receipts will fall and the UK debts will just carry on growing and in due course the UK will go bust. What exactly do not the pig ignorant folks on that march understand about that?

Some of the comments made by marchers and their leaders are just so idiotic they need repeating. “Save the NHS”. Well NHS spending is not being cut by this Government. More’s the pity. The world’s 3rd largest employer is obviously very inefficient at purchasing services and grossly overmanned at a managerial level while offering taxpayer funded services which it cannot afford (hair removal therapy for transsexuals springs to mind). The Government should be cutting NHS spend and is failing in NOT doing so.

“Making students pay fees is both unfair and damages UK competitiveness as our workforce will be under-qualified”. Well a) why the hell should an 18 year old with a job subsidize an 18 year old student who will earn more in the long run. B) A huge number of courses at new Universities are useless and pointless degrees which prepare those who do not drop out (40% at some places) and complete for absolutely nothing and c) what will damage the UK’s competiveness is going broke which is what will happen if spending is not cut.

“Front line services are being targeted for cuts in an ideological war.” Libraries and lollipop ladies and RAF jets are being axed. It is true. But equally the chancellor of Gloucester University (see above for new unis) earns £500,000 a year. The leader of Suffolk CC costs her taxpayers via salary/management consultants/photo shoots/gagging orders on staff who try to whistle blow, etc enough to save all the lollipop ladies in Suffolk. MPs are giving themselves big new allowances. Hampshire County Council employs more people than the Royal Navy. Britain gives foreign aid to China and India which can both afford nuclear missile programmes, the EU has increased the UK’s contribution massively, the UK taxpayer has paid to bail out Greece & Eire and Portugal’s begging bowl is being readied.

This Government is frankly not cutting enough and where it is cutting it is in the wrong place. This is not ideology it is cowardice and stupidity.

Those folk on the march need a reality check. Your country is going broke. Bankrupt. Down the pan. If anything you should be protesting that your feeble Government is cutting badly and not cutting enough. But I think you really are just too stupid to understand that."

dave smith

Well, the BNP have been part of Countryside Alliance marches in the past, welcome or not. A cursory search of the net would have discovered that, which rather undermines the 'what if' of the end of this piece.

Also to add - what does Nick want the TUC to actually do? Tell the black bloc they're not welcome? I think that's abundantly clear, but aside from physically stopping the black bloc from attending - i.e. causing a much bigger riot and risking injury to pensioners and children - i fail to see what the TUC could have done differently.

re the swp, even though they were trying to give out a lot of placards, i saw very few actually being carried, and their calls for a general strike were repeated only by their members.

Better ignore them than give them the attention they crave, i say.

I wish Nick had done so instead of focusing on the negative aspects of the march.

Ping

Good post Tron.

Why are the Left such haters?

Even during the Iraq demo the Left didn't go beserk.

As soon as a Tory government is in power we have one riot after another.

There is something, deeply, morally bankrupt on the Left. Very bad, nay evil.

Commentator

Well that must take the Oscar for sterile quibbles...

David Lindsay

Read the comments below, and very often above, the line on this and other rightish websites. Then ask yourself exactly how these obsessive enemies of any and all State action differ in the slightest from those who wave black flags and who daub anarchist symbols on the property that they have damaged or destroyed. There is no difference. They even come from much the same background. Yesterday's vandals were not marching with Ed Miliband. They were marching against him, and, in their view that the problem with the cuts was that they did not go far enough, they were marching in support of his brother. Though also, provisionally, in support of the Coalition.

If the Coalition does not like Ed Miliband's comparison of the anti-cuts protesters to the American Civil Rights movement and to those who campaigned against apartheid, then it ought to consider whether the ideal person to put on the media is Michael Gove, the old P W Botha cheerleader who is now backing Toby Young's (darkie-)free schools while withdrawing the Educational Maintenance Allowance from the kaffirs. Gove is also a huge admirer of Tony Blair, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn. Of course.

Simon Stephenson.

Nick

You make much of the troublemakers being anarchists, but to be honest I reckon that you and I are closer to anarchism than these people are. As pointed out by Guido Fawkes (*), real anarchists don't oppose cutting the state, and Sam Leith of the Evening Standard (**) warns that "anarchist" isn't a synonym for "thug" or "vandal".

* http://order-order.com/2011/03/27/real-anarchists-dont-oppose-cutting-the-state/

** http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23935963-anarchist-isnt-a-synonym-for-thug-or-vandal.do

Perhaps you've fallen into the same trap as those who describe the BNP as "right-wing", not because it is in any way accurate, but because being of the moderate left they wish to achieve the twin-victory of maximising the apparent distance between themselves and the BNP, and also using the BNP to belittle the right by association. As well, of course, as wishing to disguise the regrettable fact, to which you alude, of the BNP's objectives being so qualitatively similar to the groups on the far-left which the soft-left so respectfully indulges.

The BNP has far more similarities with the left-wing elements of the Labour party than it has with the Monday Club.

Fiona

"The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left..."

Trouble is, Nick, what else can you do but ignore it?

If you tried to ban the SP/SWP etc in advance, they and the other hangers-on will turn up mob-handed ready for a fight. Believe me, those who aren't weedy beardies are nasty, out-and-out thugs.

You can't confiscate or destroy their banners, unless you want a fight. You can't tell them to go and march somewhere else, they're perfectly entitled to ignore YOU, tag on to the end of your march if they want, and carry the banners they want.

There's no way to stop them without it ending in physical violence, and most people just aren't prepared to get involved in that.

If you can think of a way of getting shot of these idiots, I'm sure Brendan Barber and most TU general secretaries would love to hear from you.

seb

Tron

The left is perennially nasty and bitter. When it's in power, its plans don't work. Tears and twisted knickers all round. The rest of the time, the left is bitter because they are deprived by incompetent, treacherous and stupid voters of the chance to show how well left-of-centre administrations work.

Humanity comes in only two models if you're "of the left". Progressives and Reactionary Morons. The latter, obviously, have to be sidelined so that the former can get on with their clever plans for a world of eternal peace and love.

The shouting and the mentalist explanations for the recession are the strategy of the desperate. The real ammunition has run out - so chuck bricks. In the end, they'll stop even that. Miliband does not inspire. There is not going to be a general strike. Labour won't propose anything remotely substantive that you could run as part of an election manifesto.

Credit to Mr. Cohen for his typically accurate portray of the hard left and its pantywaist, gormless accomplices in the BBC and lefty newspapers.

Simon Stephenson.

Tron : 3.29pm

Two things:-

1. They actually only got about 19.4% of the electorate to vote for them in the constituencies in which they stood. Less than two thirds of the electorate voted.

2. The hate largely comes from ordinary, everyday, not-very-political people having their grievances and their emotions whipped up by a small group of activists misinforming them about the realities of governing a country of 60 million people. The reason these activists do this is that they want to destabilise the position of the people who are actually in power, in order to enhance the possibility of the activists gaining power themselves.

It's the unsavoury outcome of a strategy put in place to satisfy a power lust. That's all.

Erica Blair

You can't find better hatred than the far-right comments on this site.

Keith

It is curious but entirely predictable that whenever the SWP and its associated thugs and morons go on a bender lefties should start talking about the BNP. The BNP, in fact, does not go around attacking the police and smashing up private property but you speak as though it does - apparently in order to give an (entirely spurious) impression of moral equivalence.

Let's be clear - political violence in this country is the province of the Left. Those idiots who call themselves anarchists are not anarchists but socialists whether they realise it or not - since when did anarchists go around rioting in support of higher government spending? Get a grip.

You are right though about the Left's inability to recognise its own nastiness. Of course Hayek laid bare the socialism at the heart of Nazism seventy years ago but we know he was wrong because Thatch was influenced by him - right, kids?

Mr. Jolly

Hey Nick,

I remember when you used to do interviews for anarchist publications about 10 years ago, how things have changed. Dont lump us in with the islamo-trots. And if the TUC and Labour party denounce cop hating anarchists so much why the hell do they remember them every 1st of May.

Gil

Erica Blair, your first comment had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Nick mentioned one organisation, not a whole religion. And what's with the misspelling of said religion by you?

Dave Weeden

"Tory MPs do not share platforms with BNP supporters, but Labour MPs associate [with] George Galloway, the SWP and the Muslim Brotherhood."

Is this the same Nick Cohen? http://bit.ly/Vb3bb

Erica Blair

So Gil, were the Black Bloc really the Muslim Brotherhood in Burkas?

Doc Merlin

Why do people keep acting as if the BNP is on the right? They are soft-socialist to their core, and have no place at all on the right.

Gil

So Erica (or Victoria or Patricia, whatever you call yourself) do you deny that the some Labour MPs associate themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood?

And do you deny that many of said members of Black Bloc (a fascist sounding name if there ever was one, but perhaps in Anarchism it is not) wear the fashion accessory de nos jours, the 'Arafat' scarve?

Richard

How come Journalists, many of whom presumably have English degrees, are as ignorant as the violent lefties when it comes to the meaning of the word "anarchy"? Can you lot stop calling these people anarchists?

There were no anarchists at the march. There were socialist thugs, which is almost a tautology, as nearly all thugs are socialist.

How many other things were wrong with this article? Too many for a comment of sensible length.

The socialists do not have a good case. Government cuts are not only not self-defeating (the money comes from somewhere; the government spending it rather than someone else harms the economy, it does not help) but unavoidable. The country is broke. There is no money. Piggy bank he empty, comprende?

If government spends and then taxes what it has spent that cannot possibly help pay down debt unless tax rates exceed 100%, and I can't see public-sector workers going for that. Sorry, I know you are just going for the broken-window fallacy, but since that is a well-known fallacy I thought I would intentionally misunderstand you for comic emphasis.

The BNP not only does not attract Conservatives to the same platform, it has nothing to do with right-wing politics. It is left-wing authoritarian (where the self-misnamed anarchists are left-wing anti-authoritarian).

Jerry Owen

The BNP unlike the SWP don't do street violence, and don't attack the police, they electioneer and put up candidates so you can vote or not vote for them. Like them or loathe them, they do parliamentary democracy. The SWP on the other hand a party I used to be a member of in my youth ( to my eternal shame ) is a party that openly promotes violence 'smash the BNP' for one slogan. If you disagree with a far left socialist you can be sure you will get bitterness back at the very best, and violence at the worst.
There is a huge gulf between the two parties.
The SWP does not support 'parliamentary democracy' it believes in overthrowing it, not by democratic means but by seizure.
I notice that in the last four demos going back to the Palestinian Israeli demo that the SWP is given full reign of the streets to damage property at will and attack the police at will. This I find very sinister and I can't quite work out why this is, seeing as they wish to 'smash' the state. But for sure there will be a reason, as we can be sure the Country side Alliance or the BNP wouldn't get away with this socialist ( not anarchic )street violence.
The marxist left think they know best and that the general public do not figure in their plans for the ultimate workers republic. It is in fact an elitist class oriented party, that can be proven by the amount of lefty middleclass students that inhabit it!.

Al

The choice is between Socialism and Representative Democracy. The far right and left are both Socialist and mirror reflections of each other.

Jerry Owen

We have heard the boss of Unite praising the students last two riots as a way forward before the demonstration took place on Saturday, was this some coded incitement to violence?
Miliband was there as well, could it be that labour now out of power doesn't like it and wants some sort of revolution? After all the class thing is being regurgitated, not that you see a poor socialist in any kind of position of power.
Parliamentary Democracy is great when you own it, which Labour have done for a decade and more.
The shoe is on the other foot and they don't like it.....but strangely enough it's still a left shoe!.

John

Maybe this might sound like a strange question since curturally the British seem far different from Americans, but why didn't any of the half million peaceful protestors attempt to stop the 500 or so radical ones? In the few protests I have been to in America, there is sort of a self policing function where the trouble makers are first pushed out of the main protests and then pointed out to the police if necessary. If the trouble makers attempt anything, the main protestors stop them understanding that their efforts will be useless if the trouble makers succeed in their headline graving stunts. Are the British just passive to this?

Patricia Shaw

Apparently they caused £250.000 damage at Fortnums. One of them broke a jar of olives.

Sterling

I was wondering how Nick Cohen would shoehorn 'The Mooslims' into a piece about anarchists, but this is pathetic.

Poor show Nick, you can do better than this.

clearly you have nothing to say and you understand less than nothing about anything - you should get checked to see if you have some kind of learning disability that is keeping you from realizing what is actually written or is it an emotional disability.

Simon Stephenson.

Patricia Shaw : 1.47pm

"Apparently they caused £250.000 damage at Fortnums. One of them broke a jar of olives."

Oh well, being fair and upright people, concerned entirely with the wellbeing of others, I'm sure that the perpetrators have been sure to reimburse Fortnum and Mason for the costs of all damages and breakages for which they are responsible - and indeed that they have apologised for their threatening behaviour, and for the inconvenience they have caused.

Don Rodrigo

The point made that Britain's left allows genuine extremists a voice in their ranks, while the Tories keep a distance from extremists on the right is also true with American politics. The much maligned tea partiers are not extremists, whereas white supremacists are. The latter have no voice in either the GOP or the tea parties. The Democrats have leftists extremists in their elected ranks and among their closest allies.

darkhorse

"Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations"

Oh, the irony of Nick Cohen calling other people 'hysterical'.

Being neither a revolutionary lefty nor a racist nationalist, I carry no torch for either the SWP or the BNP, but the claim that either organisation is 'totalitarian' is dubious, to say the least.

The SWP, at least according to their own rhetoric, are in favour of some kind of workers democracy - that is, democratic structures different from the current hierarchial one we live under.

The BNP are a parliamentary party, and racist nationalist parties, however repugnant, do appear to take part in elected assemblies within Europe and beyond, without those countries falling victim to 'totalitarianism'.

Great Wall of Texas

"the kind of people who ensure that when you get up in the morning you have a reasonably civilised country to live in. There was no violence, and no trouble."

SNERK! Civilized country, yea right.

pottsy

Tron,
The hatred was always bubbling away under the surface during Labour's 13 years, it's just that Blair, grinning prat though he was, somehow kept a lid on it. The lefties hated the man but kept their traps shut because he was the face of respectability that offered them power.
Why is the left so nasty and bitter? Probably because deep down they know their cause is shot to pieces; they've lost the big arguments. That's why they hate Thatcher so much, because they know she was right all along.

Simon Stephenson.

pottsy : 11.11am

I think there's a lot of truth in what you write. Another angle is that mankind is composed of people with wide differences in their abilities to imagine, to project forward, to think abstractly. Most people fall into a group which is really quite limited in this respect, and the most important task of people with greater imaginative talent is not so much to design progress, but to clear the path for its implementation, by winning the confidence of the masses who are unable to design progress themselves.

To me, the essence of both the socialist left, and the acquisitory right, is the denial that the freedom of the mentally talented minority can translate into general benefit. The blight of our times, the death of the Enlightenment, is the suffocating premise that the only acceptable way forward for our society is where progress is driven by those in the bulge of the bell-curve, and not by those in the higher of its two tails.

Authoritarianism will be the death of us.

RCE

Simon S @ 12:05

We've just had 13 years of a socialist government that has, inter alia, imported millions of voters through mass immigration, bankrupted the country through egregiously high taxation and spending, and vandalised every institution that made things function remotely effectively.

Even with these axiomatic facts, the electorate still voted for those guilty in such a sufficient number as to prevent a working majority for the opposition - itself a redistributive, confiscatory entity that has spent even more of other people's money than the last lot, refused to cut a penny from the monoloth to socialism that is the NHS, ceded yet more citizen’s rights to the soviet-command-economy EU, shied away from rooting out the disgusting and immoral Gramscian bias of the BBC, and annihilated what remained of the sole remaining British institution that was credible (the military).

Doesn't sound like losing the argument to me.

Simon Stephenson.

RCE : 2.04pm

You're querying my support for pottsy's second paragraph, right? Well, perhaps you're correct - the left has not so much realised that it has lost the argument so much as that it can't win it. I think that until the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the motif of post-WW2 politics was that the left was basically correct, rationally and intellectually, and that opposition to this from the right was driven only by the protection of self-interest. I think the Mags & Ronnie show rejuvenated the hearts of many who had resigned theselves to spending the rest of their lives in the dreariness of nanny-state socialism, and that it pissed off the left who thought they'd got it won, and who now regretted not purging society early-on of those who may turn out to be hostile.

So although you are correct that leftism has won more battles than it should, it can no longer claim to have won the argument - since it is no longer able to advance through the use of reason, and has to rely on deceit and subterfuge for all the progress it makes.

RCE

Simon S @ 3:44PM

The 'Mags and Ronnie show' was the exception to the post-war political narrative of both countries; it's tragic but true. The UK is more socialist now than at any time in history - all three main parties are socialist.

Whether or not this came about by fair means or foul is irrelevant; the vast majority of people in the UK (and Europe, and the US soon enough if BHO has his way) cannot envisage a life without the government making all the big decisions and being the dominant force in an individual's life.

Socialism determines the parameters in which political debate is framed, even if not explicitly; it is the dominant political creed. Socialism has thus won the argument.

John Edwards

The fact that a saxophonist with dubious views appeared (presumably playing his saxophone)at an SWP related fundraising event would have to be stretched a long way to put the SWP on a par with the BNP in "promoting anti-semites"

Jerry Owen

RCE
Socialism does not admit to Socialism. It does not admit we live in a Socialist controlled society.
The reason....because it never won the argument, it has never won the argument. Now it pervades like a cancer through government and institutions, and although people know things aren't right at all in this country they can't put their finger on hat is wrong as our education system is being dumded down and our media corrupted.
Socialism cannot admit to what it is because people naturally and rightly fear it.

Eric Harmon

Erica Blair - you have to be Nick Cohen's mother-in-law, right?