Dangerous Dancing

Whose tune is danced to?

There are still those, even beyond the confines of the BBC who fail to understand that their attachment of the term 'right wing' to the likes of the BNP is dishonest in the extreme.

Hopefully articles such as this should disavow all but the most mentally corroded of this lazy assumption. As a précis for those without the time to read any Guardian bilge, the 'BNP Ballerina' Simone Clarke has joined the executive of a union called 'Solidarity' who seem to spout the real voice of trade unionism, including a distrust of 'foreigners taking our jobs'. Their real crime, at least as far as the TUC are concerned, is that they are not an officially approved union which sometimes criticises certain (and on this alone I will agree with them) backwards looking unions who are 'official' but also called 'Equity'.

<lie>I don't like poking fun at the internal travails of the left</lie>, but it does feel good to sit on the diametrically opposite side of the political circle from the likes of Bob Crowe and Ms Clarke, and despise the authoritarian left wing instincts of both the TUC and their proxy government as well as the BNP.

For those who think that this is a cheap dig at the left and have some experience of life outside the south east, simply ask yourself one question. If some TV company paid you to go under cover to infiltrate and recruit on behalf of the BNP vermin, would you choose: the local Con/Liberal Club, or the local Labour/Working Men's club?

If there was to be prize money at stake, I know where I'd be staking my pitch.

The BNP is a creature of the authoritarian left, and it's time the moderate left started to take some responsibility for it rather than simple colluding in the lazy media characterisation of it as a right wing organisation and hoping some guilt will attach by distant association to the Conservatives.

Whichever path the Lib Dems take under either Huhne or Clegg I think many both within and without the party will hope they will abandon to some of the statism that has crept around their message in recent years and become the voice of left of centre liberalism to mirror what Cameron has already achieved to the right of centre. The statist right wing exists only in dimmest of memories of thirty-somethings like me, leaving the David and Goliath of the BNP and Labour to fight for the big state left vote divided on either side of the racist/non-racist axis.

This has been one and only time that I've ever tried to persuade someone to vote Labour; they couldn't stomach the Lib Dems, and their alternative choice was much worse, and for that the person the selection of the only two viable candidates was as natural as breathing.

As an aside, to have had a couple of pleasant beers with good company, then to come home for a couple of glasses of wine (cheapish but nice burgundy) with good music (Zero 7, Something for Kate...ok...it's in the ear of the beholder) and a bit of a internecine squabble in the trade union movement has seemed like a good way to end a bad week - gawd, what am I turning into!