Nick Cohen writes in Standpoint:
There are no frontier posts on the Left of politics, no pale to go beyond. You can move further and further away from the centre, move so far, in fact, that you turn the circle and join the fascists and it still doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, your “leftist” credentials will protect you from criticism, as surely as a Foreign Office passport protected British colonists in the age of empire.
The borders of politics’ right flank are better policed. When David Cameron allied himself with nativist Polish and Latvian parties which were not fascist but possessors of Eastern Europe’s traditional difficulties with Jews, liberal journalists, your correspondent included, pounded him. If he had gone further and spoken at a conference that featured prominent neo-Nazis, we would have destroyed him. Honourable critics would not say that Cameron was a neo-Nazi. We would allege instead that he was indifferent to racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia and the damage they wrought — a self-interested, small-minded politician who could not see that some ideologies were so poisonous that society must confront and quarantine them. Think what you will about Cameron, but he is never going to go that far. One of the most cheering developments in British politics has been the emergence of conservative anti-fascism in Britain led by Nothing British about the BNP and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Conservatives and liberals alike police the pale of right-wing politics while the Left remains an unguarded land wide open to invasion.