Worth reading piece from Nick Cohen here:
The distinction was made clearer to me on Saturday, when I walked with the main march. I was glad to meet railwaymen, cleaners, teachers and hospital workers – 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. Everyone was jolly, including the police officers watching the demonstration. The marchers were perked up because they had a good case to make against the coalition’s self-defeating austerity programme. By pummelling a weak economy to reduce the deficit, their argument ran, the coalition will further weaken the economy and further reduce the tax take it needs to pay down the deficit. Millions of people might have been willing to listen, but when they turned on the news on Saturday night, they saw anarchists trashing shops.
The TUC and Labour Party condemned the violence. But they had not warned in advance that yobs would not be welcome on the march because neither is ready for a full confrontation with the fanatics. On the march itself the TUC allowed the SWP to hand out banners and “brand” the demonstration as its own as it called in apparent seriousness for “a general strike now”.
The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics.
As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.
