The Spectator’s Notes | 24 October 2009

When I was asked to write the foreword for the document which launched the Nothing British campaign this week, I hesitated. The campaign draws attention to the BNP’s abuse of military symbols and its attempts to recruit servicemen and their families. It is a good cause, but I am slightly suspicious of the easiness with which middle-class people parade their ‘courage’ in standing up to the BNP — ‘yielding to no one’ in their detestation of its ‘loathsome’ attitudes — when it actually requires no courage at all. If there is an establishment conspiracy to suppress the BNP, that can only feed the myth upon which it thrives. But I eventually agreed to help the campaign because of its specific focus on the armed services. We do not know how lucky we are to have non-political armed forces, and that political detachment needs constant policing. The current chaos in defence policy makes the ranks vulnerable to the politics of resentment. We may imagine that we have never encountered this problem before, but a version of it was widespread at the end of the second world war. The left gained control of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and preached to servicemen who, with reason, were fed up with the status quo. It was the forces’ votes which produced the Labour landslide of 1945. The belief that the state could ‘win the peace’ just as it had won the war plunged this country into errors from which it has never fully recovered. Luckily, the BNP are much stupider than the mid-20th-century left. But they are socialists — national socialists — peddling illusions about equality — for white people — and a siege economy. It is conservatives, not the left, who are best placed to oppose them.

Although it is fun deploring modern trends in the entertainment of children, the last 20 years have been far more creative than when I was growing up.