The Tory Party’s Secret Weapon

Writing in today’s Guardian about the weekend protests, my colleague Jackie Ashley makes a half-true argument.

‘Miliband [cannot] be blamed for the embarrassing juxtaposition of his words at the Hyde Park rally and the actions of a group of anarchists in Oxford Street as they attacked the police. The Labour leader is no more responsible for the “black bloc” than David Cameron is for the BNP. It is absurd to argue that the democratically elected leader of the main opposition party should shy away from a huge public event because a few violent troublemakers might turn up on the fringes of it.’

And of course she is right to draw a distinction between the hundreds of thousands of decent marchers and the small mob of thugs and nutjobs. What she is not facing up to is the tolerance on the centre-left for the totalitarian extreme, which does not exist on centre-right.