Nick Cohen

I once vowed never again to mock celebrities who endorse political campaigns as if they were advertising two-for-the-price-of-one offers in supermarkets. But today’s announcement that the Yes to AV campaign has recruited Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth is testing my resolve. It is not that I believe that celebrities should keep away from politics. They have as much right as journalists to express an opinion – indeed, when they argue for artistic freedom or libel reform they are more committed and more knowledgeable than most reporters are.

The fallout from Labour’s morally and tactically disastrous decision to attack David Cameron’s defence of liberal values continues. Now it is Joan Smith’s turn to take a kick. She is one of the few true feminists left in Britain, and proves it by her willingness to say without equivocation that if white-skinned women in Britain should have equal rights then so should brown-skinned women  inTehran. (Or to bring that comparison closer to home, if the emancipation of women is good enough for Hampstead and Highgate, then it is good enough for Bethnal Green and Bow.) 'Labour’s response to Cameron’s speech was lamentable, appearing to have more to do with electoral calculation than principle.

Here is a dispatch from the north-east by Andrew Hankinson, one of the best feature writers around, who wrote a superb piece on the effects of the crash of 2008 on the young. It sums up one of my worries about Labour’s awful response to David Cameron’s speech on the need to revive liberal values. It is not just that Labour was refusing to defend liberal Muslims in their struggle against reactionaries, or that Labour was making itself ridiculous by refusing to take a stand against Islamic Forum Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood and other vicious outfits, but it showed that the party was impaling itself on a fork. If it cannot stand up against Islamist groups that are racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-democratic, how can it argue in conscience against the BNP and EDL?

Writing behind the paywall in today’s Times, Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, says: "In Manchester on Saturday the National Union of Students organised what was the latest in a series of protests against government plans that are allowing the burden of the deficit reduction to fall on young people. We were there to expose the contradiction of David Cameron saying that we cannot build a future on debt and then tripling tuition fees….However, before I was able to speak to the rally of thousands, a small group of people started to chant abuse to try to intimidate me, and there were audible anti-Semitic comments.

One of the few pieces of writing that made me emit an admiring whistle last year, was by the Economist's political correspondent Bagehot. He argued that Britain did not have the far-left and right political parties of Europe because the British media provided an outlet for hatreds their respectable European counterparts ignored. 'To pick a recent case study,' Bagehot continued, 'the Sunday Mirror reported on September 5th that the estranged second wife of an obscure Conservative MP was working as a prostitute. The following day, the outwardly respectable Daily Mail carried abject quotes from the MP on his doorstep, saying he knew nothing of his wife’s actions, and could prove that he was separated from her.

Over on Coffee House my colleague Dan Hodges notes that a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party has come out against AV, and speculates that their stand will help the “No” campaign.   So it may, but he is missing the true danger to the “Yes” campaign, which lies with its friends rather than its enemies. To be blunt, the supporters of “reform” are at best deluded and at worse rank hypocrites. The alternative vote solves no problems and remedies no grievances. It is an unlovely and unloved electoral system, as the voters of New Zealand showed when their government gave them the chance to choose how they cast their votes. New Zealanders were interested in all kinds of reforms to first-past-the-post but dismissed AV with scorn.

A repulsive feature of contemporary left-wing thinking is its insistence that clerical fascists should dictate our foreign policy. After the 7/7 attacks on London, Robert Fisk lambasted Tony Blair for saying that radical Islamists were trying to destroy “what we hold dear”. He took Osama bin Laden as a source of moral and political guidance, and wrote: 'To go on pretending that Britain's enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" that Blair has locked us into. Just before the U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?" Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.

It seems like only yesterday that conservative pundits were denouncing MPs for “destroying trust” with their fraudulent expense claims and writing books exposing New Labour deceitful spin with such stirring titles as The Rise of Political Lying. How soft those strident voices have become now that a centre-right rather than a centre-left government is doing the lying. Conservative and particularly Liberal writers have yet to understand what they have thrown away by resorting to the discredited politics of the past. One of the attractions of the Coalition, even to those who did not vote for it, was that it looked like a government of gentleman was in power, after the thuggish, know-nothing rule of Brown, Whelan and McBride.

Imagine that the British National Party controls a church and community centre in the East End of London. Imagine that it receives respectful visits from politicians, and grants from local and national government. Imagine that Prince Charles extends his already unhinged beliefs in pseudo-science and homeopathic quackery to include neo-fascist race theory, and signals his approval of the BNP by visiting the church. Imagine that Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson follow him. Imagine that the Lord Chief Justice chooses a BNP church of all places to demand restrictions on the rights off immigrants.