LET'S have an end to the hysteria about the British National Party. They have arrived in the European Parliament thanks to the Labour MPs who turned their backs on the people who sent them to Westminster.
They took advantage of a voting system that Gordon Brown seems anxious to adopt here to save his skin. Under our own system, Nick Griffin and his BNP sidekick would be lucky to save their deposits. Now they can join the five French National Front MEP
s and the others in the 20-strong, anti-Semite, Far Right group of the 785-seat Parliament. That is scarcely a landslide. We are told very solemnly that we mustn't be complacent. That's rich, coming from the very people whose complacency and refusal to listen to the public, particularly on immigration, let the BNP in.
In town after town, city after city, traditional Labour voters watched the whole nature of their communities changing without their consent. If they even mentioned their misgivings, they were accused of racism. Why be surprised that the BNP cashed in?
Now that we are stuck with this pair for the next few years in this pretend European legislature, the best course is to stop advertising them. The BBC in particular cannot let a day go by without giving them publicity. The police should be ordered to put an immediate halt to the violent attacks on Griffin whenever he pokes his nose above the parapet. One glance at these thugs shows them to be the same old Trotskyite rabble who have infested British politics for a generation: the same gang who used to shout down Denis Healey during Labour's deputy leadership contest.
Their latest stunt is to offer £200 to anyone who throws Indian food at Griffin. Masterminded by the subversive Socialist Workers Party, they cluster around every controversial issue like maggots on rotten meat. They were behind the anti-police campaign after the shooting of the young Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes and they ran the Respect Party which put George Galloway into Parliament until he quarrelled with them. The BNP's success is music to their ears.
You will not see them standing for election because they know the voters have no time for them. So they operate like parasites. Their biggest success was setting up the Anti-Nazi League, which was just a SWP front but managed to fool many well-intentioned people.
Now they see the BNP as their next big chance. By inflicting damage on the Labour Party with their "entryism", they are a bigger menace than the BNP ever could be. They are the mirror image of the BNP. A plague on both their houses.
WHAT a strange mixture Peter Mandelson is. At one time, his name was synonymous with shady dealings. Two resignations: the Hinduja affair, the mortgage scandal, and a flair for mendacity. Whenever his star began to rise, trouble ensued. He seemed to have a remarkable capacity for self-destruction.
Yet, whenever he got the chance in office, he proved himself a talented Minister. The Department of Trade and Industry said he was their best ever. He then proved himself an effective Northern Ireland Secretary: there was a reminder of his time there in the news last week. The Omagh bombing, even by Ulster standards, was an obscenity. A splinter group, the Real IRA, planted a massive bomb in the main street of the city and gave misleading details which ensured that people who thought they were being led to safety were moving nearer to the bomb. Dozens were slaughtered and maimed, most of them Catholics. Botched police investigations led nowhere. The men responsible
were identified and named in TV documentaries but nothing happened. When the relatives tried to bring a civil case against the Real IRA, they had no money: the accused men were given legal aid but it was denied to the bereaved relatives.
Mandelson threw his weight behind them. But then he left office and the relatives thought that was the end of his involvement. Not so. Even after he had left Northern Ireland, he continued to work behind the scenes until legal aid was granted. Last week, after 11 years, the relatives finally won the right to sue for damages. Mandelson has not sought publicity for his part in this search for justice, but he deserves credit.
HAVING plunged the country into an ocean of debt, Labour is now busy planning how to spend billions it doesn't have, with the NHS at the centre of the self-delusion. In the Commons last week, the two sides were arguing the toss like bald-headed men fighting over a comb.
As far as Labour politicians are concerned, the NHS isn't really about treating the sick: it is to make the Government look good – even at the expense of patient care. Its other purpose is to provide jobs for managers – in the past five years, the number of senior managers went up by 62 per cent. Listen to this cardiac surgeon: "We have more people directly or indirectly scrutinising cardiac surgeons than there are cardiac surgeons. We even have people scrutinising how we react to being scrutinised."
The NHS is bankrupt but no one will admit it. Despite all the billions poured in, NHS productivity under Labour has fallen by four per cent. It needs another £10bn from the taxpayer to survive in three years' time; £500m has been cut from hospital building. But don't mention such ugly facts: there is an election on the way.
