Political violence has always been Leftist. Norman Tebbit, Telegraph.
I know that some readers may well think that I am fixated upon the importance of language. Perhaps that is so, but since we communicate and influence each other primarily through oral and written words, language is clearly important in shaping a society.
So despair that we have allowed the Left in politics to so easily label any one outside their ranks as a "Right wing extremist". A good recent example is that of Mr Darren Osborne who was recently convicted of the murder of a Muslim man outside the Finsbury Park Mosque.
Osborne seems to be a mentally unstable man whose views, if any, on the role of the state in the economy, education policy, taxation or welfare are not known.
Why therefore has he been labelled, even in the right of centre media, as "extreme Right-wing"?
I think some of this goes back to the 1940s when it was made easier for the Labour Party to join Churchill's Conservatives in the wartime coalition government which fought Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi for short) regime by portraying the latter as Right-wing. That became even more convenient when Hitler broke his friendship pact with the Soviet Union by invading Russia, which brought Stalin's murderous Communist regime into the war on the same side as the Western democracies.
There could be no such excuse 70 years later. Yet on May 28, 2010 The Guardian described the English Defence League as "the most significant far Right movement in the United Kingdom since the National Front in the 1970s". It made no examination of its policies on taxation, the economy, education or welfare.
The British National Front was first established by Oswald Mosley who, having original been elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament, swung to the Left, defected to Labour and served in the Labour government. He resigned to establish first The New Party then the British Union of Fascists, which he made plain was aligned on the Left of politics alongside Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists. The economic policies of that National Party, like all fascists, were firmly Left-wing, just as today's fascists are both politically Left-wing and inclined to violence.
In recent days we have seen the growth of violence from the Left to enforce the "no platforming" of those holding traditional views on many social issues or other views in conflict with the hard-Left Momentum faction within the Labour Party.
The balaclava-wearing thug seeking to silence that genuine Right-winger Mr Rees-Mogg when he was trying to speak at the University of the West of England at Bristol was typical of the Left-wingers who "no platform" those who hold liberal or conservative views.
I know of no "extreme Right" political party in this country, but I am concerned to see the Labour party moving further away from its roots into neo-Marxism.
