Invasion of the Party Snatchers

You’ll have seen the pictures by now. The broken glass of the Conservative Party’s HQ building in central London, the outnumbered and frankly passive police, the ring of cameramen circled round the still remaining shards of glass as yet another plump-faced student mollycoddled in a scarf steps up for his photo op kicking in a bit of broken glass.

Yes, just like when they mispronounce wines and give each other air kisses, the English middle-classes are at it again, imitating the French -- all the result of some terrible inferiority complex that Agincourt, Waterloo, the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of North America, the creation of the British Empire, and the Beatles vs. Johnny Hallyday have done nothing to dispel.

But the student riot in London is also the latest example of how the old hard Left manages to keep breathing a little oxygen, in particular the Socialist Worker’s Party. (Yes, I used the singular possessive because I’m sure there can only be one genuine worker in the entire party, the chap who industriously churns out such alliterative masterpieces as the widely distributed “F**k Fees” placard.)

Being hard Left, they are, of course, a tiny minority of people with rather disgusting psychological habits, reviled and ignored by the general public if voting statistics are anything to go by -- and they are. Their true milieu and political ecosystem is the world of the 1930s, but since that swamp has gradually dried out into a desert, they have shrunk to irrelevance. Rather than doing things in their own name, and finding the proverbial two men and a dog called “Trotsky” in attendance, the SWP, like other small hard Left groups, has evolved into a political parasite, trawling the streets of Britain’s cosmopolitan microcosm like a proverbial Bad Samaritan looking for any angst out there so that they can latch onto it and feel the warmth that has long since departed their own movement.

Rather than honestly representing the interests of Britain’s proles as you would expect from their trade description, the SWP spend all their time changing their name and infiltrating or merging themselves in other movements that have a one-issue focus (anti-poll tax, anti-nuclear, anti-war, anti-student fees, etc.) or that are essentially identity based, (pro-Palestinians, Muslims, asylum seekers, “affirmative action” junkies, etc.).

The SWP never engages with the public in its true colours, but rather in one of its many shape-shifting guises, be it Unite Against Fascism (supported by David Cameron), CND, Stop the War Coalition, The Respect Party, or some other umbrella/ front group. Like the aliens in the old sci-fi movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the idea is to tunnel in and start running things in someone else’s skin. The student fees demo is just the last in a long line of causes to find itself carrying this political version of lice.

Prepped by their Marxist indoctrination, the intention of the hard leftists is always to encourage as much chaos and violence as possible. Oddly this is the same musty blueprint that the German and Italian communists followed to help the Fascists and Nazis gain power back in the day. But chaos for the hard Left is always “good.” So, egging on impressionable middle-class kids to punch a policewoman or throw a fire extinguisher from the top of a high building onto a crowd below is all part of the bigger plan.

The naïve über-notion/ fantasy driving the SWP and its ilk is that once they get a foot in the door of these groups, causes, and demonstrations, they can then be steered away into the rail yard of 1930s socialism and coupled up to make Trotsky’s Death Train, complete with leather-clad guards, machine guns, and a death list a mile long. The only problem is lice like this aren’t very good at changing the switches.

Very few of the SWP’s members could even engage in politics (and I use the term extremely loosely) if they didn’t have publicly financed sinecures. For example, an embarrassingly high proportion of their members are university lecturers in superfluous academic areas -- humanities, sociology, etc. -- so present-day economic hardship, rather than promising a return to their glory days of the 1930s, is likely to see the slime pools from which they emerge dry up even more.