Fake news: Attempts to link Paul Nuttall with EDL after supporter posts selfie with him on Facebook

The left wing media are beside themselves with excitement after finding a picture of an EDL supporter standing next to Paul Nuttall on Facebook.

Nuttall is mobbed by supporters wherever he goes looking for selfies and a party spokesman has explained that hundreds of people queued to have their picture taken with him in Stoke and nobody had a clue who the EDL supporter was.

That hasn't stopped left wing rags including the Liverpool Echo, Guardian and Mirror from trying to associate him with the group that UKIP proscribed many years ago.

Nor did it stop the Labour MP for Wirral South, Alison McGovern, from trying to make political capital out of it which is a pretty stupid thing to do when her own leader has been pictured with despots and terrorists many times over the years. There is a world of difference between posing for a selfie with a racist who you don't know is a racist and posing for pictures with convicted IRA terrorists whilst describing them as freedom fighters and campaigning to get them released from prison so they can go out murdering again.

UKIP MEP and Dudley councillor calls for business as usual during EDL/UAF protest

West Midlands MEP and Dudley councillor, Bill Etheridge, has called for business as usual tomorrow as up to 2,000 EDL supporters and anti-fascist thugs descend on the town.

Dudley has been the scene of a number of EDL protests and violent counter protests and the planned mega-mosque in Dudley has attracted widespread criticism, not least from UKIP who have led the peaceful protest against it.

Cllr Etheridge said:

We have asked people not to go to the EDL demonstration as it is just self gratification on the group's part.

The Crumbling Pillars of the Political Class

Our good friend Dan Hannan is at it yet again, exhorting some kind of pact or merger between UKIP and the Tories.

The obvious unworldliness of it hardly bears examination:  exactly how, after slandering UKIP in the most offensive terms as 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', would Cameron explain away a pact without it being depicted as a totally humiliating climbdown? And wouldn't such a pact risk - horror of horrors - 'contaminating' the Tory brand amongst Dave's  achingly fashionable friends? More to the point, why would UKIP want to risk being contaminated by the taint of Toryism?

Be that as it may, Hannan's thinking is based on a flawed analysis, namely that the emerging split in the Right of British politics (essentially the de-merging of the classical Liberal and Tory traditions) would give the Left a more or less permanent monopoly on power.

This analysis wholly ignores the likely effect the eclipse of Toryism would have on the Left of British politics, namely the collapse of the anti-Tory tribal Labour vote.

The Right like to rant and rail that the Tories have betrayed their core constituency - and so they have - but that is nothing to the betrayal that the Labour Party has enacted on the indigenous working class. It was once famously said of the  Labour Party that it  'owed more to Methodism than it did to Marx', representing as it did socially conservative working class voters who believed in a measure of economic redistribution. Dominated as it now is by decidedly non-Methodist middle-class Guardianistas,  the Labour Party has followed a social agenda in recent years which could hardly be more inimical to working class interests, fuelling mass immigration, family breakdown and the destruction of national identity. Consequently a large section of what were once Labour's natural supporters simply support the party out of tribal hatred of the Tories, or fail to vote at all.

The journalist Peter Hitchens, no friend of UKIP, nevertheless came up with an outstanding metaphor to describe the current party political situation: he likened the Labour and Tory parties to a pair of crumbling pillars, each holding each other up by virtue of the hatred each set of core supporters had for the other.  Of the two pillars, the Labour Party is perhaps in the stronger position, having as a backstop the powerful vested interests of the public sector unions. Nonetheless, collapse of one pillar would inevitably lead to collapse of the other.

It is now possible to see the circumstances for such a collapse coming into view: if UKIP continue to chip away at Tory support to the extent that the Conservative Party loses the next general election badly, the perception may gain ground amongst working class supporters that a Tory majority government is no longer to be feared, with the result that a vote for the Labour Party is no longer essential.

Waiting in the wings to capitalise is the newly formed alliance between the sectarian English Defence League and British Freedom Party, standing on an unashamedly politically-incorrect, anti-Islamic, patriotic, pro-Christian platform which includes withdrawal from the European Union. Whatever one thinks of the EDL and BFP, they are not as heavily tarred with the charge of racism as the BNP is, and are thus more likely to make significant inroads into Labour's bedrock support.

As the situation in Europe deteriorates by the hour and it becomes clear that our rotten Political Class lack the inclination, the courage or the foresight to deal with what could rapidly spiral down into a truly catastrophic situation, we could be on the verge of the greatest re-alignment of British politics since the 'Strange Death of Liberal England' in the early 20th Century.

So, Dan, thank you all the same, but please don't ask again, as refusal often offends. In the not too distant future, marriage with you Tories would likely prove, in the words of Marshall Petain, "fusion with a corpse".

Britains most dangerous sectarian divide

Last night I managed to catch up with Channel 4's 'Proud and Prejudiced' documentary, about the bitter fermenting hatreds between militant Islamist's and the (largely but not exclusively) white working class in the town of Luton. Subsequently, these gave birth to the English Defence League (EDL), which has rapidly spread across the country.

For those such as myself who are interested in cultural issues the program was a disappointment. As might be expected neither side came out of the program with much glory and fully lived up to stereotype. The EDL and its leader, although when sober clearly highly articulate, came across overall as yobbish and immature;  the Islamist leader as a vain, ignorant self-publicist, 'raving on about Jihad', to use John Howard's memorable line.

There was no attempt to explore the reasons behind the rise of the worst sectarian  tensions  last seen in England for hundreds of years, and therefore no attempt to understand how such tensions could be dissolved. Instead, what we got was a purely factual narrative which ended on the palliative assurance that 'support for both groups had plateaued' during late 2011.

The program was highly illuminating in one way, however, albeit unintentionally.

It showed once again that the most dangerous cultural divide in this country is between the Metropolitan liberal elite and the rest of us.

Most people are well aware of some aspects of this divide: the inherited wealth and privilege of those holding most senior positions  in all the LibLabCon political  parties, in the legal profession and of course the media means our Establishment is woefully out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. Having known nothing but elite success all their lives and, in the case of many members of the Political Class never having had a proper job,  their life experience is often pitifully narrow. Consequently, although in many cases people of extremely high  intelligence, their ability is not matched by the wisdom most people accumulate along the way with all life's set backs and disappointments. In terms of politics, the result, of course, is poor policies born out of ignorance of how most folk live.

So far, so obvious. But what is, to my mind, much less understood is that these factors are much compounded by a cultural trait of the metropolitan liberal classes far more dangerous than mere ignorance of the lives of others: - their overweening narcissism.

Narcissism  has been a increasingly important part of liberal culture since the1960s, and anyone who has spent much time in metropolitan liberal circles can attest to what an enormously inflated sense of self-regard they tend to have for themselves. Indeed, one scientific study has shown that such groups have a signifcantly higher levels of the chemical dopamine, which stimulates feelings of high self-esteem.

But like any other chemical high, dopamine highs can be become addictive, and this leads to a pronounced metropolitan cultural tendency of incessant ego-masturbation. It is not going too far to say that many Metropolitan liberals are dopamine junkies, addicted to forever telling themselves and their friends just what great people they really are.

The political ramifications  are far more serious than is generally realised: mistakes in policy for wider society are not only made out of ignorance, though that is undoubtedly an important factor, but because policy choices are made on the basis of what "feels good". It is not only the case that hard choices are avoided because of cynical careerism, but also out of emotional and moral cowardice.

The result is that malign cultural trends in society are simply ignored, or at best, grudgingly acknowledged but not dwelt on, on the basis that if something doesn't make you feel good, it isn't really happening. Long before last summer's riots, for example, the liberal left laughed at the idea of 'feral' children. After the riots showed without doubt such children existed, there was a desperate attempt to blame the cause of the riots on material deprivation alone.  Such deprivation could, of course, be alleviated by more government spending, administered no doubt by nice metropolitan liberal people such as themselves.  On the Left in general, there was a total refusal to even countenance that the widespread breakdown in civil order may have had deeper cultural reasons such as family breakdown.

And that leads us back to Channel 4's 'Proud and Prejudiced': profoundly malign cultural trends in British society which the program should have examined are avoided, because such examination itself would prove to be unpleasant. Meanwhile, an increasingly alienated and disengaged electorate are forced to live with the consequences.

Because the people who are most 'Proud and Prejudiced' are the metropolitan liberals themselves.