The Guardian reports on recent successes by Britain’s favourite mob of semiliterate fascists, the British National Party. Apparently, one BNP councillor had to be “taught what it meant to abstain” at a council meeting last week. Amusing, but there is no place for blatant smuggery when a wannabe politician like the BNP’s John West can claim that “refugees tried to sell me a lot of gold and then tried to rob me” – and be believed. The reason for the successes of the thug party is the same, in effect, as the reason the Swedes won’t be euro-ing for a while. General disbelief of anything “the government” or “politicians” say combined, paradoxically, with a weird trust in whatever extremists and mob-press editors say. Of course, the Heathrow security alert was nothing but spin! But – the Sun says asylum seekers are eating swans, so that must be true. (Incidentally, did their “police source” ever discover any evidence? Wasn’t that a single source, Ms Wade? Or did your man make it up out of whole cloth?)
Speaking of single sources, Sir Richard Dearlove’s appearance at the Hutton Inquiry – or non-appearance, as he was present only in voice – produced the weird conclusion that it’s quite alright for MI6 to believe the hearsay report of a single secret source and give it to the JIC, and put it in a dossier, and on the front page of the Evening Standard. But it’s unprofessional, evil, mendacious and (if you remember Conrad the Canadian’s letter to his own paper) the most serious threat to the state currently in existence for the BBC to report the concerns of a named single source who they had heard from many times in the past.
This is exactly it – the government has withdrawn into its own mental world, which the public sanely recognise as a compendium of nonsense – but they don’t extend this sane scepticism to the mental world of people like John West or Richard Littlejohn with their demon refugees and evil gays and public services that improve if you cut their budgets. God knows why.