Brit Bombers ....

The Israelis say that the suicide bomber who killed three people in Tel Aviv was British - and they're looking for another Brit who may have been his accomplice. Is Jeremy Hardy still in the country ? Hardy was the subject of a sycophantic BBC R5 Simon Mayo interview last week, in which he said that the Palestinians didn't really want to drive the Jews into the sea. OK, he admitted, they talk about it, they sing and write poems about it, they teach the children about it, but 'it's really just hot air'. Simon gave him a typically easy ride - introducing him as 'the man who stood up to the Israeli Army'.

Pundits - and politicians - attitudes to the BNP fall into two categories. One - the 'they're trying to tell us something' school - say that voters concerns are valid and must be addressed. David Blunkett is the exemplar of this view - though his idea of addressing voter concerns is the soundbite and the 'initiative' - which will either quietly be forgotten or overturned in the courts. The second is the 'no platform for fascists' view, held by most on the Left - that addressing voter concern is 'playing the BNPs game' and 'pandering to racism'.

Johann Hari falls well into the left category in yesterday's Indie, judging by the first paragraph - does anyone know what the rest of the argument is ?

Between the Tory party, so guilt-stricken that they disowned John Townsend for unexceptional (if not terribly historically accurate) remarks, and the BNP is a vast swathe of political territory which the Tories have abandoned and which the new friendly BNP is colonising fast. If PR was introduced tomorrow I think they'd get 20% of the vote - because people reason that if the main parties all hate them, they MUST be doing something right. And for the white working class a BNP vote wouldn't stick in the craw as a Tory vote would. But I'm grateful to the Weekly Worker for a link to a truly creepy BNP document buried in their site. As someone who loves the Brits (and particularly the English) for their culture, or what remains of it, rather than their genes, I find their argument that with the wrong stock you can NEVER be a Brit quite dreadful. I know children with one foreign-born parent who are more British than most natives, and have been brought up in the culture. And my own father was not born British. To quote Churchill 'what is the use of being against a man simply because of his birth ? How can any man help how he is born ?'

Of course Churchill had a foreign parent !

I don't believe the British people would actually follow a race-based programme ....

Update - Jeremy Hardy appears to be innocent on this one .....