Rants From A Small Island

OK, I think we've got a perfect illustration of the problem of living on a small island right here, and it has nothing to do with Bill Bryson's enormous fat hairy cornflake. Third place on the Guardian's capacious website was a story about Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former Labour politician and talk-show host and probable racist.

Kilroy performed a trick at the last European elections, where he won big for the UK Independence, by proving that famous people can be xenophobes too. He then threw a quite gigantic hissy fit and left the UKIP just as it was making real progress in its goal of forcing the UK out of the European Union by allying with all the EU rejectionist parties from elsewhere in Europe in the European parliament, while drawing salaries from the EU and eating croissants.

But Kilroy was probably just continuing his march rightwards, deciding that a narrow anti-EU focus would never satisfy his insatiable hatred of immigrants, which was what got him sacked from the BBC in the first place. Kilroy's new party is called Veritas, which means "truth", and which, we dare say, is meant to draw attention to all the lies the "normal" politicans are telling, but which really sounds like an unused name for a Blairite think-tank.

Anyway, according to the Guardian Kilroy became amusingly incoherent, as he strived to attain the purple-faced spluttering indignation of the Daily Mail-reader in the street. Essentially he thinks there is this special organic substance called "Britishness" which comes from within and has not been made up by the Hanoverians or Victorians in any way, and which must be protected from people with darker skins.

We've been here before, of course, and it only seems novel because the British insist that they are immune to fascism and racism. And indeed, most of the far-right parties usually thrive on the subconscious feeling amongst BNP voters and their ideological kin that they cannot be bad people, as the success of the ludicrous Cabbie manifesto demonstrates.

We're sure that in due course Kilroy will fizzle out without even so much as an Oswald Mosley moment. Maybe he will one day wake up and realise that by then his only real friends are extreme metal musicians. But for the time being, the man has been given a podium to spout this nonsense at the cameras rather than the front of a cab. If the media are going to collude with politicans in preventing the public from hearing the voices of the pig-ignorant men in the street, can they please not make an exception for their orange-faced spiritual leader, slow news day or no.