The right grows fat on fear. Why do we keep on feeding it?
Right now, the liberal left is like a punch drunk boxer with one hand behind his back ...
Blazing Saddles lets you know exactly what it’s about in the very first scene. You see who the good guys are, who the smart ones are, and who the blinkered idiots will be.
A gang of black rail-workers are laying track when two white overseers ride up, complaining that the men look too morose and suggest that they sing a song.
The workers oblige with a dead-pan cocktail-party number—Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You. The overseers stop them, of course, and insist on Camptown Ladies instead.
Just in case anyone has missed the point, Slim Pickens sends two of the workers to free a hand-cart stuck in the mud.
They discover quicksand.
To put it another way, they discover they’re sinking in it. Pickens throws a rope—solely to save the cart. One of the workers, Bart, finally lifts a shovel and smacks him on the back of the head.
In 1874 that would have earned more than just a whipping.
Sometimes a man simply has to act, consequences be damned.
Our political and media class could use that kind of courage and clarity.
This country today is run by people who trade self-respect for temporary safety, wilting at the mere threat of a social-media pile-on while casual bigotry and shambling hatred wander free. They deserve neither safety nor respect.
Polling after polling shows the public backs left-wing ideas: redistributing wealth, renationalising key industries, regulating social media, taking serious climate action. Evidence comes from outfits across the spectrum—left, centre, even a few on the right.
We have the facts.
We have the moral case.
We have a clear purpose.
We possess more tools to spread, uplift and inspire than at any point in human history.
Without courage, clarity and the will to use those tools—without getting right up in the enemy’s ugly little face—none of it matters.
Instead, liberals and progressives bicker, tearing lumps out of each other over issues which, under a far-right government, would be as worthless as the pesetas still rattling in the backs of British kitchen drawers.
Meanwhile our opponents laugh. They sit there like pub bullies watching a group of nerds fight over rules in a game they are about to lose anyway.
The British centre-left now resembles a boxer who insists on fighting an inferior opponent with one hand tied behind his back—then refuses to free the other even as he staggers, bruised and exhausted, against the ropes.
For years it has tried to duck the fight. Too late. We’re already in one, one knee in the dirt, getting the absolute shit kicked out of us.
Here’s the grotesque part.
Confronting Russia, our leaders talk of moral choices, character and tough decisions—Israel somehow slips that rhetoric, but that’s a rant for another day. They summon outrage at Putin, yet fall silent when Trump looms.
Keir Starmer bangs on about defending Europe from the Kremlin yet never suggests Trump’s fantasies—snatching Greenland, grabbing the Panama Canal—might threaten the post-1945 order just as much, and perhaps even more.
Why? Because Trump has surrogates here—people the establishment dare not anger. These same patriots sermonise about morality abroad while vowing to treat refugees at home like prisoners in Putin’s jails. Those who claim to be on the centre-left trade barbs over who can outdo the other in inhumanity.
Once upon a time a far-right chancer had to win power to change a country. Now two by-elections and a polling spike suffice, because the so-called liberal left falls over itself to enact his agenda, egged on by the Tony Blair Institute’s assertion that the best way to stop far-right ideas from dominating the country is to remake the country around far right ideas.
Before it mastered dog-whistles, the far right called its enemies—Jews, communists, whoever—vermin. Nye Bevan once labelled Tories “lower than vermin” and was pilloried. The modern far right deserve the tag.
They’ll resent the metaphor; too bad.
They’ll hate the next bit even more.
Britain has become a nation that feeds the rats. Any pest-controller would glance at our rubbish-strewn political yard and say, “You’ve got an infestation because you keep feeding the rats.” If we want fewer rats, we have to stop feeding them. Yet every day the media wheels out a banquet.
Toxic ideas multiply because we toss them scraps. They squeak and we scurry to the kitchen for more. Soon the garden is crawling and we’ve nothing left to fill their bellies. Guess what happens next.
The problem must be named. The vermin must be called what they are. The dregs of the far-right must not be pandered to any longer. They must be aggressively shouted down and dealt with.
I’m not interested in “understanding” their voters or “responding” to their so-called concerns. The far-right claim to speak for “ordinary people”. They merely recycle a tissue of lies. They aren’t throwing rope to rescue the downtrodden; they just want to save the hand-cart. Many are as dense as the proverbial box of rocks—exactly the sort who’d queue for hours at a toll-booth in the middle of the desert before riding into a cardboard town, whooping with glee.
Yet these yokels and shit-kickers set our political weather.
Have we no self-respect? Where’s our civic sense that says outright lies deserve no platform and the “views” built on them merit no respect? Why don’t we call them what they are and fight on our terms for once?
Appeasement is forever invoked in foreign policy.
What, then, is it when the entire political and media class appeases fascists at home? Russia didn’t always look like this. Hungary wasn’t an autocracy until Orban made it one while cowards looked away. America wasn’t a lunatic court orbiting a lunatic king until people started kowtowing to the bigot and his bigotry.
They live with those consequences and so will we unless we show some nerve. This is a moral test, and we are flunking it.
We’re in a shit state.
It’s time to stop pretending a few more crumbs will pacify the rats. Every concession breeds more vermin. We could clear the square: legislate, regulate, re-weaponise the tools the far right hijacked—if we had the will.
I am not counselling despair. I refuse to countenance defeat. This is not a losing battle we’re in. We’re losing because we haven’t properly joined the battle.
Ironically, it was Trump who reminded us where real power lies when he so quickly brought Elon Musk to heel.
Power still lies in the institutions and in a government’s will to use the instruments of the state. In a scrap between a social-media billionaire and a president, the president wins, hands down. Platforms swagger only until governments remember they exist at the mercy of regulators.
The current order is under attack all day, every day. Hatred is monetised, division normalised. The US is already paying the price. It may be too late for America to heal without a catastrophe grim enough to jolt it back to sanity.
We still have a chance, but only if we stop acting as though the fight can be dodged. Once you’re being punched, you’re in the fight. We’re being punched all over the shop. Two options remain: cower and take your beating, knowing worse is to come, or free the other arm and hammer these people back across the ring.
Yes, this is a bad place. There are no nice choices. Whichever choice we make is going to come with some drama.
So, pick up a shovel and whilst you turn it in your hands remember it can dig—or you can use it to turn someone’s lights out. I’m not advocating violence. Just courage. These people are simple minded fools, and once you confront them and expose their idiocy, and once you stop pretending that their lies are legitimate points to debate you’ve got all the bludgeon you’ll ever need, if you’ve the guts to face the consequences. There will be consequences, of course, cause they don’t half squeal when things don’t go their way.
They absolutely will try to shout you down. But all across the world, every single day, people put up with a lot worse than that.
If we’ve got the guts to drown out the noise, we might yet save our democracy and our society, and we bloody need to start soon, because right now we’re on what the late, great Bill Paxton once called “the express elevator to hell” ... and it’s going down.
I’d like to get off before it reaches bottom.