Y es, the BNP is unpleasant and hate-filled. But why does
everyone feel the need to say it so much? Or rather, why don’t people say it about all the other hate-filled organisations in this country, as well as about the BNP? The Socialist Workers Party is hate-filled; so is Respect, so is Hizb ut-Tahrir, so is Sinn Fein, so are some in Greenpeace and some in Ukip, and so is John Prescott in relation to field sports and Ken Livingstone in relation to Israel, America and Britain’s imperial past. The BNP, like the now resurgent old Labour party, finds the basis of its support in resentment. Old Labour expresses that resentment in terms of class, the BNP more in terms of race. But I don’t see a big moral difference between someone who wants to destroy the rich by tax and the confiscation of land, and someone who wants the compulsory repatriation of Pakistanis. Both make hatred their ruling passion, both in the name of fairness to a particular section of the downtrodden. Gordon Brown attacks David Cameron simply for being an Old Etonian, just as Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, attacks people simply for being Muslim. It is a real merit of Tony Blair that he does not use the language of hatred in politics. This helps explain why his party directs its large reserves of hatred at him.
Although Nick Griffin went to Cambridge, one is unlikely, in educated middle-class circles, to have friends who vote for the BNP. The only person I have ever known who said he did so was the late Alan Clark. While he was a Conservative minister, he told me that he voted for the National Front (as it was then called) at council elections. I never knew whether or not to believe this. Alan’s desire to shock was so great that it frequently overthrew the truth. Besides, voting BNP would have been inconsistent with his stated views. I once asked him if he minded being labelled a fascist. ‘Yes, I bloody well do,’ he said. ‘Fascists are shopkeepers who look after their dividends. I’m a Nazi.’ The words ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ and ‘romance’ don’t particularly go together. At 80, as at 40 or 60, the Queen stands for more solid virtues. Yet romance there is, simultaneously concealed and expressed in the forms of constitutional monarchy. She was anointed at her coronation ‘as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet’ (though Zadok/Nathan took the form of Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and ex-headmaster of Repton, who pronounced this phrase). Another aspect of the romance is her horsemanship. In dictators, riding horses is almost always absurd and vainglorious. When he wanted a victory parade after the end of the second world war, Stalin wanted to take the review on horseback, even though he couldn’t ride. The appropriate white Arab stallion was supplied, and Stalin organised secret lessons but was thrown by the horse’s rearing as soon as he first mounted. ‘Let Zhukov take the parade,’ he said sourly. ‘He’s a cavalryman.’ Until well into her sixties, however, the Queen rode side-saddle down the Mall for Trooping the Colour every year, on her horse Burmese. In 1981, when a lunatic fired blanks at her, she stayed on and was angry only with the two Household Cavalrymen who rode up to protect her. ‘Those two idiots came up right behind me,’ she said afterwards, ‘and asked if I was all right. I said, “I was until you came — you’re upsetting my horse!”’ In some dreary, distant, republican future, how glorious it will seem that the sovereign rode so beautifully, and so exposed, among her Guards.
Nowadays, of course, we are all allowed to mock the Queen. The only figure in our constitution we must take wholly seriously is James Naughtie. There occasionally comes a moment when someone he is interviewing on the Today programme is not aware of this rule and commits an act of lese-majesty. This happened on Monday when a BNP spokesman called the Naughtie a ‘liberal’. ‘You have no idea what my political views are,’ said the great man, rather in the tone that Princess Margaret used to say, ‘Are you referring to the Queen?’ if anyone spoke of ‘your sister’. As Bagehot must have pointed out somewhere, the Naughtie can constitutionally have no views of his own, and acts only on the advice of his ministers (or ‘researchers’, as they are called). True, the Naughtie clearly believes that anyone right-wing (Bush, Thatcher, Sharon, Tebbit) is morally defective, but in the kingdom of Broadcasting House this is not a view, but a fact.
The Daily Telegraph reports that half the arable farmland in the east of the country must be converted to grass within six years to avoid pollution fines at the hands of the European Court. There are too many nitrates affecting water quality, says the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service. I assume that the economic effects of this change will be harsh, but a possible solution occurs. If you look at the map of foxhunts in England, you will see that all rural areas from the Wash southwards are hunted, except for parts of south Lincolnshire, large bits of Suffolk, and most of Norfolk. The chief reason for this is the wide tracts of fertile plough, inimical to hunting and immensely valuable to the owners. If the very existence of such land becomes criminal, then what reverts to grass should also revert to hunting. Admittedly, hunting is criminal, too, but everyone wants Green land-use now, and no activity is Greener than the chase.
Muriel Spark, who died last week, had a high and wholly justified opinion of her own merit as a novelist. No one guarded her rights more closely than she. When the writer Claudia FitzHerbert was in her first year at Oxford, she helped put on a theatrical version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Presuming on her family’s friendship with Muriel Spark (Claudia’s grandfather, Evelyn Waugh, was an early supporter of her work), Claudia promised her friends that she would get her to waive the copyright. She went to stay with friends in Tuscany at Christmas, and there met the author. Mrs Spark was all smiles until Claudia mentioned the copyright. Her face froze: ‘Speak to my agent,’ she ordered. Back in Oxford, Claudia panicked and pretended that everything was sorted out. But Muriel Spark had not forgotten, and her agent pursued the poor undergraduates for the £50 that they could ill afford.
Asmall Americanisation of the English language has just taken place. People in the media now ‘battle’ things (floods, demons, prejudice) instead of battling with them. Other shifts from the intransitive to the transitive are ‘debate’ (‘Blair debated Cameron’) and ‘protest’ (‘students protest fees’).
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