It's All About Being Virtuous

It Starts With Screeching Lefties Calling Us Nazis... 

It Ends in a Police State


Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday


I am sick of the self-righteousness of the Left. Their nasty demonstrations about climate change, and their screeches of ‘Nazi!’ at any opponent, are not just wrong, but warnings of a police state to come.

When they gum up London, stopping other people getting to work or going home, with beatific smirks on their faces, they are punishing us for not being as fanatical as they are or – worse – not even agreeing with them.

Their protests are not against the Government, which long ago caved in to the Green fanatics, and goes around blowing up perfectly good coal-fired power stations to please them. They are against us, for not being keen enough on their intolerant cult.

When they gum up London, stopping other people getting to work or going home, with beatific smirks on their faces, they are punishing us for not being as fanatical as they are or – worse – not even agreeing with them .



Pictured, climate activists at an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in Parliament Square, London.

They aren’t as stupid as they look. They know that if their policies are adopted we will be reduced to severe poverty, living cold, dark and limited lives as the power fails and half the transport system packs up.  Many of them will admit in private that, if they are by any chance right and the world is really doomed, the measures they keep calling for will not in fact save us. This is perfectly true. China’s huge coal-burning economic expansion completely cancels out all the economy-destroying measures this country has ever taken to reduce its carbon footprint.

They don’t care. Like every other ‘End of the World is at hand’ cult, they yearn for the wrath to come and want to see non-believers suffer. They think their self-assessed goodness will save them, while the rest of us deservedly drown, or are perhaps eaten by polar bears fleeing ever southwards.

It is all about being virtuous, and better than other people, so they can look down on them.
The same goes for ridiculous figures such as the Labour MP David Lammy, who has managed to suggest that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his (admittedly irritating) faction are like the Nazis.

And for the ludicrous senior lawyer – an actual QC, for what that is worth these days – who recently suggested that, because I did not believe the killer of Jo Cox MP was a political assassin, but crazy, that I might make the same excuse for the Nazi leadership.

I have strong family reasons for finding this suggestion particularly repellent. I’ll be brief, and say that the Nazis would have murdered my mother if they had got hold of her, and that my father repeatedly risked his life in freezing, mountainous seas, menaced by U-boats and within range of land-based German bombers, in the war against Hitler. No doubt fashionable QCs fight harder against Nazism all the time, but I still think my father’s stint on the convoys was a reasonable contribution, and I’m proud of it.

But I have broader reasons too. I am sick to the teeth of the Left suggesting that freedom-loving, patriotic conservatives are secret Nazis, or indeed have anything in common with them.

Actually, it’s all the other way. It is the Left which has the nasty connections and the sordid record of compromise with evil. They have never really managed to denounce the Soviet dictatorship. They have never properly recognised the extent of Stalin’s mass-murder. They still, for instance, revere the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who said the USSR’s murder of millions would have been justified if it had produced the promised paradise, and seems not to have noticed that Stalin, as well as Hitler, invaded his neighbours.

Hobsbawm was made a ‘Companion of Honour’ by the supposedly moderate Anthony Blair, and is the subject of a recent admiring biography by a prominent Leftist academic, widely and kindly reviewed by the liberal elite.

In my years as a labour correspondent I also couldn’t help noticing the high-level multiple penetration of the Labour Party and the unions by active, hard-line communists, at a time when the Kremlin was locking up dissidents in harsh camps in the Urals and the British Communist Party was receiving large cash subsidies from Moscow, bundles of used tenners handed over secretly in plastic bags.

They are not better than the rest of us. They just think they are. And if you’re wondering why the police have been so useless in acting against these modish self-canonised saints – well, it is time you realised that the police are no longer on our side. They’re with the Lefties, skateboards and all. And one day they’ll probably arrest me for saying that.