Quote of the day 6th October 2018

"When I listen to modern Labour supporters, I keep remembering Destiny, David Edgar’s play from 1976. Destiny is set during a by-election in a West Midlands town close to Enoch Powell’s Wolverhampton.

A neo-fascist leader, inspired by the National Front types of the time, instructs his candidate that it is not good enough to tell voters that speculators and wreckers are destroying Britain: he has to say that they are Jewish speculators and wreckers.

Then in a line that has stayed with me since I was a teenager, the fascist leader asks the candidate what he would say if a voter told him that immigrants were just as British as he was. The candidate promptly gives the approved answer:
‘Just because a cat is born in a kipper box it doesn’t make it a kipper.’

It is a sign of how deep the rot has penetrated that the modern echo of the sentiment that, even if they live here, even if they and their parents and grandparents were born here, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants can never be truly British, comes not from a fascist or a gin-soaked Tory, but from Jeremy Corbyn.

He said of Jews, who had argued against him at a meeting in Parliament, that despite ‘having lived in this country for a very long time – probably all their lives – they don’t understand English irony’."

(Nick Cohen, in a Spectator review which you can read here.)

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