People say to me that I stopped being left-wing because of 9/11. I didn't. I stopped being left-wing in a conventional sense because of the protests against the Iraq war. Tony Blair lost loads of support because of his decision in 2003—but he got me! He'd probably settle for keeping his old supporters but losing me. You saw all these fine people from the liberal Left in Britain march at the head of a demonstration led by George Galloway, a man who even then had saluted Saddam Hussein (the nearest thing you are likely to see in your lifetime to a classic genocidal national socialist tyrant), and the Socialist Workers Party, who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, who are now in power in Egypt and are changing that country. No one said a word about these things. People on the Left, whom Anthony is referring to as supporting the new liberalism, have adopted pernicious slogans about Jews.

There is a borderless Left, on the margins of British politics. You cannot be a Conservative and cut a deal with the BNP. You can't form an alliance like this. If it was found that a Conservative Cabinet member had even been in the BNP in his youth, all hell would break loose: I guarantee it. There is a border, a border you can't cross. There is no border between the far-Left and the mainstream. Paul Berman, a wonderful American writer, wrote a book about the strange way the 1968 generation has gone. He has a lovely description about old, almost certainly Jewish, garment workers' union members going to warn radicals, who were starting the 1960s movement, that these comrades should have nothing to with Communism. And of course these young students would cry, what do all these all old men and women know? We should start blacklisting people like McCar-thy has been doing, and start saying no to Communism? Of course they weren't going to start doing that. These were New York socialists. 

The older socialists knew one thing. Let a bit of lightning flash across society, and all these reasonable, sensible people would go off and out-Stalin Stalin. That can happen on the Left, and that can happen in Europe. I get this all the time, with people saying, Nick, surely you are tired of talking about George Galloway or the SWP. I say, if I were, I wouldn't bother.

There are some who, by acquiescing, go along with Islamists who want to kill homosexuals, kill Jews, and kill any Muslim who wants to change their religion or abandon religion, or set up a dictatorial, inquisitorial state. Going along with people like that used to be called being "clerical fascists", to use very old-fashioned left-wing jargon, that was applied to regimes like Franco's in Spain.

For this kind of toleration to then infect the mainstream: that is what worries me most now, when it happens. It doesn't happen so much now—maybe a bit of infection has happened in the US, with the Tea Party—but not in Britain. It is the ability of extremists to zoom into the mainstream, and then when the crisis passes, they will appear mainstream and respectable. We must stop this.