Nick Cohen

Blood is central to the myths British people tell themselves. One of the many consequences of the contaminated blood scandal is that it may blow those myths apart. For if this scandal can make us face the reality of how badly we are governed, and indeed how selfishly we govern ourselves, then some good may come from so much needless suffering. The scandal began in the 1970s. At the start of that decade, Richard Titmuss, the great social democratic theorist, placed blood at the centre of the justification for the British welfare state with an argument that complacent we Brits could not help but feel reflected rather well on us. The NHS was not just morally superior to the greedy privatised US health system, Titmuss said. It was more efficient too.

Labour people are used to defeat. Before every election they wonder if the Tories will defy expectations. Real votes are not the same as opinion polls, after all, they say. And yet ever since Boris Johnson broke his own lockdown rules, disastrous performances for the Tories in opinion polls have been replicated by disastrous results in real elections. We are only beginning to grasp the consequences of an inevitable Tory defeat. Barring divine intervention by a Tory god, Labour will win the next election Not all the results of the 2024 local elections are in by any means, but come on now. At the time of writing, Labour has taken the Blackpool South parliamentary seat. Conservative support collapsed by 32 per cent.  This was not a one off.

The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not been settled. No one can pretend they do not know who the loudmouthed old ham really is after all this time. Just before Muslim voters propelled him to victory, Galloway received the endorsement of none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP).

Fascism begins with political violence on the streets. In 1922, Benito Mussolini ordered his supporters to march on Rome and threaten to overthrow the democratic government. In the early 1930s gangs of Nazis and communists fought for control of Berlin’s streets. In 1999, a mysterious bombing campaign, that killed dozens of people and destroyed apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk, allowed Vladimir Putin to take power by posing as a strongman who could keep Russians safe. The UK is experiencing its own version of fascistic violence. As befits the modesty of this country we have a quintessentially British version of it. Nothing too grand or showy is on display. Nevertheless, violence and the threat of violence is successfully perverting the course of democratic life.

It is a measure of how conspiracy theories have triumphed in the darkest corners of the left that, when the Labour candidate for Rochdale started banging on about Jews, his rivals in the George Galloway campaign thought he was making a smart political move.  Azhar Ali had been taped putting forward two anti-Jewish fantasies. In these paranoid circumstances, Galloway and his supporters think his victory is inevitable First, he declared that the Israeli state had allowed Hamas to massacre Jews. Ali was not quite engaged in the modern equivalent of holocaust denial – that would have meant pretending the massacres never happened.

On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season. ‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping’, they chanted, as police stood by to make sure the protests did not turn violent. ‘Zara is enabling genocide’, their placards read. Quite what they wanted bargain hunters to do about the Israeli forces bombing the Gaza Strip, they never said. Lobby their MPs? Politicians are on their Christmas holidays. Join the Palestinian armed struggle? It was unclear whether the shopping centre had a Hamas recruitment office. But on one point the demonstrators were clear: no one should be buying from Zara.

It’s a little too easy to dismiss the huge Labour rebellion on the Israel-Hamas war last night as ‘virtue signalling’. No one can deny that politicians were striking poses. A party, not in government, tearing itself apart about a conflict that does not involve the UK, over policy recommendations which all the combatants will ignore, in the unlikely event that they care enough about the British Labour party to even notice the vote in the first place.  In an interview that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas member, praised the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, and vowed that his forces would massacre again and again because Israel ‘must be finished’. There’s little hope of him listening to calls for peace.

It's not often that Brits can say that the US is behind the UK. But in understanding the dynamic between the successors to the old socialist left and radical Islam, US thinkers have years of catching up to do. It is not as if American commentators are wrong or uninteresting, it is just that, unlike their counterparts in Europe, they have not begun to come to terms with the Islamisation of the worst strains of left-wing politics, and the wider consequences for the progressive cause. Moderates in the US were pushed into taking a stand after the glorification of murder at a demonstration organised by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America on 8 October. Mark that date.

Visibly desperate Conservatives are counting on their opposition to the left’s cultural revolution to save them, if not from defeat, then at least from annihilation.  The party’s deputy chair Lee Anderson forecasts that a ‘mix of culture wars and trans debate’ would be ‘at the heart’ of the party’s coming election campaign. You only need to listen to Tory ministers or read the Tory press to see that plan being followed. Left-leaning commentators have a convincing response which boils down to a simple exclamation of, ‘who the hell are you trying to kid?’ As by-election results show, the electorate will punish the Conservatives for 14 years of national decline with the anger of a subject population turning on an occupying army.

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, 'woke' is now a synonym for 'anything I can’t abide'. Overuse has made the insult meaningless. On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call 'woke' is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done. “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,' cried the actress, Kathy Burke. 'If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke.