Kelly’s Eye

IN THE mid-1980s, as a young reporter on my first newspaper in York, I was once jostled by a couple of shaven-headed thugs straight from central casting when I attempted to question the then British National Party leader John Tyndall.

They and others had pitched up on the pretext of paying their respects at the local cenotaph, but their real intent, as ever, was provocative: a limp-flagged cavalcade of pinch-faced men, nursing every grievance that might hide their own inadequacies.

Despite a few scuffles with a largely student group of protesters, Tyndall’s marching goons otherwise met with nothing but either utter indifference or withering derision. Such has always been the amused and level-headed British response to homegrown halfwits with a jackboot fixation. Even at the height of economic deprivation, and at a time when elsewhere in Europe they were the idols of adoring mass rallies and voted into power, in this country any fascists seeking office met only lost deposits and gleeful ridicule.

It’s also why BBC One’s new Sunday drama Ridley Road rings so false, with its implication that the tawdry little National Socialist Movement of 1960s Britain ever threatened to win popular support. Rather, it exposes the progressive left middle-class contempt – always patronisingly dressed up as concern – for the mass of people.This is a belief that, unless told what to do by their moral superiors, the majority can never be trusted from falling under the spell of some demagogue who will transform them into baying mobs.

On the contrary, you can rely on our so-called intelligentsia to be always most credulous about the latest fashionable extremism.And on working class common sense to find the comedy value of the posturing to which it always amounts.