The Nazis are coming!

There isn’t half a lot of hoo-ha (should that be Haw-Haw?) about on the subject of the rise of the right. The steam is spouting from every orifice as the puffing and panting squawk boxes of the activist left gear up to the next level of screechery. They are all getting their knickers in a twist and equating the surge in support for the AfD in Germany and the prospect of Anne Marie Waters leading Ukip with a call for cattle trucks and gas chambers. Behave, the lot of you.

Far right indeed! You may not have noticed, possibly because from inside that shiny bubble all you can see is a soap-sudsy distortion of yourself reflected back at you, but practically the whole of politics in the UK is slap bang in the centre. The voters for both sides all want pretty much the same things – peace, prosperity, freedom from worry and disease – they just differ in how they think it should brought about.

The pragmatists on the right understand that none of this comes for free and busily crack on feathering their own nests as all of nature tends to do. The idealists on the left believe it should be enshrined in human rights and spend endless hours in their dream state imagining a world of infinite diversity whilst maintaining equality for all. The workers on the right know they have to pay for what they get; and the dreamers on the left also know that the workers on the right will have to pay for what they get.

It’s little wonder, then, that the backbone of the country simply cracks on and the mainstream political parties try to appeal to as broad a spectrum as possible; inevitably, this means they rarely stray far from the centre ground. Last night, in response to a comments about Ukip hardly being ‘far right’ a Tweeter posted the following graphic to ‘prove’ they were, literally Hitler. Quite apart from the alarming scale, which purports to show an extreme fascist tendency for the parties they don’t like, this is a simplistic and unrealistic model.

Well, two can play at that game. Given that some of my detractors readily and regularly call me a Nazi I was somewhat surprised when I honestly took the test some months ago and came out smack bang in the centre. (Okay, I was half a small grid square above and to the right of the line, but I was still devastated!) Anyway, as something of an expert now in these matters I took the liberty of creating an updated and far more accurate version of that graphic to suit the current political landscape. Here it is.

So, as you can see, labels aren't always helpful and memes can be used to illustrate, but never to prove, any point you care to make. And as I’m in charge of this here commentary, I observe that the difference between left and right in Britain is fag-paper thin apart from a few oddball extremists. The only fly in that particular analytical ointment is Jeremy Corbyn’s fan club, Momentum. Given half a chance they would be out hanging Tories from lampposts.