MOST people would recognise at least a difference of degree between a peaceful student sit-in at an upmarket grocery store and a posse of skinheads on a Paki bashing expedition. Among those who seemingly cannot Simon Heffer, who effectively asserts in the Daily Telegraph this morning that UK Uncut and Combat 88 are ‘every bit as evil’ as one another.

That alone would be a hard act to follow, but Heffer manages to top even trick by painting the decision of a Labour Party leader to address a quarter of a million people from all walks of life as some kind of ‘association’ with ‘the whole package of rioters, police-beaters, subversives, degenerates, fantasists and criminals’.

Rioting anarchists are reminiscent of the IRA, he goes on. Perhaps, he concedes, a few Irish republicans were ideologically motivated; the rest were simply using the armed struggle as a cover for their drug smuggling operations. It is many years since I last came across that ridiculous claim, once a commonplace on the Conservative right.

Neither then nor now does the contention explain exactly how knee-capping estate level retailers facilitated the smack business at the retail level, nor why ten young Irishmen became the only dope dealers anywhere in the world ready to starve themselves to death over an arcane dispute about prison uniforms.

If I were a prominent rightwing columnist, I would be a little bit more cautious before launching such a master class in the techniques of spurious analogy and unsustainable assertions of guilt by association.

Heffer is, for example, an unabashed admirer of Enoch Powell, a man about whom he has written an acclaimed biography. Powell was not himself a fascist, but his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 was a catalyst for the emergence of a sizeable fascist political current in 1970s.

As a highly intelligent man, Powell could not have failed to appreciate that he was playing to that spectacularly nasty gallery, made up in part of the very ‘shaven headed loons’ that Heffer is at pains to denounce as the moral equivalents of Laurie Penny or Adam Ramsay. Indeed, unlike Miliband, Powell was consciously providing political sustenance for noxious elements.

Heffer’s heroine is, naturally, Margaret Thatcher. She did not herself overthrow a democratically elected government and order leftists to be rounded up and gunned down in a sports stadium. But she was a political ally of a man that did, and I have yet to read Heffer’s passionate denunciation of her friendship who did deny many the right to vote or to participate in society.

If Ed Miliband has indeed – as the headline claims – ‘wrecked his reputation by siding with the criminal class’, then Heffer sullied his standing as a democrat many years ago.