DAVID Cameron packed what he himself described as ‘a really trashy novel’ for his 10-day holiday in France. By contrast, my choice to read on Brighton beach last week was rather more serious.

Ed Husain’s ‘The Islamist’ is controversial autobiographical account of the author’s involvement with the Islamist far right in Britain, and ends with a call for some of the organisations at that end of that spectrum to be subject to suppression by the state. Tony Blair is berated for offering such a pledge in 2005 and then not making good on it.

That line of thinking probably appeals to quite a wide range of opinion. It is unlikely that the English Defence League and Casuals United – the self-professed football hooligans who staged a demonstration against Muslim extremism in Birmingham on Saturday – have drafted anything resembling a detailed statement of coherent political philosophy. But no doubt they would favour a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroon.

While I consider myself reasonably well-versed in political Islam at the theoretical level, at least to the point of knowing what the main trends are and the ideas for which they stand, Husain’s book filled me in with lots of details on what Islamist groupings do on the ground.

Doubtless anyone on the left who watched firsthand the rise of such tendencies on Britain’s campuses in the 1990s did so with considerable alarm. Yet nowhere does the book spell out exactly what activities put these people beyond the pale. Husain makes no claim that any Islamist group currently operative in Britain is itself guilty of violence; what, then, is the charge sheet?

They leafleted, they caucused, they stitched up student union meetings? That doesn’t make them any different from student politicians of any other stripe. They promulgate an odious ideology? That’s undeniable. But so do many other oddball splinter groups. Thus the Stalin Society, the CPGB-ML, the Racial Volunteer Force and the November 9th Society operate legally, despite their overt advocacy of Stalinism or Nazism.

Public figures such as Bernie Ecclestone – who famously gave the Labour Party £1m in 1997 – can utilise large circulation national newspapers to attack democracy, praise authoritarianism and commend Adolf Hitler for ‘getting things done’. Yet I do not recollect suggestions from any serious quarter that such a viewpoint should not have been carried in The Times.

Husain’s best shot seems to be the argument that the road to 7/7 – which unlike the daily paper of the left, he does not regard as a secret state put-up job – was prepared by Islamist activity in Britain.

While I am not aware of any direct linkage between Mohammad Sidique Khan and his fellow bombers and organised Islamism, and self-activated anger at British involvement in the invasion of Iraq seems the most likely explanation.

If Husain’s contention is true at all, it is true in the same sense that the work of the British National Party creates the climate that led to the bombings of David Copeland and the bomb plot of Robert Cottage.

Yet the BNP rightly remains a legal organisation. To my mind, Husain does not establish the case for Al Muhajiroon or Hizb ut-Tahrir to be treated any differently. Remember that no political party has ever been banned in modern Britain; even Sinn Fein has always been allowed to function, despite the known Irish Republican Army connections of its core leadership.

While neither side would ever admit it, there is a certain symmetry between the Islamist far right and the British nationalist far right. The English Defence League are just as much ‘preachers of hate’ as Omar Bakri. Regrettably, toleration for both varieties of this poisonous brand of politics is the least worst option.

Daily Mail, 14 July 2009: Richard Littlejohn describes ‘Hattie Harman’ as ‘the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of social engineering’. Total bollocks, of course, but a good little one-liner nevertheless.

Daily Mail, 10 August 2009: Melanie Phillips speaks of ‘that Isambard Kingdom Brunel of social engineering, Ed Balls’. She doesn’t even acknowledge the source.

Mel, love. All journos nick gags. I certainly do. But the trick is to wait for a few months until everyone has forgotten the original, and then use it in another newspaper.

Not only is such blatant plagiarism shockingly bad manners, but you are spoiling things for everybody else. No one will be able to recycle that joke for ages now. You owe Richard a Friday after-work beer.

By the way, today’s Phillips column is a minor classic of the New Labour = closet communists genre. If you ever wonder how the gal got her nickname, check out this vintage example of full-on Mad Mellery:

[T]he petals have finally fallen off the New Labour rose to reveal the Red Flag still flying in the stylish Mandelson lapel ...

[T]he red rose was an illusion. Egalitarianism remains the real Clause Four, the last great immutable shibboleth of the Left.

Worth a read if you fancy a laugh.

IT’S TEN days before the next election and Nick Griffin is on walkabout when a white leftist with a history of mental health problems plunges a breadknife through his heart before the skinhead heavies can stop him. The British National Party leader is pronounced DOA at the hospital.

Or maybe it’s ten days before the next election and a huge bomb goes off at a mosque during Friday prayers. Some 19 Muslims are dead, dozens injured. Nobody claims responsibility, although police inquiries centre on the theory that this is the work of a lone wolf white supremacist.

Or maybe an Islamist cell gets lucky once - to coin a phrase - and blows a nightclub-load of dancing slags to kingdom come or brings down a couple of transatlantic airliners.

Or maybe an English Defence League march kicks off big time, with a punch-up between the boot boys and the counter demonstrators drawing in passers by until cars are overturned and shops are looted.

Whatever the proximate cause, riots erupt in former mill towns across Lancashire, with pitched battles between Molotov-cocktail throwing Asian youths and the police. The next day we get repeat performances in the inner cities. The kids in the banlieus watch the television coverage, and three days later the habitations à loyer modéré are once again ablaze. By the end of the week, there are copycat incidents across the EU.

Nobody in their right mind would want of these scenarios to come about. But then, not every actor in the racialised politics fringe is in his or her right mind. There may be those tempted to go down such roads in the hope of boosting the BNP’s Westminster chances, or because they somehow how it will convince the Muslim community of the need for sharia in the UK.

There will even be those who do not need a particularly coherent reason to ratchet up racial tension, and the run-up to a general election offers the opportunity for them to achieve maximum impact.

So none of the possibilities listed above can be ruled out as inconceivable or in any way outlandish. I’m not predicting that one or the other will happen, of course. But there are plenty of parallels from other times and places: Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, so hauntingly recalled in John Coltrane’s composition Alabama.

The consequences would be immediate, and sharp, whichever government found itself in office. Organisations will be proscribed, individuals arrested. I can just about remember the climate of anti-Irish hysteria that surrounded the Birmingham pub bombings, and I suspect that what we could witness if there is a next time would be off the scale by comparison.

The most illiberal wish list of the most illiberal home secretary will be there for the asking, with such voices as plead for civil libertarian calm destined to go unheeded.

Like just about everyone else in Britain interested in politics, I will be watching Question Time tonight. For the record, I think the BBC’s decision to host Griffin was on balance the correct one. But my guess is that some of the most important questions will not be asked.

The most obvious one that comes to mind is the issue of how we have reached this tinderbox after 12 years of New Labour government, and the most obvious answer has a lot to do with the ways in which New Labour has simultaneously alienated the white working class while pandering to many of its baser sentiments.

Welcome to a Britain where fascism has finally entered the political mainstream, and the far left is just as much outside it as ever.

THE period of post-Thatcher consensus is not an era characterised by ideological politicians; both the hard left and the hard right have long lacked a substantial figurehead of the intellectual depth and popular appeal once personified by the likes of Tony Benn and Enoch Powell.

This is an important reason why politics today is less political than politics 20 or 30 years ago. Without any real clash of ideas, managerialism is triumphant and apathy replaces polarisation. Same shit, different sock puppet.

Surveying the contemporary British socialist scene, I don't see anybody with the capacity to step up to the plate. Indeed, no one to my mind comes even close.

But an increasingly obvious choice for the serious right has is now emerging in the shape of MEP Daniel Hannan, who last night stepped down from the Tory frontbench in the European Parliament.

Resignations of this kind are rarely interesting in and of themselves. ‘Tory bust-up over EU, world keeps turning’ is scarcely a sexy headline. What I do think is significant is the reason Hannan is proffering for this action. Hannan has overtly declared his intention of building a neo-Poujadist faction with the Tory Party.

We need a broad movement within the Conservative Party that will push for referendums, citizens’ initiatives and the rest of the paraphernalia of direct democracy. I don’t just mean a referendum on Europe - though, naturally, that is the obvious place to start. I mean full-on Helvetic people power … I have returned to the back benches in order to concentrate on building such a movement.

Now, as a leftist, I don’t have any problem with direct democracy. The subjection of elected representatives to the right of recall is a textbook Leninist demand. As a clever bloke who litters his speeches with quotations from Edmund Burke and Dr Seuss alike, such irony will scarcely be lost on Hannan.

But note that Hannan doesn’t want direct democracy; he simply wants the paraphernalia of direct democracy. This Freudian slip is of the highest importance. What that paraphernalia will mask, we are not told.

My reading of his agenda is that full-on Helvetic people power equates to something like full-on Daily Mail-style Dacre democracy, with the system geared to pushing demands currently confined to the more colourful newspaper column fulminations of the free market space cadet squad.

If the left got its act together – stop sniggering, you at the back! – referenda on the renationalisation of the railway network or a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses could probably be won.

But the right has the organisation, not too mention the dosh, to ensure that such mechanisms are dominated by calls for tough curbs on immigration, the return of hanging, and perhaps even the abolition of what Hannan famously derides as the ‘Marxist’ NHS.

If such questions ultimately boil down to a wrestling match between Mad Mel and Polly Toynbee, there could be only one winner.

Forget Griffin, forget Farrage. Hannan – a man who has made his admiration for Enoch Powell abundantly clear – may yet prove to be his hero's clear successor.

COMMUNISM is suddenly in danger of becoming fashionable again, with a whole new layer of young people finding themselves attracted to Leninist ideas. That’s the kind of claim I usually discount on sight, after having heard it so often advanced by far left activists desperate to disavow the readily-visible decline in the membership of their vanguard party of choice.

But when exactly this argument is put by one of Britain’s best-known centre-right philosophers, the lack of obvious self-interest make it rather more worthy of consideration. So I was intrigued to read this assertion in John Gray’s review of the the latest book offerings from Slavoj Žižek and from co-authors Michael Hardt and Toni Negri:

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas.

Now, until Hackney SWP branch meetings find themselves mobbed with star-struck teenyboppers who swoon when the evening’s speaker takes to his or her feet, or Kate Winslet stars in the title role of a Spielberg-directed Clara Zetkin biopic, we probably have to factor in a certain degree of writerly hyperbole here.

But speaking as one who spent far too much time in both academic seminars and dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites in my progress from youth to middle age, I cannot help but notice the new faces that show up at the rather fewer leftwing gatherings I do get to these days.

Buddies still in far left groups insist that they are picking up plenty of newcomers, and the turnout behind their banners on demos indicates that they are probably not fibbing, either. It’s also worth noting that the ‘On the Idea of Communism’ conference at Birkbeck earlier this year – at which both Žižek and Negri spoke - attracted an audience of over 1,000.

Gray bases his assessment of the two works he reviews on the argument that there is some essential linkage between Leninism and Stalinism, which is a separate debate and not one I want to resurrect here. So let’s leave that aside for now and concentrate on his observations about an incipient youth radicalisation.

The reasons for this, he believes, are the little local difficulties capitalism seems to have experienced in the last year or two, and the arrival of a new generation for whom Actually Existing Socialism was something that happened before they were born. And, when you are in your twenties, ‘before you were born’ = ‘like, ancient history, innit’. Intuitively, both postulates seem plausible.

So what should the older layer of leftists - the milieu formed between 1968 and the early 1980s, to which the punk rock cohort is the tail end – be saying to the recent arrivals? Maybe I am getting old and jaded, but my first reaction is along the lines of the old disclaimer broadcast with each episode of the original Batman television series: don’t try this at home, kids.

You deserve better than to participate in the continued fragmentation of the far left into numerous competing sects. While this state of affairs continues to obtain, far left politics will remain marginalised. The theoretical differences are important, yes, but should not be a barrier to joint work.

Be wary of middle-aged blokes who order you to shut down your website in the name of 'democratic centralism'. If you are going to style yourselves Leninists, make sure you read Ms Luxemburg's criticisms of the Bolsheviks. The perusal of a few anarchist critiques probably wouldn't hurt, either.

If I were you, I’d vote most of the old farts off their central committee positions – hey, many are close to retirement age, anyway – and unify into a group with sufficient social weight to win at least the beginnings of a wider audience. This is hardly rocket science, and I apologise profusely that my lot were far too sectarian to pull off this ABC task.

On the other hand, those of us have waited two decades to see some sort of revival cannot help but be pleased at what is happening. I don’t suppose any of you would happen know where I could score some decent blow, do you?