Venn Diagrams

As JRM shows no compunction in tweeting the speech of the AFD leader, Nigel Farage (who used to struggle in his UKIP days with swivel-eyed UKIP councillors who said floods were sent to inundate homosexuals) puts distance between himself and Gerard Batten’s UKIP and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. This may come to be seen as a clever move by Farage or it may be a mistake. The simpletons at the Guardian (or the simpleton in Parliament who attacked JRM yesterday) who, in the piece posted by Will Stirling, expect the moral life to separate us into convenient black or white circles, heroes or villains we can love or hate. In the real world we are more like the overlapping circles in a VENN diagram. While I won’t want to overlap with some parts of Tommy’s circle there might be a considerable part I do want to overlap with. I might prefer the fact that, at heart, a skinhead bootboy (by which I don’t necessarily mean Tommy)is patriotic to the fact that a hyper-civilised, quinoa-munching Islingtonite with whom I might be seen to have some things in common is, at heart, treacherous and self-loathing when it comes to his/her country. Complicated isn’t it? All this means one has to do is live in the moment and pay attention to and address each situation on its merits as JRM did with the video. I suspect that being seen to stray into the realm of “populism” here may prove to be a wise move on his part in the long run. Populists are really the conservatives the Conservative Party no longer represents.