Can it really be true that IRA/Sinn Fein has reached the end of its bloody road?  Normally, it would be unwise to entertain the slightest suspicion that history is leaving it behind, so irreducible are the communal divisions in the North.  But there really does appear to be a fork in the road for IRA/Sinn Fein.  It can transform itself into a regular political party of the mainstream or it can cling to its thuggery, its criminality and its arms and lose its broad base of support.  Since the Northern Bank robbery, the money laundering affair in the Republic and now, most tellingly, the brutal murder of Robert McCartney it can no longer do both.

Yesterday’s news that in talks with the dead man’s family it offered to shoot the killers for them only underscores its profound detachment from the public mind.  There seems to be no way back from this position.  It is arguably the most hopeful moment in the last four painful decades in Northern Ireland.

Lee Barnes, who looks after the BNP’s legal affairs, has lodged a formal complaint with Offcom about the Channel 4 programme, “Let ‘em All In” written and fronted by open borders enthusiast, Keenan Malik.

The programme, one of four being aired by Channel 4 this week on the immigration debate in the UK, made extensive use of the famous “Feudin Banjos” music from John Boorman’s 1972 classic film, Deliverance.

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Today that organ of unquestioning anti-racism, the Guardian, reports the Commission for Racial Equality’s latest Terror: 125 happy news ways (pdf file)  to make Britain’s police force fit for our happy, happy, race-blind future.

Sir David Calvert-Smith, a benign-looking and perfectly white, former director of public prosecutions and now a high court judge, has authored the latest hate attack on – or, as he sees it, attack on hate in - the police forces of England and Wales.

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Le jour où nous aurons en France, non plus 5 millions mais 25 millions de musulmans, ce sont eux qui commanderont.  Et les Français raseront les murs, descendront des trottoirs en baissant les yeux

Jean-Marie Le Pen, explaining to anyone who will listen that, “The day when we have not five million but twenty-five million Muslims in France, it will be they who rule.  And the French will stick against the wall, jump in the gutter and lower their eyes.

Of course, it brought him another conviction and fine from the (anti-) French establishment.  He’s been collecting them since the 1960’s.  His stubborness and verbal extravagance have cost him in excess of $200,000.  I think it’s safe to say he doesn’t much care about that.  For the desperate and the irredeemable any publicity is good publicity.  In that bullish, foolhardy-brave way he has, Le Pen is perfectly irredeemable.  And, if you happen to be one of those, of course, extreme far right French nationalists, he is undeniably inspiring.

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We are eight weeks away from an (as yet unannounced) General Election in Britain, and the political parties’ mad clamour for headlines has begun.  Savage criticism from one side follows scornful demolition by the other.  Policy launch follows publicity stunt.  Either way, it seems certain that we are to have more of everything.  Britain’s far-seeing and benevolent politicians are deciding how they can make our lives wonderful.  In fact, very, very wonderful.  How could you ever think it will be otherwise?

Politicians love to talk about hospitals, schools, nursery places, police on the beat … all the many ways in which they can spend your money better than you can.  These things are, apparently, what the electorate most wants to hear about.  They are managerial politics, the politics of consensus, of ideological neutrality.  They are, therefore, safe and comfortable for all concerned.  They are what the political establishment most wants to talk about.

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It can’t be often that the Prime Minister’s wife, otherwise known as Miss Cherie Booth QC, takes a hand in defending our culture.  But she did just that today before the civil division of the Court of Appeal.  She won the right for 16-year old Shabina Begum to wear the Jilbab - traditional head-to-toe Muslim dress - to school.

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I’ve just come across an extraordinary research paper. It examines, in a remarkably open and honest way, the reasons why some Sydneysiders are leaving the established western suburbs and moving to “master planned communities” on the urban fringe.

What it finds is that the residents of these new communities are fleeing precisely those suburbs in which there is both a large amount of public housing and a rapid influx of immigrants. The residents are trying to recreate a traditional Anglo-Australian community in which they feel their identity, values and way of life are secure for themselves and their children.

In other words, the paper takes an academic (and surprisingly unbiased) look at the process of white flight.

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Three decades ago Martin Hutchinson sat down to write a ‘coffee table’ book about the significant figures in Conservative history.  Not a remarkable ambition in itself, perhaps.  To many on the right of the Party the Heathite Corporatism of the early 1970’s looked like the end of the ideological road.  For all its allegedly free enterprise vision of ‘Selsdon Man’, Heath’s Tories had proved wholly unable to think outside the post-war economic consensus.  While direct taxes were cut to a certain extent, both major parties remained committed to a public sector vastly larger than anyone would seriously advocate now.

The eleven-year, partial and, therefore, temporary revival of the right under Margaret Thatcher still lay in the future.  It was the moment to think historically of Conservatism - and the moment no doubt, amid the sound and fury of Saltley and the three day week, to conclude that its like might not be seen on our national stage again.

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