Today is an INS day (which could well mean that tonight will be a drinking night) so there probably won't be much space for blogging.
I assure you, no irony is intended here: if you haven't yet seen Michael Gove's excellent piece on the Pim Fortuyn assassination, here it is. A couple of excerpts:
Fortuyn and his allies developed a critique of the establishment notably different from those pioneered by the politicians with whom he has been compared, Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Fortuyn was uncompromisingly neo-liberal. An advocate of laxer rules on euthanasia, greater drugs liberalisation, more use of the private sector in healthcare and tax cuts, he was very far from Le Pen’s hearthland politics of Vichyiste nostalgia. He may have been a “cultural protectionist” like Le Pen. But the culture he wished to protect was the Dutch libertarianism so familiar to many Britons from their weekends in Amsterdam, so congenial to him as a gay man, and so threatened, he claimed, by the incursions of Islam...The success of far-right or populist movements which use race as a political weapon almost inevitably leads to an upsurge in hate crimes. Even in Britain, as I have had unhappy cause to report, the recent growth in expressions of anti-Semitic sentiment has led to a quadrupling of attacks on Jews.
Assaults on Britain’s, and Europe’s, Jewish communities also regrettably force us to contemplate the other dark side of the Fortuyn legacy. For intemperate and simplistic as his rhetoric was, its success reflected a widespread concern.
Why is it the most horrific acts of politically motivated violence committed against the West have come from Muslims, in the grip of a twisted fundamentalist version of their faith, who have enjoyed the freedoms, welfare benefits, educational opportunities and wealth Europe has to offer? And why do Western establishments temporise in the face of fundamentalist violence, from the EU’s funding of the infrastructure of terror in the Palestinian Authority to the lack of prosecutions against those who preach hate and recruit for jihads? A failure by European elites to tackle these questions allows both extremes, the far Right and Islamic terror, to flourish. Where do extremes now meet? In the house that Jacques [Delors] built.
The proximate cause is probably the atrocity of September 11. From that moment, the debate over immigration and multiculturalism took on a new immediacy. Feelings ran high on both sides. Right-wing politicians sometimes crossed the line between being anti-immigration and being anti-immigrant. Left-wingers took to demonising their opponents, accusing them of being not merely wrong, but malevolent.Although neither side will admit it, both have contributed to an inflammatory atmosphere. In a number of European countries, notably France and Belgium, opponents of immigration have stirred up resentment against legally settled ethnic minorities...
By the same token, the readiness of some on the Left to daub their opponents - sometimes literally - with the swastika, has fed the kind of hatred that led to the recent assassination of Silvio Berlusconi's adviser on employment law, and that may have killed Mr Fortuyn.
To lump Mr Fortuyn in with Jean-Marie Le Pen, as Left-wing newspapers constantly did, was ludicrous. The National Front leader was the political heir to Vichy. Mr Fortuyn, by contrast, was more maverick than fascist. True, he opposed further primary immigration into the Netherlands - but this, in theory if not in practice, puts him no further to the Right than the British Labour Party.
The truth is that Mr Fortuyn, like other politicians around Europe, was chiefly protesting against the governing cartel. The political systems of most EU states - based as they are on proportional representation, state-funded political parties and consensus - tend to create a "club" of establishment parties.
The Netherlands was typical in that most of its politicians could expect to be in power most of the time. The governing coalitions set out to create a consensus on all the big issues: immigration, European integration, corporatist economics. Those outside the tent found themselves isolated and stigmatised.The 20 per cent of Dutch voters who had planned to back Mr Fortuyn were protesting against all this. Ten years ago, as Maastricht was rammed through, we predicted that voters would turn, in frustration, against their political systems. We take no pleasure in being proved right.