Nasty, brutish and short

Not merely applicable to Hobbesian man, but also, and I think more exactly, to the Mayor of London, the ghastly Livingstone. His recent unpleasant remarks about men such as the American ambassador to London, or "chiselling little crook" as our elected representative described him, or the two Indian born Iraqi Jews who Livingstone told to get back to Iran have already been noted briefly on this blog and more extensively elsewhere.

So it was with a weary sense of the inevitable that the Reptile picked up his paper today to note that, once again, this odious little man, personification of all that is unpleasant about the Left in British politics, had drawn a direct comparison between the Poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square and the massacre of approximately 3,000 demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

That Livingstone draws no moral distinction between the governments of Deng Xiao-Peng and Margaret Thatcher is not surprising. That he argues an equivalence between the deaths of hundreds in a brutal totalitarian crackdown against demonstrators for democracy and a riot against a democratically imposed tax in which no-one was killed displays his stupidity. That he did so in Tiananmen itself displays his insensitivity. That he has defended his remarks as valid displays his moral vacuity.

That he then asked for the Peterloo massacre - a bloody but small scale fiasco in which 11 people were killed 200 years ago - to be taken into consideration is staggering. Mind you, Ted Heath would have been proud, and it does show that between the moral relativism of the hard-left and soft-right there is little to choose.