Racist! Racist!

I must admit that, with a few exceptions, I have always found the Fabians to be humourless little tits.  Good evidence as to why that is comes from their leader – Sunder Katwala.

Sunder has been engaged in an online pursuit of Dan Hannan, on the grounds than Dan’s failure to predict the collapse of Iceland’s economy a mere four years before it happened renders him ineligible to have opinions – a point echoed by Sunny Hundal, who went on to make a series of irrelevant/inaccurate observations about Dan’s speech to the European Parliament.

Dan twits Sunder and Sunny mildly over this in a blog over at the Telegraph, saying that:

There are two Lefties, though, who follow this blog keenly. They are called, confusingly, Sunder and Sunny. One writes for Next Left, the other for Liberal Conspiracy - or possibly the other way round: as with Ant and Dec, I've never been entirely clear on which is which.

before going on to say that the recent elections in Iceland do not demonstrate the turn towards the EU that Sunder posited, even though they do represent a swing to the left.

All reasonably cheerful stuff.  And Sunder’s response is to say that

As far as I can tell, the humour depends on a 'don't these chaps have funny names' piece of side-splitting hilarity, or may be a nostalgic attempt to revive the sadly neglected 'why is it so hard to tell Asian people apart' humour that many people thought was getting a bit stale back in the early '80s when I was at school.

Funny names, presumably, like Ant and Dec.  It’s not really surprising that his instant reaction is to smear Hannan as racist, but it is a little dispiriting.