I found it quite conceited that us Brits were scoffing at the debacle unfolding between the ‘Tangerine Fuhrer’ and the ‘Corporate Whore’ in the presidential battle across the pond when all the while, we nearly missed the delightful Amber Rudd reciting her 2016 version Mein Kampf at the recent Conservative Party Conference.

Fortunately, Rudd’s speech did get picked up on by a few too many people like James O’Brien of LBC, and when David Cameron’s former aide, Steve Hilton, said in The Sunday Times that Rudd might as well have announced that “foreign workers will be tattooed with numbers on their forearms” a policy U-Turn was hastily made.

It doesn’t mean that she hadn’t meant what she proposed though, and it is another reason, in a list of reasons, why David Cameron should have never given the UKIP sympathisers in his party the opportunity to take the country back to the days of Enoch ‘He ‘ad the right idea’ Powell and a state of authoritarian conservatism.

It may well turn out that David Cameron was a picnic compared to this regressive mob of lunatics who have taken over the asylum and whilst we laugh at America, the Tangerine Fuhrer hasn’t even got a job in politics yet…Boris Johnson is the British Home Secretary. I think I need to repeat that…BORIS JOHNSON IS THE BRITISH HOME SECRETARY!

When I was very young, multiculturalism, sexuality, good working practice and popular culture were all pretty much taboo subjects and were basically, state controlled. These were of course, the days of three TV channels and no internet or social media, so freedom expression was difficult to come by.

Songs like ‘God Save the Queen’ (The Sex Pistols) were regularly banned from the airwaves and even as late as the mid-eighties, we had Radio One refusing to play ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash which, bizarrely, was a song promoting the dangers of the cocaine addiction swamping America, not the benefits of it.

In late the 1970’s music brought the divided youth together (Ska, Punk and Reggae) with a series of anti-Nazi gigs, and for a damaging run on deluded nostalgia to be halted, it is down to the new generation of young people to become the next Joe Strummer, Paul Weller or Billy Bragg, by standing up in the face of ridicule to ensure we don’t go back to the bad old days of hatred and repression.

The Clash playing at the Victoria Park Anti-Nazi League Concert in 1978

Having fond memories of the past  is what makes us human, but getting drawn into thinking it was a golden age we need to return to will be to the detriment of our children and grandchildren.

All those Thatcherites who made a quick buck in the 1980’s can’t get bird flu quick enough in my opinion; they are voting against the interests of their own grandchildren, frothing at the mouth as they read hate headlines in Dacre and Murdoch rags, despite being better off than anyone behind them could ever dream of. Why are they so selfish?

Some of you may have seen that it was the 80th anniversary of ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ last week, a moment in history when Jews, Irish and the working class of East London stood up to fascism. I posted a song (The Ghosts of Cable Street) by a folk band called The Men They Couldn’t Hang on Facebook that day and whilst I was looking it up on Google, I was surprised to find that BBC Radio One (apart from John Peel) refused to play it when it was originally released in 1985, because of its political rhetoric.

Do we really want to go back to a time when a song highlighting a stand against fascism is deemed unacceptable for young ears? I don’t know what it was the government of the time didn’t want to be heard, but maybe it was this?

“And so we learn from history generations have to fight
And those who crave for mastery
Must be faced down on sight
And if that means by words, by fists, by stones or by the gun,

Remember those who stood up for
Their daughters and their sons.”