Various bloggers -- Stephen Pollard and Harry at his eponymous Place have written of their deep concern about the victory by George Galloway over Labour's Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow and the rise in the British National Party vote in various constituencies; while Oliver Kamm has previously described Galloway's Respect party, which is a Socialist Workers' Party/radical Islamist front, as a fascist party which shares with the BNP -- despite the latter's hatred of Muslims -- the same espousal of fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence.

All very true. Yet the Bethnal Green result has to be seen in its proper context; after all, Oona King was herself a despicable politician who, let us not forget, said of America : 'It's a f***ing f***ed-up power man, it's a fundamentalist Christian power if we're not careful. It's terrifying' and in a Guardian article compared Palestinians in Gaza to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. This woman was in the Labour party, which is surely even more worrying in some respects than the Galloway phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the Galloway victory is in itself deeply dismaying. As Stephen Pollard comments, it shows that the Muslim community, which is numerous in that constituency and has swept the renegade former Labour MP back to power, has signed itself up to dangerous political and religious extremism as embodied by the Respect coalition. Equally alarmingly, it votes en bloc. At the same time, the odious extremism at the other end of the spectrum, in the shape of the BNP vote elsewhere, has also strengthened.

Without wishing to exaggerate the significance of these marginal developments, they are straws in an exceedingly ill wind and should cause no small alarm. Galloway has earned widespread ridicule and opprobrium for his cringing to Saddam Hussein. Yet his views are surely only a more extreme version of the anti-war vote cast by millions at this election whose position, if acted upon, would also have been to have kept Saddam in power, and whose virulent anti-Americanism is merely a few notches on the ratchet down from Galloway's own wild rhetoric. In other words, the Galloway victory is a symptom of the tide of irrationality and hatred which has overwhelmed our mainstream culture.

It is not such a large step from that mainstream irrationality and hatred to fascism. That is why, since the Iraq issue first emerged, we have seen the phenomenon of conservative audiences applauding Trotskyite agitators denouncing President Bush as a greater war criminal than Saddam Hussein and urging action against the 'rogue state' of Israel. That is why the fight in Bethnal Green and Bow was between the unspeakable within the Labour party and the even more unspeakable which had been thrown out of the Labour party. That is why we now have in Britain the fascism of the far left and militant Islam shaping up against the fascism of the far right. Unless this climate of irrationality and hatred, both political and religious, is firmly addressed this ugliness will spread and our already buckling democracy will splinter into warring fragments as our civilisation progressively implodes.