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PETER HITCHENS: Miliband shoots at a footballing fascist - and scores an own goal

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I should have thought fascism had a lot in  common with football. Both like huge mass  rallies in ugly, grandiose buildings, in which the enraptured mob chants gormless, unpleasant slogans and sings unpleasant songs.

Both have personality cults. Both involve the worship of strutting, violent, dishonest and selfish people. Both are almost wholly masculine in a boozy, sweaty, muscle-bound way that sometimes makes me wonder if Germaine Greer doesn’t have a point about men.

The enthusiasts of both are, among other things, very  boring conversationalists, if you don’t happen to share their passion.

Common goals: A recent football match between West Ham and Chelsea where West Ham fans threw a Hot Dog thrown at Chelsea's John Terry

Both demand the adulation of youth and strength, and both require a great deal of very bad acting, shouting, posturing, eye-rolling and fake injuries or at least fake grievances. Both are based on an angry intolerance of rivals and both spill rapidly into serious violence, given half a chance.

So the only surprise about the revelation that Paolo Di Canio once said he was a fascist is the honesty involved. Mind you, why did it take so long for it to come out? Wasn’t poor old Swindon important enough for anyone to care that its football team was run by a man who liked giving straight-arm salutes?

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But here comes the really funny bit: the resignation of the supposed political giant David Miliband from his posts at Sunderland Football Club, because he couldn’t bear to be linked with this totalitarian monster.

Now, I know from personal experience that the supposedly brilliant Mr Miliband isn’t that clued up about life (he survived some years as Foreign Secretary without even knowing that this country had conferred a knighthood on Robert Mugabe). But there’s something else here that needs to be remembered. In October 2012, a man called Eric Hobsbawm died. Professor Hobsbawm was at least as fine a historian as Mr Di Canio is a footballer.

But, alas, he was a lifelong supporter of communism, an unapologetic defender of the Soviet Union in the days of purges, mass murder and the slave camps of the Gulag. I’ve no doubt he gave the occasional clenched fist salute in his time, but I’ve seen no pictures.

Soon after his death, the other Miliband issued a statement saying that Hobsbawm was ‘a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family’. So did the young David Miliband stalk righteously from the room when this grisly old Stalinist apologist came round for comradely tea and buns, as I believe he did quite often?

Of course not. Mr Miliband only objects to one sort of violent, murderous political creed. The other sort is fine by him. The British Left-wing elite has hopeless double standards about dictators, and for some reason always gets away with it.

What do you think would happen if the Nazi Horst Wessel Song were sung at the funeral of a Tory politician? Yet the Internationale, the anthem of world communism, was sung at the Edinburgh funeral of Labour’s Robin Cook in 2005, and nobody fussed. It was played at the memorial service of Tony Benn’s wife Caroline in 2001 (and one very senior Labour apparatchik was heard to sigh: ‘Great to hear language we aren’t allowed to use any longer’).

The same suspect song was played at the Glasgow obsequies of another Labour Minister, Donald Dewar, in 2000, and the congregation joined in. They knew the words.

The excuse was offered: ‘It’s a grand tune, whatever you think of the politics.’ The Hitlerite Horst Wessel Song also has a fine tune, but I doubt the Edinburgh or Glasgow mourners would have stood by and let it be sung.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who is prepared to apologise for either fascism or communism should be a pariah, in football, politics or anywhere else. But you cannot scorn the one and be soft on the other.

  Fancy that. Research shows that going soft on cannabis means more people take dangerous drugs.

Next, they’ll find out that printing money leads to inflation, and that cheap booze sold without limit means more drunkenness.

  The BBC's vile Village betrays our history

Revolutionaries always defame the past to try to make us content with the horrible present. But I have seldom seen such tripe as the BBC’s The Village.

Teachers are savage disciplinarians. Husbands beat wives. The upper classes are snobbish and bigoted. The only likeable characters are Stoke Newington liberals from the 21st Century, presumably transported into 1914 by Doctor Who.

And the basics are wrong. The band plays Jerusalem – written in 1916. A banner reads ‘God Bless Our Troops’ – a US slogan I doubt you’d hear in Derbyshire then.

Out of step: A banner in The Village carries an American slogan not used in 1914 Derbyshire

Cardboard justice created Mick Philpott

The Devil, as I was brought up to believe, finds work for idle hands. And there is no doubt that many people are corrupted in dozens of ways by the paid idleness offered to them by both major political parties.

The more I think of the way in which our great industries were destroyed, leaving millions of men with no proper work to do, the angrier I get.

But in the case of Mick Philpott, I think it is our cardboard criminal justice system that is at fault, not the welfare state. It is only thanks to the skill of doctors that Kim Hill, his first victim, survived.

Blame system: Mick Philpott, pictured with wife Mairead Philpott, who were both found guilty of the manslaughter of six of their children, and mistress Lisa Willis and his two youngest children

Philpott stabbed her 27 times and ripped out a phone to stop anyone calling for help. I think attacks of this kind, which would certainly have led to the victim’s death 50 years ago, should be classed as murder and punished by hanging. The intent is clearly murderous. Why should the would-be killer be spared because good people have saved his victim?

But in any case the law should have responded to this foul act with more than a ‘seven-year’ sentence, an official lie told with the deliberate intention of fooling the public. In fact, he served only three years and two months.

And he did so in conditions that he no doubt found it easy to cope with – no hard labour, no discomfort, no austerity, no discipline, in short nothing that he would have feared undergoing again.

Philpott knows all about fear. As the judge noted, he liked to use his attempted murder conviction to scare his fellow creatures into doing his nasty will. But he never experienced fear himself. Two years ago, police were called when Philpott dragged his wife out of the house by her hair, after striking her. The police response to this action, committed by a known and convicted savage, was a ‘caution’ (they issue these for rape, too).

This was far worse than useless. It must have encouraged him in his justified belief that the authorities, too, were scared of him. How his neighbours must have trembled when they found out he had been let off. At the time of his final filthy offence, he was on bail after another violent attack.

I can only say it once again. If people such as Philpott are not afraid of the law – and they aren’t – then the rest of us will have to be afraid of them.

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