If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution

Emma Goldman's famous quotation sprung to mind today when I heard how an English National Ballet dancer's debut was disrupted by some numpties waving placards.

Basically, as I previously wrote, the Guardian newspaper disgracefully published lists of BNP members in their newspaper that they had obtained by infiltrating the party for seven months.

But despite their lengthy undercover investigation, the worst they could find about the BNP was that - shock, horror - many of their members were afraid to lose their jobs just because of their membership of what is accepted in the UK as a legitimate political party, and that they use encryption software to protect their membership lists.

Now, I am no fan of the far right. But nor am I a fan of fascism when it comes from the far left either.

And the scum who protested at Simone Clarke's debut performance are, despite their chin-stroking, anti-racist, lemon-sucking intentions, classic contemporary fascists who want to stifle opinions they disagree with and shout down those whose political outlook differs from their own.

One wonders when any of them last attended a ballet performance or if indeed they are ever likely to again.

And while they interrupted the performance to yell nonsense slogans against racism, the irony that Ms Clarke is herself in a relationship with a Cuban-Chinese dancer was no doubt was lost upon them.

But rent-a-mobs aren't really the issue here. Like the poor, we will always have with us those who consider it a useful pastime to wave placards and protest against allegedly right-wing ballet dancers while their allegedly left-wing government conducts a murderous imperialist occupation of at least three other countries.

The real problem is the continued campaign by the Guardian newspaper to seek to justify and legitimise their witch hunt of BNP members, solely on the basis of their party membership.

Either the Guardian believes that the BNP is a dangerous and seditious body that ought to be banned and should launch a campaign to see it proscribed. But seven months of trying to prove that particular thesis resulted in precisely nothing.

Or they can admit that the BNP is a small anti-immigration party seeking to make in-roads into the centre-right ground being ceded by the Tories.

But if they were to do the latter, they would also be forced to accept that their witch hunt against private BNP members, such as Ms Clarke, is itself a fascist act that is incompatible with democratic reporting.