“I HOPE NOBODY votes for the British National Party,” declared David Cameron at the weekend. “I would rather people voted for any other party.”

It does not belittle the issue of principle to point to Mr Cameron’s political calculation. The Tories have a chequered history in confronting racism in their own ranks. In 1992 a black Conservative candidate suffered racist abuse from his own constituency association. In 2001 an MP claimed ministers wished to turn the British into a “mongrel race”. Mr Cameron needs to show that the party is purged of such sentiments.

The urgency of confronting racism conceals an oddity in Mr Cameron’s words, however. “Any other party” implies not only the mainstream left, right and centre, along with constitutional nationalists, but also parties of a different ideological stripe. Most prominent of these is Respect, an amalgam of Islamists and Leninists led by George Galloway, MP, which is fighting an energetic municipal election campaign in East London and one or two other localities.

No serious commentator would refer to the BNP as an “anti-immigration party” without also mentioning its neo-Nazi antecedent organisations and ideology. To do so would be politically partial, taking at face value the party’s attempt to win respectability by shedding the more violent elements of its propaganda. Yet Respect is habitually characterised as merely an “anti-war” party, without reference to its history, founders and stated positions. Over recent weeks, politicians, newspaper editorial and religious leaders have denounced the BNP, with scarcely a murmur about Respect. Perhaps it is felt that Mr Galloway’s reputation was damaged irretrievably by his antics on reality television. More likely is that Respect is seen as a party of the fringe, but nonetheless one with a legitimate – even colourful – point of view, much like the Greens.

In the interests of reliable labelling at least, opinion-formers ought to exercise greater scrutiny. Even to describe Respect as anti-war is strictly inaccurate. The Socialist Workers’ Party, for which Respect is largely a front, stated during the Iraq War that “by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces” — it appeared, in short, to be pro-war and on the wrong side. But more fundamentally, Respect stands in a tradition whereby parties nominally of the Left can on occasion cross over to their supposed ideological opposite.

It is a cliché, and inaccurate too, to depict politics as circular, with the far Left shading into the far Right. There are Marxist thinkers and organisations with a militant commitment to constitutional democracy. But there are also numerous instances where revolutionary politics have allied with extreme reaction and even fascism. The 1920s and 1930s saw many cases: some French Socialists and Communists went beyond the view that the Versailles Treaty had treated Germany unfairly, and came out in support of Nazi Germany. The Belgian Marxist Henri de Man exercised a powerful influence on Mussolini. A pro-Fascist organisation called the British People’s Party attracted support from socialists and peace campaigners in the late 1930s and 1940s.

When they called for defeat for British and American forces by Saddam Hussein, supposed leftwingers were giving support to a regime consciously modelled on Hitler and Stalin. When (as the SWP has done for the past two years) they entertain at their keynote events a speaker — a jazz musician called Gilad Atzmon — who explicitly believes that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are, whatever their historical provenance, an accurate depiction of modern America, they are allying with classic anti-Semitism. Far-right ideology is the literal content, and not merely the moral equivalent, of their political beliefs. It is little wonder that after the last general election the BNP itself declared: “The future for British politics is the growth in support and power of the ethno-specific political parties like the BNP, the People’s Justice Party and Respect.”

Why, in the circumstances, do liberal-minded people, including Mr Cameron, implicitly regard far-left parties as at least one step up from the political realms inhabited by overtly racist and fascist organisations? And does it matter? I have only a theory on the first question, but a definite answer to the second.

Critical labelling of the far Left is routinely dismissed with the charge of McCarthyism. This is historically unwarranted. In his blustering speeches McCarthy accurately identified not a single Communist agent, while maligning by wild and irresponsible exaggeration New Deal liberals and other democrats. Liberal anti-Communists were appalled at his antics, but the damage was done. A recent dramatic account of the damage that McCarthyism wrought, George Clooney’s film Good Night, And Good Luck, failed to distinguish between the causes of anti-Communism and McCarthyism, or to suggest that American Communism then was a genuine threat to Western security. (Ironically, McCarthy’s unprincipled and destructive methods were not so different from those of the leading Congressional opponent of domestic fascism in the 1930s, Samuel Dickstein.)

There is need not for a new McCarthyism, but for its opposite: a new anti-totalitarianism. There is a common thread in the politics of the totalitarian Left and the far Right, which is to make people’s wishes secondary to pseudoscientific abstractions such as race and historical forces. The far Left and far Right increasingly talk the same language: division, nativism and even deference to religious fanaticism. The BNP’s cult of violence was once expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya.

It matters that political debate lacks a language for this phenomenon. One way of enhancing our political terminology would be to add to Mr Cameron’s observation. Civilised people abhor the BNP; and for literally the same reason, they reject Respect.

The author’s blog is at www.oliverkamm.typepad.com

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