Italy disappoints British Lefties

One of the worst crimes a journalist can commit is to decide on the answer and fit facts or near-facts to make it the conclusion. We have seen quite a lot of this recently where the Left in Britain, unable to conceive that a European country threw out a centre left government and replaced it with a centre right one (you’ll see another soon, chaps) have decided that Italy has turned fascist. From their usual outlets, the Guardian, The Independent and the New Statesman has emerged a chorus of drivel which would have put Mussolini’s press management to shame.

One or two wanted us to believe that there were strutting fascisti on the steps of Montecitorio making fascist salutes. I looked as close as I could at the photos and they were just people waving, having a good time. What might have been two straight arm salutes could have been people catching the attention of the camera or even about to make closed fist communist salutes. None of the worthies claimed that Italy was facing disaster when the communist salute was visible everywhere. Indeed there have been communists and ‘post communists’ (Tobias Helm uses the term ‘post fascist' in the hope that you will think they still are) in the government in recent years but the lefty comentariat never suggested that Italy was heading for a period of Stalin’s gulags or Jewish pogroms. Indeed even that is not a fair comparison because there was a hard right party standing at the election (La Destra, headed by Storace and Santanché) which refused to join Berlusconi’s People of Liberty without assurances as to policy which they were not given. La Destra was completely wiped out, as of course was the hard left. If there is only one conclusion that we can draw from recent elections it is that Italy has rejected extremism.

People in Italy, politicians in particular, do things for effect. When the likes of Tobias Helm quote Bossi as having the firearms ready they don’t understand (or perhaps they do but don’t want you to) that he would have been horrified by such a thing, even before his heart attack. Helm shows neither a liking for nor an understanding of Italy. He is the author of a lightweight book called the Dark Heart of Italy, in which he complains, inter alia, that Italian Sex Shops are called Sexy Shops – foreigners unable to get his language right, you see.

The big issue in Italy, particularly in Rome, is crime. A black girl was raped and killed outside one of Rome’s stations; most of the kids in juvenile detention centres are non-Italians; most people think illegal immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of the crime in Italy and most people think that the generations of left wing governments in Rome and elsewhere haven’t done enough. So they voted for someone else. Nationally they thought the centre left government didn’t do enough on a range of issues, so they voted for someone else.

Here is Tobias Helm again: ‘Many in Italy are deeply worried by the results. Berlusconi's coalition, they say, wasn't an ordinary rightwing movement, but instead an assortment of far-right extremists and dangerous, deluded rabble-rousers.’ So who are these ‘many people’, Tobias? Met them down the sexy shop, did you? Or was it, perchance, in the Guardian’s editorial room?

What people really are worried about here is not that Berlusconi will be screeching plans for an invasion of Africa from the Palazzo di Venezia but that he will do what he did the last time: nothing, except keep himself out of prison.