I have been on a lot of demonstrations in my life. I greatly regret having taken part in some of them – especially the Nuclear Disarmament marches of the 1960s. I still think I was right to go on some of the others, against racial prejudice, and in protest at the shooting of innocent British subjects in Londonderry in 1972.

But I don’t believe I’ve ever been on a pro-government march. And I am filled with a feeling of strange puzzlement over the rather weird events in Paris on Sunday. What were they demonstrating for? I’ll come to that.

I’ll be told ‘it was for freedom, democracy, free expression’.

Are you sure? (See below) But even if that's actually true, these are self-evident virtues. Nobody (even people who secretly had doubts about free speech and democracy, as many do in fact, see below) would demonstrate against them.

And no doubt I’ll also be told it was ‘against terrorism and murder’.

Once again, who would say he was for such things? The people who favour them have other ways of showing their feelings.

All you need to do is subject such talk to the late Roy Jenkins’s rather neat test of empty banality. Just ask this question: Could anyone conceivably have said the opposite? If not, then nothing of any significance has been said.

We are here, once again, in the rainbow-hued, furry-bunny-and tweety-bird-infested land of Tom Lehrer’s wonderful little satirical song from 1965, called ‘The Folk Song Army’ :

Thus:

‘We are the Folk Song Army.

Every one of us cares.

We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,

Unlike the rest of you squares.’

It was partly the people who were teenagers when Tom Lehrer wrote that who advanced, full of grandiose solemnity, down the streets of Paris on Sunday, though David Cameron’s generation, who didn’t even need to try to be soppy because my lot had made it so easy for them in our teens, were also there.

My favourite participants in this march for virtue were King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. Jordan, where I have spent some happy days, is indeed far less frightful than most Arab Muslim regimes, in the torture and freedom of speech stakes. But that’s precisely the problem. By any other standard, especially those of Western Europe, it’s terrible.

The Palestinian Authority is one of the few entities which has managed to establish a very bad record for such things even before it has attained statehood. It’s not terribly good at religious tolerance, either.

Here are some links and details for those interested : Jordan ranks 120th out of 178 countries in the 2010 Press Freedom index maintained by reporters Without Borders. Amnesty international is concerned about torture in Jordan http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/jordan

And http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-jordan-2013

Torture is likewise not unknown in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority (see P.17 here

http://jij.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hidden-Injustices.-Human-Rights-in-the-PA-7.4.13.pdf )

And freedom of the press, speech, assembly and expression are strongly constrained there as well (see pp 19-22 of the above document), likewise freedom of religion ( see pp 22-24 of the above).

Little is done on Palestinian media (though they are far from free) to restrain anti-Semitic attacks ( I put this mildly):

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=786

And before anyone tries to make an Arabs-vs Israel issue out of this, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel has of course rightly come under heavy criticism for its often appalling behaviour in occupied territory, and its unequal treatment of its Arab minority within its own borders, though I think its record on press freedom and freedom of speech is pretty good.

Yet these three leaders, plus a platoon of Eurocrats, were in the front line of the Paris March. So it couldn’t really be called an unambiguous statement about freedom.

And then again, who was absent, who might have been expected to be there, if it was really about democracy?



Well, this is awkward, and I have once again found it hard to pin down the exact nature of the problem (see my article about Arseniy Yatsenyuk, about whose interesting TV interview in Berlin I am also still making enquiries ).

But Marine Le Pen, whose National Front party scored 25 % in France’s Euro elections and who is personally running at around 30% in the polls, a bit more than two years before the next presidential election, was not there.

Why not? Even if you loathe her, she is a considerable political figure.If the march was truly in favour of democracy, the rule of the people, she had as much right to be there as several people who were there, if not more.



In fact, Mlle Le Pen ( or is Madame? She’s been married and divorced twice) would beat every major French political figure (including M.Hollande, and M.Sarkozy, who were both present at the forefront of the march) in the first round of a French presidential election, according to a recent survey

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11078493/Boost-for-far-right-Le-Pen-as-poll-finds-she-would-triumph-in-presidential-election.html

So why wasn’t she there? She says she ‘wasn’t invited’, and French journalists seem to agree, some of them saying this was a mistake on the part of President Hollande. I'm not sure it was (see below). I think his mistake is quite different.

Obviously, she didn’t have to be ‘invited’ if she merely wished to turn up as a private individual. Some accounts suggest that President Hollande actually intimated to her that she was welcome to take part as such a private individual.

But this is silly. Of course she was, and so was anyone in Paris that day. So, of course, was President Hollande and so was our Prime Minister. But of course *they* didn’t march as private individuals, because they knew they would be welcome in the front rank. Imagine the scenes of woe and fury if Mr Cameron had been told he was 'welcome' to join the normal, standard-class crowd.

I think we may be sure that some sort of official invitation and pass would have been required to get anywhere near the front row.

The reports I’ve seen don’t make it clear if Marine Le Pen directly asked to be there, and was directly snubbed, or if she just assumed that the absence of an invitation meant she was unwelcome, or something in between. This being France, I’d suspect it was the third.

The fact remains that one of France’s most prominent political figures wasn’t in the front rank, and wouldn’t have been welcome if she’d tried to be there.

I’d be interested to know what treatment was accorded to the other French minority parties and their leaders, including the Communists and the non-Communist left.

The problem civilised people have with the French National Front is mainly caused by Marine Le Pen' s father, Jean-Marie.

He memorably described the gas chambers of the German extermination camps as a ‘minor point in the history of the Second World War’. In my view, no civilised, Christian person could say or think such a thing.

I think the case against Jean-Marie Le Pen, is quite straightforward. He will carry the burden of such statements to the grave. His daughter, not directly tainted in this way, even so carries the burden of her father, and the party he founded, which links her and her movement to the unlovely past of the French Right, and its despicable and unexpiated behaviour under the German occupation.

I'm emphatically not saying Marine le Pen should have been there. I wouldn’t want to march arm-in-arm with Marine Le Pen in any direction or for any cause. The trouble is that the main opinion she claims to speak for is reasonably held by huge numbers of French men and women, and for good reason. They wouldn’t vote for her if they were offered a more civilised alternative. But they are not offered it, so they do and they will vote for her.

What I want to see is for ‘mainstream’ politicians and media to stop scorning the view she claims to speak for – opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism. They need to admit they have been wrong, and reverse these policies. Until they do, they feed her and the National Front. By the way, I should note here that France is just as guilty of multiculturalism as Britain. Despite posing as a stern Republican secular state, with illiberal, unenforceable gimmicks such as bans on face-veils, in practice France has permitted the growth of separate solitudes, in which an entirely Muslim culture has grown up on the edges of every major city, especially Paris.

The point remains that the exclusion from the march of Marine Le Pen removes one if its main claims – to be representative of the whole of France. It specifically was not representative of perhaps 30% of the French population and would have been very uncomfortable, and possibly noisily divided, if their representative was there.

What else didn't the march stand for? In my view, the growing clamour for more and better ‘security’ against terror – plus what I suspect will turn out to be exaggeration of the level of planning and organisation in last week’s murders – also removes the march’s claim to be in support of liberty . So, of course, does the presence of heads of repressive states abroad.

In fact, the most worrying thing about this march, and the imitators it will no doubt have in other countries where Islamist commit atrocities, is that it will make it easier for government to introduce the renewed attacks on liberty which they itch to implement, and for which such events provide the pretext. In the end, when we have all moved on to something else, this may be its main legacy.