For some reason I find myself listening to Tony Benn on Radio 4, wittering on about pieces of prose he feels have influenced him. He has just talked about peace and Gandhi, and then leapt to a quote from Bobby Sands, a provisional IRA member who was convicted of firearms offenses. The man is the most shallow of intellectuals.

Neil Clark’s “Best UK Blog” award, following a classic vote early, vote often strategy, has stirred up a bit of a hornets’ nest over at Comment is Free (yes, I did write that!). In the discussion following Clark’s puff piece, two commenters stand out. The first is “antifaschismus”:

“‘The Exile’ and Neil Clark are both adherents of the Strasserite Third Position, exemplified by the National Bolshevik Movement and to a lesser extent the National Front and BNP. Mr Clark, an apologist for Serbian fascism and genocide, is the prospective parliamentary political candidate for the third positionist British People’s Alliance in Wantage, and ‘The Exile’, who was involved in an attempt to form a political alliance with the NF/BNP, socialises with BNP Oldham organiser Mick Treacy when he’s in Britain. They no more represent the mainstream of working class opinion - or any current of European socialism - than does David Cameron.”

Nothing contentious there apart from the assumption that the “British People’s Alliance” is a substantive organisation, but the Guardian moderators chose to delete the comment, while at the same time giving free rein to the money-blogging fascist Ken Bell (’The Exile’).

Accusing the Grauniad of stooping to new lows has become a popular blog sport. The reality is that the publishing group is a consistent offender when it comes to giving space to anti-democratic political opinion. Such is the nature of left-liberalism. The Guardian newspaper and its online forums may have deteriorated markedly in recent times, but so too has political discourse in general.

Does Neil Clark represent a sizeable political constituency within Britain? To me that sounds like the wishful thinking of modern day fascists and their paleo-leftist fellow travellers for whom the world is terrifying in its complexity. But the problem is not only with intellectually-challenged writers such as Neil Clark. Take Seumas Milne, for example. In Milne we have the thinking person’s Neil Clark, and as a senior columnist and editor he is untouchable.

Paleo-leftism is undoubtedly appealing to some. Karl Naylor, a CiF commenter who writes as SzekelyKarl, portrays Clark’s Strasserite ideology as a form of nostalgic fundamentalism. I am more sympathetic to antifaschismus’ succinct description of Neil Clark and the “British People’s Alliance”, but Naylor makes a number of good points. For example, he sees weird alliances and ideological schizophrenia everywhere from Respect to neoconservative cliques such as the Henry Jackson Society. Their mode of operation, he says, is to scramble as many facts as possible with which to bend reality to the ideological prescriptions of the creed.

We have no shortage of opinion journalists who make a living from writing “jeremiads against neoliberal economics and militarist neoconservatism”, to use Naylor’s words from his Goulash and Guardianistas blog, and Neil Clark is arguably the least talented of them all. There is a market for this material, and I’m therefore not surprised that Clark still enjoys the Guardian’s patronage.