Say what you like about the BNP, at least they give people with more mainstream sympathies cause to unite in cosy ecumenical smugness. So what if the Conservatives are heartless, the Labour Party incompetent, the Lib Dems without principle? When they get together to declare the BNP the greatest threat to democracy since Mosley, anyone would think they are decent fellows after all, putting their differences aside like that for the greater good. Alas, the more Cameron, Miliband and Clegg denounce the far-right, the more it seems to thrive. Red-blooded Labour voters on the estates, who form the BNP’s most fruitful constituency, will not be brought to heel by Harriet Harman telling them with fastidious Fabian distaste how horrid they are. This is not to say that we should just ignore the BNP in the hope that it will disappear. We tried this with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg, and look where that got us. No, it is laughter, not condemnation, which will send Griffin and Co scuttling back under their stones: ridicule, not outrage. And what deadlier ammunition could there be than Matthew Collins’s book ‘Hate’? A one-time National Front man, he knows full well how mean, sordid and ludicrous these people are: ‘little more than a poorly organised pressure valve’, in his words, ‘built around obsessive personality cults’. You don’t so much join the far-right as step in it. His new comrades, delighted to have in their ranks a promising youngster who knew how to read, lost no time in making him Secretary to the National Executive, a meaningless title for an organisation whose national executive probably out-numbered its paying members. They had no policies, only grudges. They didn’t like black people. They didn’t like Jews. They didn’t like socialists. They really, really didn’t like the BNP, an NF offshoot which would soon grow to be the biggest turd in the swimming pool. What did they like? Drink, mostly. Violence. Holocaust denial. In Collin’s case, as he candidly informs us, perhaps a little too candidly for some tastes, furious and frequent masturbation. Collins, no means the first young man to nurse his grievances for want of a social life, girlfriend or job, wallowed in bigotry, ‘a dedicated follower of fascism’. One day though he changed his mind. ‘It just was not right to walk around for the rest of one’s life thinking stupid and wicked thoughts all of the time’. He began feeding information to the anti-Nazi magazine ‘Searchlight’, then watched the NF tear itself apart as it hunted the mole. He left the country on police advice for Australia; now he is back, doing splendid work for ‘Hope not Hate’ to warn others from the path he chose. His book is welcome and necessary, disturbing and hilarious. If ‘Hate’ bears at times a heavier imprint than one would like of m’learned friends learned bottoms – such as the NF’s dealings with Mr X, a once-famous media figure - this does not detract from Collins’s overall message. To paraphrase Anton Walbrook’s character in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, who can describe rabies better than one who has been bitten?