New Labour embraced them with open eyes

On 7 March 2009, Stephen Glover said this in The Daily Mail:

"Twice this week I have been reminded of a peculiar quality of the British. WE LOVE TO PRAISE, HONOUR AND REWARD THOSE WHO DON'T REALLY LIKE US - WHO MAY INDEED HATE US.

While Gordon Brown was sweet-talking the Americans, it was announced that an honorary knighthood is being conferred on 77-year-old Senator Edward Kennedy...

One might suppose that Mr Kennedy... was an old friend of this country. BUT HE ISN'T... During the Seventies he portrayed the British role in Northern Ireland as one of virtual occupation, and even suggested that the majority Protestant population be encouraged to 'return' to Britain.

91-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawm... has lived in this country since 1933... One might suppose that Mr Hobsbawm was a kindly old gentleman who would never harm a flea. A panegyric by Seumas Milne in The Guardian newspaper called him Britain's 'greatest living historian'. HE IS ALMOST INVARIABLY SO DESCRIBED...

The truth about Mr Hobsbawm is almost the exact opposite of what has been stated. For most of his adult life Mr HOBSBAWM SUPPORTED THE SOVIET UNION, whose methods made MI5 look like a bunch of amateurs...

He either turned a blind eye to Soviet atrocities, OR JUSTIFIED THEM. He defended... the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. He deprecated Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's totalitarian methods. Long after decent fellow communists had disowned Soviet communism, HOBSBAWM REFUSED TO CONDEMN IT.

In his book On History, published in 1997, he wrote: 'Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal, use of force was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.' Somehow, he had forgotten about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Asked whether 'the radiant tomorrow' promised by Stalin would have justified 'the loss of 15 to 20 million people', HOBSBAWM SIMPLY REPLIED: 'YES'...

Despite all this - despite his well-publicised support for an inhumane regime - he is widely treated as a grand, as well as a delightful old man, whose views deserve to be venerated.

One may wonder why Hobsbawm should seek an honour from a country for which he has never shown much affection, and whose interests he undermined during the Cold War through his support for the Soviet Union...

It would be as pointless to demand that he be stripped of his Companion of Honour as it would be to ask Gordon Brown to think again about Senator Kennedy's honorary knighthood. NEW LABOUR HAS EMBRACED BOTH THESE GHASTLY MEN WITH OPEN EYES." 

'We love to praise, honour and reward those who don't really like us - who may indeed hate us,' says Glover. This, of course, is not true. We have never wanted anything to do with 'those who don't really like us,' much less anyone who 'hates' us. However, the powers-that-be do indeed 'love to praise, honour and reward' those who hate us.

The better to dismay and demoralise those whom they, themselves, hate.

Kennedy, who died in 2009, was an American of Irish Catholic descent. Hobsbawm, who followed him to the infernal regions in 2012, was Jewish.