Famiglia ladrona.

For the last three days the Northern League has been the lead story in the Italian media. It began with the news that the party's treasurer, Francesco Belsito, was being investigated for corruption, then it emerged that public money had been diverted from the League to pay the expenses of various members of the family of its leader, Umberto Bossi. Today the Corriere della Sera carried the news that Bossi had resigned yesterday at 4.30.
The ghastly Northern League is a xenophobic and racist organisation which prides itself on the north's self-proclaimed superiority to the feckless southern Italians running the country from Roma Ladrona (thieving Rome). I found it extremely gratifying, if unsurprising, that their claim to moral superiority has been so spectacularly and comprehensively exploded. Far-right parties attract people who - dimly aware of their own brutish appearance and limited intelligence - seek to comfort themselves with the belief that whole sections of the human race are even stupider and more repellent than themselves. As Fielding pointed out in his preface to Joseph Andrewes, this affectation makes these unfortunate beings an object of ridicule:
" Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves ... but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth."
Far-right parties draw support from those with a desperate need to believe that whatever their own personal inadequacies, collectively they belong to a superior group, identifiable by the colour of its skin or geographical location. The mainstream right, however, attracts those who, in defiance of elementary logic, identify themselves with their economic betters. They are happy for the Posh-Boys to cut the top rate of tax for the very wealthy whilst withdrawing benefits from ordinary working people, because they identify themselves with the first group though in reality they belong to the second. When Brenda Last, in A Handful of Dust, is worried that her husband's poor relations may think she's patronising them, Aunt Frances tells her: "Dear child, all these feelings of delicacy are valueless; only the rich realise the gulf that separates them from the poor."