The 1980s saw the emergence of a new radically social movement in a few inner city councils in England. These councils, which were regarded as a laughing stock by both the right and the establishment socialists, were known as the loony left. ‘Marriage between two men? That’s mad! Only Whites are bad? How insane! Mass immigration from the third world? Don’t be stupid!’ – nobody thought their ideas would come to fruition. For added context, this small but growing phenomenon materialised at the exact same time when Margaret Thatcher banned the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and losing your virginity before marriage was still a thorny topic among all social classes.

Yet the policies of the loony left, which were then seen as so fringe that people regarded believers as clinically insane, are now central pillars of the societies we reside in the year 2020. What’s more, Margaret Thatcher’s party, the Conservatives, have enacted much of these policies, and have themselves proclaimed anybody who is against them of being insane. Such a 180 degree turn in 35 years is quite remarkable, yet it is easily explainable.

As in the late 19^th century, when the creation of the London County Council proved to be a testing ground for radical socialist policies, so the inner city councils of the 1980s in the 20^th century proved to be a testing ground for cultural Marxist and bio-Leninist policies. The High Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) created the London County Council in 1889, hoping it could provide a body more understanding of the needs of the local poor. However, he came to regret this move, because the urban civil structure he created was simply used as a stepping stone for the radical left’s organisation and progress through the institutions.

By the late 1940s during Clement Attlee’s Labour Government, the phrase ‘housing for the poor’ was banned in London because it was seen as offensive, and was replaced by the term ‘social housing’ instead. This rephrasing marked the beginnings of political correctness in Britain, and it was the direct result of the Left’s slow conquest of London’s civil structure, which as I mentioned was created by a well-intentioned Conservative. It may seem rather mundane to complain that politicians in 1948 could no longer call poor people poor, yet the slippery slope in language policing that it enabled became relentless, and has led to people looking over their shoulder to speak the truth in the present day – even in rural areas.

Instead of an isolated, one off pocket of left wing radicalism in the inner cities, it is always in reality a testing ground for policies that, like their predecessors, will slowly tear the West apart. And that’s the key aspect of all of this – that small activism by dedicated groups in local areas is likely to be amplified in the ensuing decades. As we saw in Britain in the 1990s, a new generation of the left can take on fringe ideas and make them law and social orthodoxy on a national scale, but only if they hide them until they win elected office.

The Labour Party in the mid-1990s abandoned the hard-left trade unionism of old and rebranded as ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair. This new form of the centre-left, which embraced big business and liberal welfare spending, ran on the 1997 election winning slogan ‘Education, Education, Education’. The slogan was very effective, yet in reality it was in part a smokescreen to hide the real intentions of the party. Within just 4 years of them being in office, gays had adoption rights, the borders had been fully opened, the death penalty for treason had been abolished, and the hereditary House of Lords was replaced with a House of Life Peers. Most White working class voters had no idea about any of that, and would have been a lot more sceptical of Labour if those policies had been publicly known.

A few years ago on the internet, the issue of ‘low hanging fruit’ was a criticism levelled at classical and centrist liberals who fought against social justice warriors, yet refused to tackle much more deep and controversial issues. It is of course true that producing a video making fun of an unhinged feminist is easier than producing a video about Race and IQ. However, that doesn’t mean that the fight against social justice is pointless, and indeed as this year has shown it was probably the one fight, as well as immigration, that needed to be won. Yes, a purple haired feminist who screams ‘kill all men’ is insane. Yet on the flipside, it’s also true that her beliefs in regards of race, crime, education, abortion and gay marriage are now not only passed with legislation, but are also held up as orthodoxy by the courts. She may be crazy, but she has power on her side – which is why the culture wars rumble on in her favour. Just because an issue is easy to critique, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be critiqued. This logic applies on a geographic basis as well – just because a left wing phenomenon is small, urban and localised, that doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

In the natural world, when a fruit falls from a tree, it is either eaten by a human or animal, or it rots down slowly producing a hideous mass. In political terms however, if the fruit is a representation of ideology, then it never really rots down at all. It can be picked up again by a new generation of people, or a new political party, and cultivated in a future context – no matter how small it may be. Unlike 150 years of conservatives, you must never give them a chance to spread their seeds. As in the inner city boroughs of Britain in the 1890s and 1980s which I mentioned, low hanging fruit were in reality the first signs of a rather threatening future, and were more than just an isolated mental asylum.

In the same way that minor political activists prove to be a tiny but necessary cog in a national party machine, so a fringe idea can be the seed which can grow into a giant fatal tree. If there’s a new and concerning idea that instinctively threatens you; instead of laughing it off and dismissing it as a small, localised phenomenon that won’t get anywhere, your best bet is to treat is as the monster of the future taking baby steps. And if a new idea has both good and bad aspects to it – like social media did in the mid-2000s – then make you sure constitutionally surround it before it grows too important and powerful.

Conservatives laughed when the term ‘social housing’ replaced ‘housing for the poor’ in 1948, seeing it as outlandish buffoonery, yet their grandchildren aren’t laughing when they’re sitting in a jail cell for stating a historical fact. A lot of people are too naïve to realise the national consequences of localised madness until it is too late.

Indeed, this also applies to communities on the internet. After all, the fringe ideas that were floated on Tumblr in 2008-12 are now both public policy and culturally significant on a hemispheric scale. A selection of celebrity endorsements, donors, and politicians were all that was needed to elevate Tumblr-tier thought to the masses, and this kind of cultural machine shows no sign of ending. Tumblr was the laughing stock of conservatives back in the early 2010s, yet that site’s SJWs have had most of their policies pushed through society as if they were a freight train on rocket fuel. Instead of ‘low hanging fruit’, perhaps such phenomenon should be called ‘the future great enemy’. Don’t laugh at small enemy armies – defeat them before they become large armies.