What do want? Sensible moderation!

A walk throught UCL's main Bloomsbury site offers an interesting cross section of political flyposting : the Socialist Workers Party summer school, still going after 40 years; the more obscure and exotic Internation Bolshevik Tendency urging cash machine users to 'Defend, Extend the Gains of the Chinese Revolution' while they get out ten quid for lunch; a Maoist-oriented meeting in SOAS to support of the 'People's War in Nepal'; an anarchist sticker to 'Sack Parliament and End of All Wars' and some posters protesting UCL investment in the arms trade.

So, I was pleased to see a handmade poster on a phone box moderately asking the world to "Use Our Oil Resources Wisely". Impressive moderation.

Even academics, although themselves not usually politically that radical, have an obsession with radicalism and radicals. Far right and far left exercise a truly hypnotic fascination as far as academic artilce and research outputs are concerned. There be a small mountain of literature on the (basically marginal) far right in Europe. As colleague and I at Sussex wondered, only half in jest, should we perhaps supplent the Political Studies Association specialist group on Extremism and Democracy with a specialist group Jolly Moderate and Reasonable Parties or Inoffensive Centrist Politics.... The Czech satirist Jaroslav Hasek, author of that anarchic masterpiece of Czech literature, the Good Solider Svejk, however, got about a centruy before us by founding aParty for Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law.