Leftists Aren't Pink or Red They're Pale Grey

From George Baker, of the Times Online [pointer from Melanie Phillips]:

... What does th[e] surprising, tentative resurgence for the Left signify in global politics? Not a triumph for progressive policies, that’s for sure. On the contrary, if you look hard at what unites the left across Europe and the US, it is decidedly reactionary.

... The French Left, and its allies in the rest of Europe, stands not for some progressive dream of international solidarity for the dispossessed, but four-square behind the protection of the continent’s own illusory privileges.

The Left’s new rallying cry is to build a protective system that would impoverish Bulgarians, Romanians, Turks, Indians and Chinese and would, of course, as do all attempts to retreat from the realities of the global market, ill serve its own workers.

And the real kicker:

In the Middle East the left finds it much easier to side with the mullahs and the jihadists, the persecutors of women and the torturers of dissidents. America’s flaws at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed by the Left’s political and intellectual leaders as morally indistinguishable from (or perhaps worse than) anything the Islamists and Arab despots have got up to.