I’m trying to understand what happened in the Netherlands election, and make sense of the rash of analyses I’ve read about Europe’s “swing to the right”. I don’t believe there’s a swing to the right – I believe there are different swings and cycles happening, that are clashing with each other, making it less easy to decide who the good guys are. It may be worrying that it’s not so clear – but at least we can be on our guard, for complacency in these matters is toxic. Besides, life and politics have never been clear cut.

Liberation movements that are based on redressing injustice – anti-racism, anti-colonialism, trade unionism, feminism, gay/lesbian activism, animal rights activism, anti-capitalism, have, at their source, a howl of outrage against hate, a wound that hurts so much that it drives individuals to great lengths to stop it hurting, for themselves and for those similar to them. These movements are not the only dynamic forces in politics, but they are increasingly potent; and they have similar trajectories and downfalls.

At the early stages of all these movements, the situation is often clear, and things can be seen in black and white terms (pun deliberate). The status quo is defended by reactionaries, who are invested in maintaining it, the radicals agitate for change, and the majority in the middle, usually with no strong feelings either way, are won over. However, as the movements advance, and the wound is healed by revolution or evolution into a fairer system, something very human happens. The status quo settles into dull, sometimes

moribund, ordinariness, until the next howl of pain is heard, from a new quarter, with new

opponents, and a new debate.

Occasionally, these cycles overlap, so that a

radical on the up with one liberation movement – Pym Fortuyn, a flamboyant gay man enjoying political leadership and popularity – can also be a reactionary, pitting himself against another liberation movement, one that espouses the rights of minority cultures and races in his country.

When I first heard the news that he had been killed, I assumed it was because he was a queer radical – I had only heard about him a week before, in a radio documentary that focussed on his sexuality. I felt energised and oddly gutted, thinking that the gay liberation movement had another martyr for the cause, like California’s Harvey Milk. And then it transpired that the reactionaries in the other cycle, the right-wing anti-immigrationists, could claim him as their martyr, and I felt oddly flat and disappointed. I apologise for revealing such tawdry thoughts, and him not yet buried. But in examining the avowed politics of his assassin – an environmental activist – one becomes aware of the irony that untrammelled free market capitalism is their mutual enemy. It destroys the environment, and requires migrating blue-collar labour from poorer countries to sustain it, when it reaches its late stages in wealthy countries.

His party’s success in the polls demonstrates that, in the Netherlands at least, the movement for gay liberation has succeeded well enough to allow him to gain prominence, however briefly and/or posthumously. His Diana-like send off was proof that he wasn’t simply a clever technocrat or pugilistic demagogue – he hit a chord in Dutch society, and it doesn’t sound like it was hate-filled.

Fortuyn said he was anti-Islamic, not racist. He deplored the way the sexual liberation he

cherished so much in his ultra-liberal country was being eroded by (a) fundamentalist religion. I identify with his passion 100% – I detest fundamentalist religion from Catholicism to Mormonism to Islam. Because, with fundamentalism, there always has to be a scapegoat, and that scapegoat is usually queer, after women have been put in their place. Queers epitomise resistance to dogmatic religion. I’d love the polarity between queer and spiritual to not be so extreme, but that’s not my doing.

If one only views the world through victim/oppressor glasses (and it’s very depressing if you do, you don’t see any rainbows, only monochrome), Pym Fortuyn was oppressed as a queer; as a white male, he was the oppressor. What’s new in Fortuyn’s message is that he believed that the so-called “oppressed” black minority, especially the Muslims, are not victims, but are gaining in power at local level in some urban areas, and are promulgating offensive, hate-filled, oppressive policies against queers, and, by extension, liberal secular Dutch society, the status quo. Fortuyn dared to accuse a minority of being hateful. And in so doing, he was playing with fire, and stirring a hornet’s nest of scapegoating hate – perhaps unwittingly, perhaps consciously – we’ll never know what he intended, only what his followers manage to do in government.

I do not respect a religion that hates, that ostracises, that punishes, that shames those who are different in its midst. I abhor that in my

society young teenagers could be trapped in

fundamentalist families and schools, and taught to hate their god-given sexuality, leading to lives of self-hate and misery, if not shortened due to suicide. I do not believe that religious freedom means freedom from questioning, from reasoning, from a liberal education. Religious education in Northern Ireland has resulted in one of the most segregated hate-filled communities in Europe, with individuals living their entire lives without having even spoken to a member of the opposite tribe.

While sharing Fortuyn’s queerness and

passionate anti-fundamentalism, I do not believe the answer lies in a selective, racist, immigration policy. The global market is here to stay, and labour will move across the world where the employment is. It is not racist to question what this means to the social fabric of the host cultures; it is not racist to call into question what it means to be Irish or British if there are new members to include in our self-definition. Avoidance of the subject can lead to denial that there is a problem, which can be very unhealthy. But that’s not to say there is automatically a “problem” when there is immigration from another culture – different societies have different ways of adapting.

Having been living out of Ireland since the Celtic tiger brought in new immigrants, I have no real first-hand experience of how we are coping with the new Irish. But recently, when I was on a Dublin bus, the driver was black – and I noticed it, the way I wouldn’t in London. I was pondering on the difference when I realised, with pleasure, how everyone was saying “thanks” or “cheers” or “good luck” to him as they got off the bus, the way we usually do to bus drivers in Dublin, and this is never done in grey London. And his intensely white smile hardly ever left his face as he was doing his job. It says something nice, but I’m not quite sure what yet.

Instead of resorting to an obnoxious system of admission to a country based on race or culture, it should be open doors, matching skills to what work there is going. I’d rather a secular society, with proper protection for kids from hate-filled religious fundamentalists at school, and the freedom to choose what religion one wanted to practice as an adult, even if it’s fundamentalist. I’d love a society that shared the same easy-going humour and friendliness, no matter where our parents came from, what religion we practised, who we slept with, or what colour our skin was. In such a society, fundamentalism cannot flourish, but faith – from Islam to Buddhism to Christianity to good old humanistic kindness – can blossom in mutual respect.