Steve suggests that "Standing outside an abortion clinic harassing women and their doctors is positively fascist. " OK, but what about harassing scientists who experiment with animals, or fox hunts, or badger culls? It appears to me that most of those would identify themselves as being on the left rather than the far right.

That is a good challenge and it's hard to respond to. The kneejerk and pretty useless response would be that abortion harassment is wrong but so are animal experimentation, fox hunting and badger culling. But saying that (in my opinion) the demonstrators have right on their side is not the same as saying that their violent tactics are right. I think that if they do that they are no better than the anti-abortion extremists. There are better ways of passionately informing people of your views than the use of harassment or violence. That is not to say that non-violent direct action can't be brilliant. I just don't think it's people you should be attacking, that's all. Many people work in jobs that fail ethically in my book. I'm opposed to Trident but I have to respect the fact that thousands of people who are employed in that industry are doing it, in hard times, to put food on their tables. I think that many farming practices are cruel and brutal, but in many ways the consumer society and demand for cheap food has forced that. I have many friends who work at CSOS Morwenstow, the listening station of GCHQ, which is just up the road from us. They have the ability to listen in to every telephone communication and email ever made in this country. I detest that but they are just bringing home the bacon, aren't they? Making the argument against does not require violence, and my view is that everyone who resorts to violent protest is in the same boat, whether I sympathise with their cause our not.

It's not difficult to think of a left-wing regime which built a wall dividing families, or which imprisoned millions. Or which persecuted gays.

This is not such a good challenge. Those regimes were not anything like approaching left-wing in my view. That label (or its variants, such as communist) was persistently applied by western regimes in the Cold War with an axe to grind and a foe to demonise. Very convenient, as "left", "reds" and "communist" were expressions that had been extremely successfully demonised for decades by US regimes in particular, culminating in McCarthyism, which still resounds with a good many yanks today, admit it. We regard Hitler as right-wing, Pinochet as right-wing and Franco as right-wing. So tell me what qualitative differences there were between the ways they treated their people and the way Stalin and Mao treated theirs. Not an easy one that, is it? More a case of a deliberately misapplied term, I'd say.