Owen Jones is clearly channelling the British Left’s guilty conscience.
As the stories of left-wing hysteria and bad behaviour following the Conservative election victory rack up, at least one left-wing commentator is finally starting to feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at the words being said and misdeeds committed in the name of so-called principled opposition to the Evil Tories.
For Owen Jones, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the way that UKIP’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell, was set upon by foul-mouthed, threatening activists as he waited for a bus outside Parliament. But even now, Jones is unable to simply express regret or disapproval, choosing instead to water down his criticism of the anti-Tory hysteria in a broader (and redundant) argument defending the activists’ right to protest.
So we’re clear, the way [Carswell] was reportedly treated was out of order. Protest is a basic democratic right, won at great cost by our ancestors. It is often passionate and angry, be it about cuts to public services or opposition to the ban on fox hunting. It includes civil disobedience, employed by protest movements ranging from the suffragettes to tax justice campaigners.
If a disabled sufferer of the bedroom tax angrily accosted Iain Duncan Smith, it would not be the place of privileged me to tut at them. But subjecting Douglas Carswell to what was undoubtedly a frightening and upsetting experience was totally wrong, and it is difficult to see what those involved hoped to achieve.
However, his attempt to use the incident to make political gain – and resort to sweeping generalisations about the left – cannot go without a response. “Austerity, according to the left, is the ultimate evil,” writes Carswell. Well, no, actually. I suspect most on the left, if asked for “ultimate evils”, would opt for, say, genocide, war or murder.
Heaven forfend that those of us on the right should point out the moral wrong of physically and verbally intimidating someone simply because they hold right-wing political views. This is the kind of principle that the Old Left (wherever they went) would have been rushing to the barricades to defend – but apparently no longer.
Never mind that Douglas Carswell, their latest victim, is actually UKIP’s member of parliament and no longer a Tory. The protesters may not have done their homework in this case, but the scene would only have been worse had more of them known this fact.
(The general degree of hatred and outright hostility shown by the activist Left increases exponentially as you move further away from the dull, lumpen centre of British politics and towards the right.)
“I’ve just been attacked by a – by a mob, walking home. You can see I’ve just been surrounded by several hundred people, by hard lefties, just… just unbelievable. It got really, really nasty, and I’m an elected MP trying to get home at the end of the day and I run into a mob who, you know, were insane.”
Insane is just about the only word strong enough to describe the hysteria which has gripped much of the Left since David Cameron’s unexpected election victory. From the expressions of disgust in their fellow voters for not embracing Ed Miliband, the alarmist warnings that the NHS would now immediately be sold off to Evil American corporations and the melodramatic apocalypse warnings sounded by those who just like their government big and intrusive, it quickly became apparent that the Left were drinking so much of their own Kool-Aid that they were no longer capable of viewing conservatives as anything more than two-dimensional cartoon villains.
And it is far easier to shout “Tory scum” while chasing UKIP’s sole MP into the back of a police van than it is to ruminate on why his party picked up thirteen per cent of the national vote.
The only comfort for the British Left – not that they are rational enough to notice at present – is the fact that the Tories are so timid in their embrace of real conservatism, and so intellectually stymied from having nodded along to arguments about the inviolability of the post-war consensus for so many decades, that even given a free hand with their slim parliamentary majority they are unlikely to do anything to radically shrink the state where it most needs to be shrunk.
But this won’t be a comfort forever. Eventually, at some point in the next few years, the Left will stop taking so much joy in self-righteous opposition and actually aspire to govern once again. And this will not be possible if the Labour Party becomes indelibly associated with screaming, hate-filled mobs shouting “Tory scum!” at decent public servants as they go about carrying out our democracy.
More Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch here, here and here.
UPDATE:
Appearing on the BBC’s Daily Politics show today, Douglas Carswell had this to say when asked by Andrew Neil if he had not somehow deserved the abuse he received because of UKIP’s political stances:
Andrew Neil: Does it have something to do with UKIP, though, because it is – although the UKIP overall policy attempts not to be racist, there is a widespread feeling that there is racism in your party?
Douglas Carswell: Well, maybe one or two commentators watching this show and watching those clips might want to ask themselves has stuff they’ve said over the past seven or eight months perhaps created the intellectual space that allows a mob to feel it’s justified to attack an MP.
I’m not sure that “intellectual space” is necessarily the best term to describe the cumulative effect of all the anti-UKIP commentary flying around before the election – after all, there was certainly nothing remotely intellectual going on in the minds of the snarling young activists who hounded Carswell yesterday – but his point is a good one, and well made.
When is it okay to make obscene Hitler comparisons and to mock cancer survivors, while still claiming to be an enlightened, privilege-checking, compassionate progressive?
Well apparently if your name is Sandi Toksvig and you are speaking at the Hay Festival – the “Woodstock of the mind“, according to Bill Clinton – then you have a license to do just that while still being taken seriously as a decent, responsible individual.
Toksvig saved her most cutting remarks for Nigel Farage. ‘I watched the count for South Thanet and I found myself cheering for the Tory candidate,’ she told the audience. ‘I hate Farage for that, I really do. He made me cheer a Tory, the b—-rd.’
She then went on to refer to the testicle the Ukip leader lost to cancer, joking about what Farage and Hitler have in common: ‘Farage kept having pictures of him defaced with Hitler moustaches. I mean he’s not really like Hitler. Okay, he has a German wife, he hates foreigners, he only has one testicle and he was defeated.’
Imagine now that Sandi Toksvig had launched a crass verbal tirade against a senior politician of any other party while living it up at the Hay Festival. Suppose that she had made a joke about David Cameron’s late son, Ivan, or chortled to herself as she regaled her audience with a wisecrack about Ed Miliband’s deviated septum. Hell, imagine that Toksvig had just made fun of Ed Balls’ mild stammer.
If Toksvig had done any of these things it would have been a national scandal – guaranteed front page stories in all the national newspapers. Forget any more lucrative gigs on BBC Radio, Toksvig would have counted herself lucky to work as a volunteer on hospital radio after so openly and tastelessly mocking an establishment party leader.
According to Muslim News, Ed Miliband has promised to make “Islamophobia” illegal:
“We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime […]We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear of our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia. It will be the first time that the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country,” Ed allegedly told the editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J. Versi.
Now, I cannot be certain as to the veracity of this statement nor the accuracy of the quotations. I am not certain of the integrity or quality of The Muslim News so I am assessing this with some scepticism while using it as a starting point to discuss a broader theme.
For me, whether Ed Miliband really intends this or not, it is a reminder of the essentially morally corrupt nature of the concept of hate crime. Is it healthy that Muslims should rejoice that they will be recognised by a law identifying them as a separate group, worthy of a special law, to gain parity with Jews and homosexuals? I would contend that it would be better for the social fabric of our society that their sense of separation be eroded rather than made official by law.
Hate crime is identity politics in legislative form, it erodes the principles that uphold the common law; that all are equal before it, it is the law of the land and applies to all, rich, poor, black, white, Muslim, Christian, the government and the governed. Hate crime is divisive because it creates further barriers and aggravates the sense of otherness that minority groups feel.
Operation Rising Panther, the first of six proposed air defence operations due to take place every year, will “show Vladimir Putin in no uncertain terms” that Britain is ready, willing and able counter increasing Russian aggression should the need arise, say military sources.
More than 30 aircraft, including 20 Typhoons and Tornado fighter jets as well as a range of ED-3, AWACS, Sentinal and Shadow surveillance aircraft took part in the mock attack-and-defence wargames over the North east of England, as well as ground-based command teams.
At first glance, this sounds like a positive development – like maybe the British government has finally woken up to the fact that history did in fact not end at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that future threats to our national interest and national security will remain, and be unpredictable, for many years to come. Given the circumstances, a show of force by the British military might be no bad thing.
The Ministry of Defence played down Rising Panther’s significance, maintaining that it was merely the first opportunity since the end of hostilities in Afghanistan to hold an air exercise of this scale.
“Due to our continuing commitment to operations overseas, this is the first time we have had the full spectrum of our capability operating together at the same time in a realistic, opposed, environment,” said Wing Commander Andy Coe in the Ministry of Defence-run RAF News.
He added that this was the first time that the RAF had used AWACS and Sentinel together because they have been “in such high demand” in theatres abroad.
It is the facts that are implied, rather than those which are stated, which are most significant here.
Semi-Partisan Politics 