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Jeremy Corbyn has largely stayed above the fray, but the anti-Tory hysteria coursing through the Labour Party from the grassroots urgently needs to be tackled

Tim Montgomerie does my work for me in this edition, writing in CapX yesterday in anticipation of a Jeremy Corbyn victory:

There’s always been a nastiness on the Left. The Guardian is currently selling T-shirts (inspired by Bevan) that describe the Tories as lower than vermin. Harry Leslie Smith – who is now a regular turn at Labour Party events – compares Rebekah Brooks of News UK to Joseph Goebbels. An effigy of Margaret Thatcher in a coffin is paraded at the Durham Miners’ Gala – with a “rest in hell” message daubed upon it. At that Gala Len McCluskey attacks Tory ministers as “thieving bastards”.

Throughout the Labour leadership campaign the Twitter accounts of too many Corbyn supporters have routinely been vile, anti-Semitic and misogynistic. There’s nastiness on the Right too, of course but the Right has rarely enjoyed the moral high ground. Because many on the Left feel they are doing the work of God (or Marx) they feel even the worst of behaviour is ultimately in service of a good cause.

This is very true. There is a nastiness among the broadly mainstream Left toward their political opponents and certain segments of society (the Evil Tories, the “bankers”) which is just not present on the Right.

That’s not to say that newspaper comments sections and Facebook discussion groups are not full of semi-literate rants against asylum seekers, benefit scroungers or Muslims – they are. But they are not picked up in rhetoric or deed by the Conservative Party in the same way that some Labour MPs and officials are willing to publicly talk about the Right.

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