Stephen Pollard

during the Rochester and Strood by-election in 2014 a picture of a house with a white Transit van parked outside and three St George flags hanging from its window, alongside the caption “image from #Rochester”? Her sneering contempt was so obvious that she had to resign her front bench position (although she has been brought back by Jeremy Corbyn to the heights of shadow foreign secretary).

And it’s not just the hard Left. Gordon Brown, infamously, was caught on tape during the 2010 election describing Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter in Rochdale, as a “bigoted woman” because she had dared to ask him about immigration. There are any number of such examples. And in the context of Ms Abbott’s remarks about Brexit they all show the same thing.

They show the mindset that explains why it is that the Remainers lost. It is a mindset that regards anything that does not emerge from the Leftliberal establishment as being beyond the pale.

That means that any concern with the scale of immigration, or even with the simple idea of having control of our borders, is not merely wrong but actually racist.

In this, Ms Abbott perhaps speaks in her typically blundering

BUT whatever the context, it was clear that Ms Abbott expressed a generalised opinion of how “white people” behave – the very definition of racism, attributing uniform characteristics to one “race”.

Imagine the uproar there would have been if a white politician said that “black people love playing divide & rule”. And yet after Diane Abbott’s remarks on Monday there has been barely a sniff of comment – and certainly not from her fellow Corbynites.

Of course there hasn’t been because this is how they think. They really do think that ordinary voters – the 52 per cent of the country that made clear what they think of the EU – are nasty, uncouth louts whose views deserve to be treated only with contempt. Is it any wonder the Remainers lost?

And is it any wonder that, while Mr Corbyn enjoys riproaring support from the hard Left who propelled him back to the Labour leadership last Saturday, the rest of the country looks on with horror?

And wants nothing to do with any of them.

‘Contempt for decent working people’