Sympathy for Diane Abbott
THERE are many tremendously annoying things about Labour MP Diane Abbott which have been endlessly picked over during her long career in politics. But do I wish her ill? Not in the slightest. I have better things to do than work myself into a lather over the present tribe of (as Robin Day said once) here-today-gonetomorrow politicians.
Though having said that I’ve noticed how anger is now the required mindset even among civilised people. The rule seems to be that if you’re not apoplectically angry about six things before breakfast then you don’t count.
This week in Westminster Hall there was a debate as Theresa May announced an investigation into the abuse that politicians now receive daily from the legions of the brain dead and angry. Much is misogynistic in the extreme, antiSemitic, violent, obscene, racist.
Diane Abbott spoke with great and understandable passion. She has had death threats, rape threats and has been described as a n ***** “over and over again”.
Of course if you go into public life you have to be thick-skinned. You have to be accountable and you have to put up with being lampooned and ridiculed, often in the press. But the level and intensity of the vitriol is now of a different order than in the past and it is entirely due to the internet.
One answer could be to go off Twitter but can any politician afford to do that now without being jeered at for being (everyone’s default insult) “out of touch”?
Diane Abbott made the point that in the past if someone wanted to let rip at a politician they had to go to the bother of writing a letter, finding a stamp and posting it. Now you merely need a smartphone, an opposable thumb, and a rudimentary grasp of English.
But it’s not only words. Yvette Cooper was photographed by some intrusive creep in the first class carriage of a train with the sneery tweeted question: “Was it too busy in standard?” Not exactly top political discourse is it? Sometimes it gets too close. Tory MP Maria Caulfield had her car tyres slashed outside her home. There are really unpleasant people out there.
When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader he called for a “kinder politics”. In 2015 he said: “Cut out the personal abuse, cut out the cyber-bullying and especially the misogynistic abuse online and let’s get on with bringing real values back into politics.” Well hear, hear. But what has happened is the precise opposite.
And both the hard Left and extreme Right are guilty though each routinely claims the high moral ground.
Even politicians are infected by the poison. In that debate Diane Abbott was asked by MP Andrew Percy whether it was really acceptable to say that Tories were murderers as John McDonnell recently did. “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that,” she said.
As I say, she can be tremendously annoying.