Contrition’s a Long way off

THE new year will bring a leadership contest for the Labour Party, which should promise a bumper crop of meaningless slogans.

In fact, they’ve started already, with Rebecca Long-Bailey coming up with something called “progressive patriotism”. This is because even Labour has noticed that most voters, especially in its now former heartlands, don’t automatically think “colonial oppressor” every time Britain is mentioned, but are in fact quite fond of their country, as they are of their home town.

But rather than simply acknowledge that fact, Long-Bailey, right with Jeremy Corbyn, has to remember a lot of party members are hard-Left, so she has to qualify her supposed patriotism with the “progressive” prefix. Thus rendering it as vapid as, say, David Cameron’s “big society”.

I’m starting to see why Long-Bailey’s nickname among opponents is

Wrong-Daily...

Lord Justice of appeal Sir Alan Moses has just stood down from leading the Independent Press Standards Organisation, by acknowledging how “deeply offensive” some comments can be, but emphasising: “There is no right not to be offended.”

threat to that succinct definition of free speech was demonstrated straight away in the furore over one such deeply offensive word – “faggot”. It featured in the lyrics of a performance of The Pogues’

Fairytale Of New York in the BBC’s Gavin & Stacey Christmas special, and provoked a predictable social media storm, epitomised by one user who claimed: “Even if it offends one person that’s one person too many”.

even a moment’s thought betrays the absurdity of that assertion. Or as Ricky Gervais put it in an interview this month, so-called “hate speech” is an invention of those who “feel they shouldn’t have to hear something they don’t agree with, and want to complain”.