The moral vanity that makes Left think it’s OK to put up a banner saying ‘Hang Tories’

WHOEvEr would have thought the far Left would be in favour of restoring capital punishment? But apparently they are, for the most heinous of all crimes: which, in their eyes, is to be a member of the Conservative Party.

This would explain the gigantic banner suspended from a bridge in Manchester, where Conservative members have assembled for their annual conference. The banner’s slogan, in deepest red, reads: ‘Hang the Tories.’ In case we still don’t get the message, two effigies of men in dinner jackets are hanging by their necks from ropes attached to the bridge.

A number of Labour MPs have condemned this stunt: one, Gareth Snell, said: ‘If the people who did this think they speak for the Labour Party, be assured they do not.’ But it’s interesting, don’t you think, that Mr Snell felt he needed to offer us this reassurance. Why should it even be necessary for him to distance his party from such murderous statements?

Dangerous

Perhaps it is because some of the most influential figures in the party, figures very close to its leader Jeremy Corbyn, could not be relied upon to do so — and, indeed, have previously made clear their relish for exactly this sort of vile language.

Two years ago, the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell described the then Conservative disabilities minister Esther Mcvey as ‘a stain on humanity’ — and went on to quote someone who called for her to be ‘lynched’. Just like the effigies of Tories swinging from that bridge in Manchester (except Mcvey is a woman with a strong Liverpool accent, rather than the Tory toff of the hard-Left’s demonology).

Later, McDonnell denied that he was endorsing this call for Mcvey to be ‘lynched’. He’d just brought it up in the course of debate. As you do.

And he insisted: ‘I don’t believe in any threats of abuse or violence. I’ve said that continuously.’

I must have missed that. What I do recall is how McDonnell — a much more intelligent and dangerous figure than his comrade Corbyn — eulogised students who, as he put it, ‘kicked the s**t’ out of the Conservative Party Headquarters during the riots over student fees in 2010.

He described those smashing public property during that episode as ‘the best of our movement’ arguing that ‘we’ve got to encourage the direct action, in any form it can possibly take’.

Then there is Andrew Fisher, the man Mr Corbyn brought in as his chief political adviser despite the fact that Fisher had been suspended from the Labour Party for a number of — what shall we call them? — provocations.

Fisher, who was previously employed by McDonnell, bragged about how he had ‘taken back Whitehall’ during the 2010 riots (he was actually 30 at the time) and how ‘hundreds of people were enjoying the role reversal of the police being penned in and scared . . . I felt elated’.

Fisher also seems to have enjoyed the London riots of 2011 in which shopkeepers in Croydon experienced the horror and heartache of their businesses being looted and burned to the ground.

He described how ‘as soon as I heard things were kicking off in Croydon, I headed into the centre of town’. According to him, the looting was nothing more than ‘aggravated shopping’.

Now, the police (whose retreat from rioters so elated this intellectual darling of Jeremy Corbyn) are preparing to defend the right of Tory party members to go about their business in Manchester.

Even if they perform that protective role successfully, intimidation has resulted in at least one scheduled event — nothing more than an innocent ‘gin- tasting’ Conservative social evening — being cancelled. Threats on social media led the organisers to pull it: they felt they couldn’t guarantee the safety of those involved.

Doubtless those who would smash up a gin-tasting would not be threatening it purely for the love of violence itself, still less out of militant temperance.

No, it is justified — by its perpetrators — in the belief that all Conservatives are evil. Not mistaken: evil. All of them, without exception. This means any action taken against them can be seen as correspondingly virtuous. Indeed, it sanctifies the perpetrators of such action, up to and including physical violence.

Lethal

This attitude is not confined to the far Left. The extreme right has exactly the same mindset. It dehumanises its chosen enemy (as McDonnell described Esther Mcvey as a ‘stain on humanity’) and this allows it to treat them inhumanely — or even murderously.

The most lethal example is how the Nazis treated the Jews. Anything, including mass extermination, could be justified on the grounds that these people were inherently a threat to the wellbeing of the rest of humanity ( and, in particular, Germans).

I wouldn’t have brought up this period of history, except that last week one of Corbyn’s closest allies, the Labour MP Clive Lewis, appeared to accuse the Government of practising Nazi principles in its method of public administration.

Lewis told young Labour activists that in its alleged undermining of ‘the BBC, NHS, public services’, so- called ‘neoliberals’ (standard Left-wing jargon for anyone who believes in free markets) were emulating Nazi governing philosophy: ‘The Nazis actually developed a word for it. Gleichschaltung. They understood that when they came into power they had to undermine those civil democratic institutions and hollow them out until they are pointless or irrelevant.’ Lewis hastened to add that he was ‘not comparing the Conservative Government to the Nazis’. But he must have been aware of the effect on a young audience in telling them that there was a common factor between recent Conservative governments and the intolerance towards public institutions exhibited by the most methodically murderous regime in all human history.

And if we are going to compare any strains of modern British politics with the totalitarian regimes of the last century — which were Marxist as well as Fascist — then it is those who have no respect for the legal system who deserve to be so stigmatised.

Both Nazi and Communist regimes took the view that if you were on the right path politically, you were above the rule of law. And it is the rule of law, independent of the day-to-day whims of politicians, which most guarantees our long-held freedoms.

Abusive

Yet, when the Unite leader, Len McCluskey, recently declared his willingness to endorse industrial action which did not meet the legal requirements (backing by a ballot in which at least half a union’s membership took part), no member of Corbyn’s team — nor indeed Corbyn himself — was prepared to condemn what would be an illegal strike.

This is also profoundly undemocratic. It is for Corbyn, if his party can command a majority in the next Parliament, to use the power conferred by the ballot box to change the law on strikes: but not for him, or indeed Len McCluskey, to declare themselves above the law as it stands.

Mainstream Conservatives, like the overwhelming majority of the British people, have an ingrained respect for the rule of law: they do not regard our courts as the hired lackeys of the ruling class. And they lack the moral vanity of the Left, which means they are able to disagree without regarding their opponents as evil.

This may be why Conservatives have never attempted to disrupt a Labour Party conference, let alone use the threat of physical intimidation in their political campaigns.

It is not just Conservatives who are right to feel threatened by the intolerance that pervades the Corbyn cult. As it has tightened its grip on Labour, it is that party’s own MPs who feel most frightened to express dissent.

They remember what happened when Angela Eagle stood to challenge Corbyn’s leadership last year. She received what an internal Labour investigation described as hundreds of ‘abusive, homophobic’ — Eagle is a lesbian — ‘ and frightening’ messages. One of these messages was in the form of a brick thrown through her office window.

Jeremy Corbyn claims to stand for a ‘kinder, gentler politics’. It’s as if he’d never met John McDonnell. Or Andrew Fisher. The threatened violence in Manchester is absolutely in the spirit of their brand of politics. Coming soon to a street near you.