Stop calling each other Nazis, MPs are warned

MPS risk fuelling violence against politicians if they continue to troll each other online and calling each other nazis, Theresa May’s deputy said yesterday.

First Secretary Damian Green warned colleagues hostile discussions on Twitter could inspire abuse offline as opponents are portrayed as ‘not quite human’.

Following the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, Mr Green said politicians needed to think about who was reading their tweets and whether they could encourage attacks. He also went on to slam political websites which pedal extreme views. Mr Green said: ‘I think everyone before they go in studs up on a political opponent needs to think long and carefully about whom they are talking to.

‘It might play well with your own troops to give an opponent a big kicking on the latest microsite but perhaps it behoves us all to ask, “who’s reading it and what are they going to do next?”’

He added: ‘ We have in the past few years witnessed a sad and completely ridiculous rise in routine comparisons to Hitler and the nazis. It is symptomatic not just of a decline, but of a rapidly increasing viciousness in our discourse which is totally out of kilter with what I see day after day in the Commons.

‘Even when we are in the chamber or on the media giving it what-for, we need to remember that we are all democratic politicians. What is pernicious is the attempt to portray your political opponents as somehow not quite human.

His speech comes weeks after the Daily Mail revealed that one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest allies had claimed British governments have enforced power like the nazis.

Hard-Left MP Clive Lewis told young Labour activists that political leaders had ‘ systematically undermined’ the nHS, the BBC and public services.

He likened this to the nazi policy of seizing power by forcing all institutions to toe the same line, called ‘Gleichschaltung’.

at an event run by pro-Corbyn group Momentum, he said: ‘One of the things that neo-liberalism has done, it has undermined [the BBC and the nHS], systematically undermined them.

‘The Germans – the nazis – actually developed a word for it. It’s called Gleichschaltung’.

Mr Green said the level of online abuse aimed at politicians was ‘appalling’ and did not reflect the reality of life in the House of Commons where MPs frequently worked with opponents on a cross-party basis. He also criticised websites such as the Jeremy Corbyn- supporting Canary and Skwawkbox, as well as Right-wing Breitbart.

The ashford MP said: ‘I do think we need to respect each other’s motives and treat each other’s views with courtesy. If we don’t we risk feeding an atmosphere of increasing hatred which at the most horrible extremes led to an event like the killing of Jo Cox.’

Exposed: Corbyn ally’s vile Nazi slur on our democracy From the Mail, September, 30