Wishart hits on a deeper problem
WHEN people ask what Pete Wishart is like, I always answer, quite honestly, he’s one of the nice guys at Westminster.
The musician turned politician is good company and doesn’t take himself too seriously. People are surprised when I say that because while Wishart is gentleman in the flesh, he is an online Mr Hyde.
The SNP MP is prone to dishing it out heavy on Twitter and taking no prisoners. Yet when he made a reasoned case for delaying a second independence referendum, Wishart felt the hornet’s sting of the cybernats.
He wrote: “I was surprised by the vehemence of people I presumed were political comrades. It would be easy to dismiss that as ‘just Twitter’ but I know that environment reasonably well and have to conclude we might have an issue and difficulty in our movement.”
Easy to say, “we told you so, Pete” but he’s hit on a deeper problem. Just as Corbynistas brook no criticism, many nationalists will not let anyone question their holy grail.
Politicians like Wishart now have to live with followers who use the web and politics as a version of George Orwell’s “two minute hate”. Sadly for Pete, and everyone else, there’s little reasoned debate.
Only outrage drives online traffic and in their Facebook newsfeeds, people read a datadriven reinforcement of their own prejudice. Wishart’s belated discovery of this switchblade traffic would not surprise Orwell, nor RL Stevenson either.
As Dr Jekyll said: “If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”