The far-left’s abuse tactics always backfire

Unlike the impeccably civil Jacob Rees-mogg, I found it hard to check my anger when I was targeted

It was a sun-dappled May morning in 2015. The General Election in which I was standing to be a Bristol MP was in less than a week. The police were on their way and I was surveying the damage to my parent’s property, making futile efforts to overcome my physical rage.

My parents’ cars had been vandalised: sprayed with an “A” for anarchist, along with a rather tired slogan involving the words “Tory” and “whore”. A few months back, my team and I had laughed off graffiti that had appeared on my constituency office wall, informing me that I was a “fracking whore”. What, then, was different about this new insult?

Targeting my place of work with abuse, however unedifying, was at least clumsily playing the ball, not the woman. This was not only playing the woman, but her family as well.

I was angry. We hate to see people we love get hurt – although my parents seemed far more resilient about it than me. But my anger was turbo-charged with disgust. It was pathetic. These people would not face me in debate so had resorted to vandalising the property of pensioners. As I pondered this, I began to feel sorry for the offenders. In their warped little way, they thought they were fighting for something good. But they were tragically misled.

And this has, sadly, become part of a pattern. This week, we have seen Jacob Rees-mogg face a vitriolic attack on his family – including his children, who were harangued outside their own home by activists from the Class War group. Whatever your view of Mr Rees-mogg and his stance on Brexit (which I do not share), it is difficult not to see this as a despicable spectacle, and Mr Rees-mogg’s reaction – which was impeccably polite – as impressive in comparison. Last year, he was also a pillar of calm when far-left students disrupted a speech he was giving in Bristol.

What do they think they are achieving, these extremists? They are certainly not changing any minds. No one will listen to the opinions of a man who is shouting at a politician’s little child. Mr Rees-mogg’s consistently dignified response, meanwhile, means such attacks make him look like a hero – surely the opposite of what Class War intended. In the same vein, I have to thank my anarchist vandals for persuading far more Labour supporters to vote for me in the 2015 election than I could ever have achieved through door-knocking. The support I received was overwhelming. I sympathised with my Labour opponent whose electoral effort they had so undermined.

So why do they still do it? The self-defeating trap the far-left often fall into is to exaggerate the tendency of some Left-wingers to think they have a monopoly on morality. They believe that their own inherent virtue excuses any vile behaviour to further it. “I am moral, they disagree with me, therefore they are immoral!” they cry, merrily dehumanising their opponents and shouting at their children, while energetically proclaiming on the evils of dehumanisation and the need to protect children.

This, of course, is not solely a Left-wing issue. While I experienced vandalism from anarchists and Mr Rees-mogg’s family faced aggressive far-left protests, the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a selfproclaimed far-right extremist. The restraint and calm shown by her family in the face of this atrocity is extraordinary.

We must resist the temptation to overlook the radicalism of our own political extremes. To a Conservative, the far-left might seem the only threat; to a Labour party member, only the far-right movement. But if we are to tackle the toxicity both these extremes bring to our country, we must call them out for what they both are – fundamentally the same: ideologies that excuse dehumanisation in the cause of some unquestionable greater good. It can start with small and unremarkable tweets or verbal abuse. But it is the thin-end of the wedge and it can end diabolically.

So, if you ever find yourself angrily justifying undeniably bad behaviour for the sake of a greater cause – watch out. Even when it is that momentarily overwhelming desire to land one on the person who attacked your parents’ house.