The fanatical intolerance of the liberal Left is a sin against Reason

I was there when liberalism became illiberal. This election is a chance to restore value to argument

back then. At first, he was heard in silence but when his arguments were considered to be too tortuous and indefensible to be tolerated, some students began to object – assertively and loudly.

I clearly remember arguing after the event with a friend who, like me, was an active member of the protest movement. She insisted that the vociferous student anger was wrong: that rudeness was always objectionable. And then I said: “but this man is an apologist for unspeakable acts. This makes the normal rules of courtesy not just irrelevant but repugnant”.

Our moment of disagreement was, of course, one tiny instance of a debate that would grow into a full-blown litany of moral certitude. At the time, and to this day, my side of that argument won hands down. The wholesale adoption of this principle – that those whose views you oppose are so immoral that they deserve no consideration – has now become such an entrenched doctrine of Leftist philosophy that it can be used to shut down almost any useful discussion of political policy.

All sense of proportion has been lost: when napalm was being dropped on Vietnamese villages and civil rights workers were being murdered in Mississippi because they were trying to register black voters, the claim that people on the other side were not worthy of respect had real traction. But should this anathema apply when you are debating tax policy, the public ownership of industries or – most urgently – membership of the EU?

All of the things that are so pertinent to this election campaign – how much tax should be paid by whom, whether the state is best suited to own and manage the production of goods and services, and whether EU membership is or is not beneficial – are hugely complex issues, often with counterintuitive practical ramifications. Presenting them as simplistic, ethically straightforward matters is positively dangerous.

It makes it effectively unnecessary to confront the difficult, ambiguous dimensions of contentious governing proposals. Any question about the consequences of changes in social and economic policy can be dismissed with a sweeping claim that criticism is simply a devious self-serving desire to maintain an unjust status quo. It is, in other words, a neat way of avoiding debate altogether.

For example, I have never heard (correct me if I am wrong) any prominent Remainer confront the most respectable argument against our membership of the EU: that it undermines the democratic accountability of our own elected government. So much easier simply to dismiss all those who want to Leave as (evil) bigots who are beneath contempt.

But there was perhaps an even greater sin against Reason committed at that tumultuous time in my youth. It was the historic moment when tolerance ceased to be an essential part of the liberal Left conscience. Since to be tolerant of the “evil” inherent in your opponent’s position was a form of complicity with that evil, liberalism itself, with its natural inclination to consider all sides of a question, came into disrepute.

There was a momentous speech given by an activist at an early Berkeley demonstration in which he said, to warm laughter and applause: “Don’t trust the liberals when they’re over 30.” This is frequently misquoted as “Don’t

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion trust anybody over 30.” Believe me, I was there when it was uttered. He said the former, not the latter.

What was significant was the rejection not of those who happened to be a decade older than us but of liberalism as it was then understood. So the commandment that you should never be tolerant of evil, became a chronic distrust of tolerant liberalism. Hence the derogatory term “wishywashy liberal” gained currency and eventually became a totemic insult. It distinguished the radical Left-winger from the mealy-mouthed, half-hearted reformer who might think that there could be grounds for any doubt about the necessary programme. (Does this sound familiar?)

A strange aspect of the latest incarnation of this Manichean political philosophy in Corbynite Labour is its seemingly inextinguishable relationship with one of the most indubitably evil phenomena in human history: anti-Semitism. In the first of last week’s television debates, Jeremy Corbyn chose to pronounce the surname of the infamous paedophile Jeffrey Epstein as “Ep-SHTEIN”. To anyone with my Jewish roots, this has a clear and unmistakeable inference. It draws attention to the Jewishness of the name and so to the inevitably foreign nature of Jewish identity: the Jew as perpetual immigrant outsider (who does not understand British irony, as Corbyn once put it).

Here we are again cast as Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitans”. Was this unrepentant defiance or just crass stupidity? Who could tell? What I do know is that this election might be a chance to restore the value of real argument, and teach a new generation what the words “liberal” and “tolerant” actually mean.

‘The principle that those whose views you oppose are so immoral they deserve no consideration can be used to shut down almost any discussion of political policy’