Laura Pidcock: a visceral disgust at Tories

“August is a cruel mistress to politicians,” said Labour MP Jess Phillips in The Observer. “Silly season means that if you say anything you will find yourself splashed all over the papers.” So it was for my colleague Laura Pidcock after she declared last week that her “visceral” disgust at the way the Conservatives (“the enemy”) are running the country meant she could never be friends with a Tory MP. From the reaction to her comments, you’d have thought she had “expressed a desire to steal the first-born children of anyone who had ever voted Conservative”, rather than taken a slightly unforgiving line on cross-party fraternisation. Pidcock has made clear that she will work with Tories; she just won’t be “necking champagne at the Conservative black and white ball any time soon”.

“Pidcock is on to something,” said Anne Perkins in The Guardian. “One of the hardest parts of Westminster politics is staying true to what you believe”, and not succumbing to the “sense of privilege and entitlement that slowly encrusts long-serving members, and turns the place into a toothless club rather than the cockpit of the nation”. But while her rage at the “smug complacency” on the opposite benches might be justified, she’s wrong to regard all Tory MPS as enemies. That attitude won’t help her get things done. Unlikely friendships have always sprung up between MPS of differing ideologies: Jess Phillips has admitted a fondness for Jacob Rees-mogg; Jonathan Aitken is godfather to Diane Abbott’s son. “Anger is indispensable.” But hatred doesn’t get you anywhere.

Pidcock’s posturing remarks are “both childish and worryingly close-minded”, said Marianne Taylor in The Herald (Glasgow). They reflect a “wider societal shift towards echo chamber thinking”. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are wonderful tools for engaging people in politics and rallying support, but they also create “silos” where people “only hear, consort with and repeat views they already agree with”. The result is that people become tribal and – as we can see with Pidcock – ever more intolerant of those with different views.