Intolerance, bigotry and the march of the fascist Left
Historian DOMINIC SANDBROOK on why we should all be very, very worried
Most of us count ourselves lucky to live in a democracy. ours is one of the world’s great cradles of political freedom, a land where we are free to write, think and vote exactly as we wish.
What would it be like, though, to live in a world where all that was taken away? What would it be like to live in a country where opposing views were shouted down and politicians were afraid to speak in public?
How would it feel to live in a land where demagogues whipped up lynch mobs with talk of murder and insurrection, where newspapers were destroyed and posters defaced, where academics and teachers preached intolerance and bigotry?
Well, if you want to know, I am afraid you only have to look around Britain today.
In the House of Commons this week, south East Cornwall’s Conservative MP sheryll Murray told her fellow MPs about the campaign of intimidation waged against her by supporters of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
‘over the past months,’ she said, ‘I’ve had swastikas carved into posters, social media posts like “burn the witch” and “stab the C”, people putting Labour Party posters on my home, photographing them and pushing them through my letterbox. someone even urinated on my office door.’
As she said herself, this hardly amounts to the ‘ kinder, gentler politics’ that Mr Corbyn, who, significantly, didn’t refute sheryll Murray’s comments to the House, likes to talk about. And the truth is that in the hysterically supercharged atmosphere that he and his admirers have done so much to create, it is far from unusual.
Politics has, of course, always been something of a contact sport. But never, I think, has the atmosphere ever been as nasty, as intolerant and as downright bigoted as it is today.
Although, yes, there are Right-wing internet trolls, too, the fact is the overwhelming majority of the abuse, bullying and intimidation comes from the Left.
If you doubt it, just ask yourself this. Is it remotely conceivable that a 69-year-old tV newsreader would ever go to the Glastonbury festival and jump up and down with a crowd of youngsters, chanting ‘F*** Labour’?
Yet this is what Channel 4’s Jon snow, the pin-up of the chattering classes, is alleged to have done last weekend — only the words were not, of course, ‘F*** Labour’, but ‘F*** the tories’. He has not denied the outburst.
NOTHING
was done about it, of course. It never is. For among our self-styled intellectual elite, such sentiments are not merely tolerated, they are virtually obligatory.
on the very day that Mr snow was at Glastonbury, the actress Romola Garai was interviewed in the sunday times. she was asked about the message on her necklace. Well, wouldn’t you know it? Her necklace said ‘F*** the tories’, too.
It is tempting to dismiss people such as Mr snow, a man best known for reading from the autocue on a programme hardly anybody watches, as silly, small-minded irritants. But they are, I am afraid, part of a wider and more disturbing picture.
It is now clear, for example, that the last general election was disfigured by bullying and abuse on a scale inconceivable even a few years ago. For, as many Conservative MPs privately admit, what sheryll Murray experienced in south East Cornwall is becoming the norm.
Last week, the Conservative candidate in marginal Gower, Byron Davies, told the Mail that within hours of the election being called, his social media pages were defaced by obscene messages calling him ‘tory scum’ — and worse.
on twitter, two men issued him with death threats, while others circulated lies about his wife. on Youtube, a video claimed he had taken bribes; on Facebook, Labour supporters claimed that he was being investigated for fraud.
All lies, of course. But the torrent of ‘fake news’ — such as the completely false claim put out online that theresa May was anti-gay and campaigned for lesbians to be ‘cured’ in the late Eighties — became so overwhelming that many tory candidates found it almost impossible to be heard.
And there was worse. Many Conservative MPs complained that their posters were ripped down or defaced. Campaigners had their cars vandalised. some MPs even gave up attending local hustings because they were so sick of facing mobs of Corbynistas.
All this will be very familiar to most moderate Labour MPs, of course. It is precisely what they had to endure, too, when they tried to oust Mr Corbyn last year.
Remember Angela Eagle, the Labour MP who considered challenging him for the leadership last summer?
not only did Mr Corbyn’s supporters throw a brick through her window and subject her to horrific homophobic abuse (she is openly gay), but her staff even gave up answering the telephone because they were getting so many threatening calls. When confronted with evidence of his supporters’ abusive tactics, Mr Corbyn always pretends to know nothing about it. Like a villain from the pages of Charles Dickens’s novels, he wraps himself in a cloak of pious sanctimony and leaves the intimidation to his bully-boys.
But his chief puppet-master, the Marxist shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, is less circumspect. Having previously called for people to take to the streets and launch an ‘ insurrection’ against the Government, Mr McDonnell was at Glastonbury, too, last weekend.
there, he made no pretence of preaching a kinder, gentler politics. Instead, he tried to whip the crowd into a baying mob, telling them the residents of fire-ravaged Grenfell tower had been ‘murdered’.
Mr McDonnell is not a fool. He knows what he is doing. this is the man who once called for Labour activists to lynch tory Employment Minister Esther McVey. In his own words, recorded in 2014: ‘Why are we sacking her? Why aren’t we lynching the b******?’
the fact that this posturing demagogue, a man who deliberately incites violent upheaval, now serves as shadow Chancellor is a stain on our national political life. But in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, where misogyny, bullying and anti- semitism flourish almost unchecked, it is sadly not surprising.
What is at stake is not just basic human courtesy. It is something much deeper: our love of democracy, our tradition of pluralism, our respect for alternative views.
two years ago, after the previous election, I wrote in the Mail about a hitherto obscure philosophy lecturer called Rebecca Roach.
Evidently disappointed by Ed Miliband’s defeat, Dr Roach wrote an oxford University blog post claiming that supporting the Conservatives ought to be ‘ as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views’, and that conservative values ought to be made ‘socially unacceptable’.
AttHE time, I hoped she was a one- off, a crank, incarcerated for her own good in an ivory tower. But in the academic world — and as recent Mail investigations have shown, in our school staff rooms, too — such sentiments are only all too common.
As a result, not since the thirties, when sir oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts physically attacked people who disagreed with them, has our democracy seemed so embattled.
the Left will bridle at that comparison, of course, because it is one they love to use themselves. they always tell us the tories are fascists in all but name. But who are the real fascists here?
It is not the tories who denounce opponents as ‘scum’ and worse. It is not the tories who deface posters with swastikas, throw bricks into their rivals’ offices and burn newspapers in public.
It is not the tories who shout down their opponents, issue death threats and call for insurrection. And it is not the tories who so obviously take inspiration from the paramilitary politics of men who so besmirched democracy before the last world war.
Without tolerance, there can be no democracy. Without pluralism, there can be no debate.
the greatest Labour leader of all, Clement Attlee, who was married to a Conservative, and who was proud to serve under a Conservative Prime Minister during the struggle against fascism, knew that better than anybody.
But Mr Corbyn and his friends are not remotely in the same league. For theirs is not, in reality, a kinder, gentler politics.
It is the politics of fake news on Facebook and swastikas daubed on posters, the politics of lies, bullying and intolerance.
It is they who are the true heirs to the demagogues of the thirties. For the sake of our democracy, they must be beaten.