Has the Left lost all sense of decency?

For a politician to accuse his peers of murder is bad enough but to applaud him is even more worrying

It’s become something of a cliché to complain that political debate is now at an especially low ebb. Political heavyweights appear to have vanished as a breed, and all three main parties are represented by varying degrees of pipsqueaks and nonentities.

But used as we may now be to our dire political landscape, it retains the capacity to shock.

On Sunday afternoon, Shadow Chancellor John Mcdonnell spoke at Glastonbury and calmly, blithely and matter-of-factly blamed the Grenfell Tower disaster on the decision of previous governments to murder the inhabitants. As he put it: “Those families, those individuals – 79 so far and there will be more – were murdered by political decisions that were taken over recent decades.” Many of the victims have not yet been identified, let alone buried, but Mr Mcdonnell has already used their deaths for his own political ends.

Not that anyone should be surprised. Even among his fellow hard-left revolutionaries, the Shadow Chancellor stands apart as a man prepared to utilise almost any tactic to overturn the existing order. He has praised violent rioters as “the best of our movement” and hailed the “sacrifice” made by “the likes of Bobby Sands” with their “bombs and bullets”. “It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle,” he said. Mr Mcdonnell long ago showed that he was unfit to hold elected office, let alone to serve in the upper echelons of a mainstream party.

But however repugnant his words may have been on Sunday, the reaction has, if anything, been still more shocking. Because there has been next to no reaction.

Let me correct myself: next to no critical reaction. Beyond a few newspaper headlines and indignant Tory MPS, it’s been as if it’s perfectly normal for a senior politician to accuse his colleagues of murder – of the premeditated decision to kill the residents of Grenfell Tower. Or as if he was simply speaking an obvious truth.

It was not just Jeremy Corbyn who was greeted at Glastonbury with ecstatic applause. When Mr Mcdonnell spoke, his accusation of murder prompted rapturous cheers. This is the most chilling aspect of the turn politics has taken in recent months. The evidence suggests that our political culture is now so degraded that voters simply do not care about the basic decency – or otherwise – of politicians.

You would, for example, have had to be living in a darkened, sound-proofed room for the past few months not to be aware that Mr Mcdonnell holds extreme views and appears to prefer mob rule to parliamentary democracy. Similarly, you could hardly not know that Mr Corbyn has allied himself over his 30-year career with some of the most unsavoury characters on earth. And that’s without even mentioning Labour’s failure to tackle the spread of anti-semitism within its ranks under his leadership.

And yet despite all of that, Labour’s vote increased to 40 per cent.

All sorts of hifalutin explanations have been put forward, varying from younger voters being electrified by the promise of socialism to the appeal of the “unspun” Labour leader. There’s an element of truth in all of them, but none offers a satisfactory explanation as to how a man with the soiled record (to put it mildly) of Mr Corbyn could have been the choice of 40 per cent of voters as prime minister.

Which brings us back to the reception accorded to Mr Mcdonnell’s murder accusation.

Is it foolish to take events at Glastonbury as evidence of anything other than the predilections of a few thousand moneyed hippy-wannabees? Until June 9 I’d have said absolutely it was. I’d have said the same thing about Twitter: however popular Mr Corbyn might have been on social media, it was entirely unrepresentative. Clearly, however, that’s just wrong. Something has changed, and the Labour leader is either the instigator or, perhaps more likely, the receptacle of that change.

It’s a change that means it’s now an obscure irrelevance that one party’s leadership actually wanted the IRA to win. It’s a change that means no one really cares that that party’s leader has described terrorists as “friends”. And it’s a change that means it’s perfectly fine for a senior politician to accuse his peers of murder. It’s also a change that should worry us all.