Trolled – for daring to be a friend

ON MONDAY, I shared a BBC panel with Labour’s Jess Phillips. There was some disagreement, of course, but in other areas there was a surprising amount of constructive discussion. Afterwards she joked that viewers might have been disappointed we hadn’t argued more. I only mention this because Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has been horribly trolled on social media for showing support for a Conservative friend at Oxford University. How heartbreaking that a woman who survived the hatred of the Taliban should be subject to the same kind of blind bigotry in the UK – simply for daring to choose friendship over politics.