A bad person asks what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

Intolerant, judgemental, excluding, bigoted, closed-minded, sneering, insulting, rude, divisive, ignorant, aggressive and downright offensive. Shallow, unpleasantly personal, condemnatory, bullying and, sad to report, violent.

These are the sorts of words that spring into my mind when I consider our politics right now. I guess that, what with Donald Trump in the White House, Brexit and the rise of populism across Europe this is how many of you - especially the left wing ones - feel too. What you don't realise is that it's you I'm talking about. I'm fed up with the narrow, bitter little world that you inhabit and the manner in which you think anyone prepared to consider other opinions, ideas from the right, is essentially a bad person.

I've known I was a bad person for a long while. It's not just that I think capitalism is brilliant, empowering and liberating. No it's a wider conservative agenda - the bits about rejecting the world of equalities top trumps created by left-wing group think. It's about thinking that we should take people as individuals - in the round.

I know a bloke. Have a drink with him now and then. We'll call him Steve. He's a racist. And I've told him this loads of times. But I know he also fusses over elderly neighbours and will go out of his way to help someone hurt or stranded. I've seen him do this. So tell me, am I to reject him because he's a racist? Or should I mention his sin to him and continue to see the good that he does? Truth is it's better I hear his argument, engage with his concerns, than simply walk away.

But then I'm a bad person. I don't agree with your left-wing agenda. Take abortion - for sure I'm not opposed to it. But I do think it's a damned sight more complicated than the simple slogan 'women's right to choose' tells us. Yet people who don't agree with you about abortion - terrible people. Bad people. You know something? I want to hear those people, to treat what they say with respect.

A couple of days ago this gay, journalist 'came out' as a conservative. Now I appreciate that this is the USA where there's an enormous liberal temper tantrum going on but this little quote sums up for me the problem the left has with the idea that people don't all accept their worldview.

Frostiness spread far beyond the bar, too. My best friend, with whom I typically hung out multiple times per week, was suddenly perpetually unavailable. Finally, on Christmas Eve, he sent me a long text, calling me a monster, asking where my heart and soul went, and saying that all our other friends are laughing at me.

I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited.

The left wing commenters I read seem to speak a lot about values - how politics should be value-driven and how we should all fight to defend their values. Yet, these are values that think it's OK to ostracise someone from a community because he wrote an interview with someone right-wing? Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a chunk from a riposte to that gay journalist by another gay journalist:

Gay conservatives aren’t welcome in gay spaces because the people they support are an existential threat to our rights and our community. After all, queer spaces (such as bars, bathhouses, community centres, and even bookstores) were founded and instrumental in radical sexual politics and political engagement. You can’t divorce that from the social aspect, because doing so would deny the history of our community and the present reality of so many vulnerable LGBT people.

You're not allowed to be in the gay community if you're not left-wing.

For a while I worked for a voluntary organisation in Oldham. I never made a secret of my politics if anyone asked but I never brought those politics to work. I did my job, talked about all the other things in life but left political debate on the doorstep. This was hard because one or two colleagues with robust left-wing views were always ready to loudly proclaim their opinions (including in front of me, saying that conservatives are all ignorant, racist bigots).

You, my left wing friends, really must stop this (and I apologise at this point for the left wing friends who've already stopped). Not just because I'm telling you it's not very nice but because this attitude is destroying your parties and political prospects.



This chart, from Political Betting's Mike Smithson, shows that Labour is in third place among C2DE voters. Take a second to absorb this fact. This is, if you want a definition of it, is the 'working class'. Now ask yourself why? I know your response - the media, Brexit lies, racism, bigotry. Every single time this is the explanation from the left.

Perhaps you want to take a step back and consider whether it's actually your outlook and values that are doing the damage. That friend of mine, Steve. He's a Labour voter (except he's not any more). And there are loads more like him. Inadvertently, Paul Mason, left-wing former BBC journalist captured the dominant left wing view of people like Steve:

“They’re not working class Tories… most of the UKIP people are either people who haven’t voted or have flipped in a radical way from Labour. They are toe-rags, basically. They are the bloke who nicks your bike.”

The search for understanding of these voters stops once you've satisfied yourself that they hold views you consider unsavoury such as wanting fewer immigrants, worrying about Islamist terrorism, supporting the armed forces, liking grammar schools, backing tough penalties for criminals, thinking the international aid budget is too big, believing that lots of people on benefits are essentially scroungers. I could go on but you get my gist.

All of these unsavoury views have a sensible, considered policy response that, when people hear it, gets them to to nod - even if thy don't always leap enthusiastically to support that policy response. Right now these people are voting for right-wing' parties because those parties do at least seem to have half an ear for the things that are bothering folk. What's the left's response? Mostly it's to call them racist, homophobic, misogynist bigots. Or, for the more considered, to mutter about 'dark forces' and genies being out of bottles followed by arch references to the 1930s. That and calls for violence.

But then, I'm a bad person. A conservative. I probably don't share some of your values. I certainly reject the idea that we are defined by the groups you've placed us in - it really is possible to be a gay conservative or a black libertarian. Such people are not weirdos, strangely deluded folk who probably need a re-education camp (and who we should surely ostracise before their unsavoury views contaminate our caring liberal places). You, my left wing friends, have a long way to go - you've allowed this to happen:

Ranking institutions as either red, amber, or green in terms of how restrictive they are, the survey of 115 universities found that 108 – when taking university administration and students’ unions as a whole – censor or chill free speech to some degree. Some 73 were assessed as red, 35 were amber, and only seven were green, meaning that as far as Spiked was aware, they placed no restrictions on free speech and expression – other than where it was unlawful.

Red means that the university - often under pressure from left-wing student activists - has "banned and actively censored ideas on campus". And trust me on this one - no left wing ideas have been banned not even the most extreme of communist apologists for historic genocide and current oppression. Indeed some of these lovely folk are the very activists campaigning for restrictions on free speech.

The bitter, snarky, judging and excluding way in which much of the left behave - not just the extremes but people who'd consider themselves moderate - suggests that it is having something of a crisis. Now I know there remain open, engaging and thoughtful left-wing folk out there and I feel for them. But what I don't see is that openness to a diversity of ideas that once was the hallmark of modern liberalism. Those hippy values - peace, love and understanding - have vanished, replaced with a unwavering and judging creed founded in groupthink and the rejection of free speech.

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Quote of the day...

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Absolutely:

I am free not to be offended by a cartoon I did not draw. If my prospective constituents do not like me not being offended, they are free not to vote for me. Other Muslims are free to be offended, and the rest of the country is free to ignore them. I will choose my policies based on my conscience. As such, I will continue to defend my prophet from those on the far right and Muslim extremes who present only a rigid, angry and irrational interpretation of my faith.

We need more to challenge intolerance of free speech in this manner.

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Scroungers?

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Such is the rhetoric I believe - we are asked to believe that either there are loads of people sitting on sofas, smoking, drinking cheap lager and eating sweets while defiantly refusing to work, or else that eager, smart and enthusiatic folk are valiently (and vainly) struggling to find work.

And every now and then we get a little insight:

Scrutinising the period from July 2012 to June 2013, the Labour Force survey found that 65 per cent of people across Bradford were in some form of employment, but 20 per cent, or a fifth of those questioned, were classed as “economically inactive” and “not wanting a job”.

This group chose not to disclose a reason why they did not want to work, ignoring options such as being on long-term sickness, looking after a family home or being a student. 

So this group - about 70,000 people - aren't looking for work, aren't raising a family and aren't ill. Are they our much debated 'scroungers' living off benefits, occasional cash-in-hand jobs and petty crime? Or is it even more complicated than we're told?

It could be that there are problems with the survey - although one hopes that the Office for National Statisitcs (ONS) knows a thing or two about this and is likely to get it right. Perhaps some of these people have literacy or comprehension problems making the findings unreliable. Or there really are a lot of people in Bradford who aren't working, aren't caring and aren't ill but aren't looking for work. Doubtless they are the drone-like scions of Bradford's millionaire class!

Even if only a proportion of this group are actually lounging around doing sod all on benefits it says a great deal - about the system, about education and about how tolerant we are as a society. I think of other people who're turning the heating down a notch this winter, cutting back on life's little pleasures, perhaps forgoing a holiday. In part so their taxes can pay for people who have no intention of getting any work.

There is, perhaps, a limit to tolerance?

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So will social media make us more tolerant (at least in public)?

Today I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day in Scarborough speaking with Councillors about social media. Alongside all the usual subjects – how to do it, what the risks are, how councils get in the way of local councillors making best use of social media and how it’s all so scary – was a subject that I find quite fascinating. This is the distinction between public and private – the whole question of our media profile and the degree to which we are tolerant of perceived societal sins.

There are plenty of examples of these perceived sins – threatening in jest to blow up airports or stone journalists, dressing up in WWII German uniforms for parties* (and, of course, the dreadful ‘Nazi salute’) and our back catalogue of misbehaviour.

We’ve seen how the misdeeds of Cameron and Osborne are used as a stick to beat them with (especially as a great deal of such bad behaviour involves dressing up in penguin suits and wearing embroidered waistcoats – a sin of terrible poshness). But the question for future generations of politicians – if you like, the ‘Facebook’ generation is just how we will deal with the silly antics, the photographs of semi-naked dances in fountains and the louche photographs of drunkenness and seeming debauchery. All great fun for 19 year olds enjoying university or 25 year olds on the office Christmas night out but what about those who go on to be cabinet ministers, bishops or diplomats?

Will we as a society still drag out photos from 20 years ago – or even newspaper reports from ten years past – as the basis for active, current political campaigns? Will we still say that such and such a politician should be sacked or has bad judgment because of some drunken photos that appeared on Facebook twenty years previously? Or will the fact that Facebook – and other social media – provide such a public record of everyone that the response will be “so what”?

I suspect we won’t grow up. We’ll still seek political advantage from other past pranks and misdeeds. The apology will be ignored and the opportunity to look at the whole person ignored in the search for a clever comment, a good spread in the papers or a cutting blog post.

…but I can hope!

*Always wondered why it was OK to dress up as Stalin, Moa or even Pol Pot but not Hitler?

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