Remainers are remoaners who are plotting to subvert the democratic will of the people.
Leavers, meanwhile, are xenophobes wanting to turn their back on the world.
Tories are “scum” who hate the poor.
And Corbynites? They love terrorists while hating Britain.
Robust political debate is right, proper and healthy; but we’ve crossed a line in the past two years and arrived at a terrible place.
We used to look across the Atlantic aghast. But, as the Brexit fallout has shown, we can put as much hype into hyper-partisan as the Americans. Far from settling the debate on Europe, the 2016 referendum has only intensified it – as some of the heated reaction to today’s news from Labour on the customs union proves.
The same can be said for the way Corbynites champion their hero’s cause – and the way the anti-Corbynites opponents hit back (“hit” being a better description than argue).
The way we’re also importing American-style “culture wars” and the language deployed to fight them is also striking. Take transgenderism. Even mild scepticism about the agenda gets people labelled as transphobes.
This wasn’t always been the British way. Over the past two centuries we’ve been one of the world’s best governed and most stable countries. This stability owes much to a preference for incremental implementation. Labour governments with big majorities never imposed hard-left socialism, nor sought to abolish the Lords, nor the monarchy, however much their ideological instincts impelled them to do so. Similarly, Conservative governments, however big their concerns about the ballooning welfare state, never really took the axe to it.
Both parties recognised that Britain is country founded on compromise and consensus, and that maintaining “one nation” – Disraeli’s famous expression – is more important than “winning”. To put it another way, this is not a country where the 52 ruthlessly impose on the 48, for that doesn’t make for a sustainable and stable society.
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