Is it possible to detoxify the political debate in Britain, as I discussed in my last column for UnHerd? Certainly it isn’t enough to moan about it. We need to determine a practical response, create some rules.
A way to do this would be to identify, isolate and attempt to avoid the tactics which have so demeaned our political conversation. There are enough of these for a long-running series. But the one I’d like to single out here is the increasingly prevalent and flagrant insincere offence-claiming. This has run rampant in the age of social media and often rides pillion with its cousin: the wilful misinterpretation of words. Together they form a potent – and quite evidently attractive – combination.
Two textbooks examples of this have recently been provided, from both Right and Left.
At the weekend, the centre-left Labour MP Chuka Umunna gave a speech in which he warned his own party about its decline into incivility. Specifically, Umunna warned that Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was driving moderate Labour MPs like him out of the party. In the course of the speech, Umunna asked Corbyn to “call off the dogs”. It’s a commonly enough heard phrase, and one which might be said to be apt in the age of the grass-roots ‘Momentum’ movement.
You would expect the Labour party leadership to treat such a call from one of its own MPs with some degree of seriousness. At the very least, it might have attempted to make some fact-based excuses for Momentum and the behaviour of its members. But it chose not to. Instead, it chose to misinterpret Umunna’s remarks and then claim offence.
The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, was the one put forward to counter Umunna’s claims. How did he choose to reply? He condemned the comments as “grossly offensive”. And he went on to make the important point: “Our party members are not dogs.”
This is a beautiful example of the genre. Nobody ever claimed that the Labour party’s membership consisted in small or large part of dogs. But McDonnell’s deliberate misinterpretation meant he could claim that Umunna had – for shame – insulted the grassroots members of his own party. As a result, McDonnell successfully avoided answering any serious questions around why his party is carrying out a purge of moderate MPs.
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