On Incivility and Wellbeing
So ends another thrilling week in the online antisemitism wars. Quick shout-out to Spectator and Tatler columnist Tanya Gold for telling me that asking her to condemn fraud was a ‘purity test’ she was not prepared to take. Yes! We will not be coerced into taking moral stands against the journalistic frauds we ourselves have perpetrated for five years. End the bullying! #EnoughIsEnough!
Moral stands have been spectacularly absent generally. My MP, one Peter Kyle, emailed me to say he would not engage in any further discussion about the frauds he’s been perpetrating for the last five years because he found my tone ‘uncivil’, and he was concerned about his — and, intriguingly, my — ’wellbeing’.
‘Uncivil’ I would readily stipulate to. I really do feel just slightly ill-disposed towards those who lied to me and the world for five years in order to prevent their own party winning an election. Call it a character flaw, if you will. I don’t feel civil at all, really. We’re in a post-fraud, post-civility world now. We might all wish it otherwise, but civility got beaten to death with a baseball bat behind the bins five years ago, and it isn’t coming back.
But can it really be psychologically damaging to Mr Kyle to be asked to be accountable for his public statements and behaviour? Is this not a reasonable working description of what we mean by ‘being an MP’? Well, no, apparently it isn’t. Incivility such as scrutiny and accountability pose a grave threat to their very souls. Hush now. Tread lightly, for you tread on their wellbeings.
It was also the week, of course, in which a universally loved children’s author, one who has made it his business to delight children and their parents for decades, thereby introducing millions to the joy and excitement of reading, was finally exposed as a ‘hard-left bully’. Who knew! The accusation is complex, and in places even baffling, but we must hunt the bear of truth to its lair and we must not be taken in by Rosen’s posturing as a good and decent man who has devoted his entire professional life to the cause of championing literacy in children.
No! This hard-left bully boy attempted to stifle freedom of speech, in the form of a photoshopped image of one of his books made to appear to be ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which he, a Jewish man who has written also about his family’s history of the Holocaust, said he found offensive. As if a Jewish author had any right to object to one of his books being turned into antisemitic propaganda. Cancel culture run mad! Woke warriors complaining about our God-given right to offend anyone, in any way we choose, and then to cry foul when someone else exercises their freedom of speech to complain about it. #EnoughIsEnough!
Corbyn was attacked in the same image, as someone who would read aloud to children the Protocols. But Simon Heffer got there years ago, with his spectacular ‘Corbyn wants to open the gates of Auschwitz’ comment on LBC in 2019, and frankly no-one is ever going to beat that. His crown remains unchallenged. Protocols? It barely registers.
And do we even have time to mention left Jewish comedian and author Alexei Sayle, whose appearance on BBC’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ caused some honking Tory backwoodsman whose name I simply cannot be arsed at this moment to google wanted to be cancelled, because cancelling a Jewish person’s media appearances is the best and only way to fight antisemitism? No, we don’t.
So a busy week overall. It would be uncharitable, and possibly even uncivil, to speculate that this resurgence of left-baiting has anything at all to with the coming debacle of the Batley and Spen by-election, of course. It might affect someone’s wellbeing to suggest that Corbyn is now basically the human shield in Starmer’s hostage drama.
Hush now.