between the vote for Brexit and the increase
in hate crimes.
But, I would argue, the link between the
referendum vote and any rise in hate crime
is no stronger — and probably (depending
on what you think motivated Brexit voters)
a whole lot weaker — than the link between
my friend’s death and the people who call
Tories ‘scum’. Rhetoric has consequences.
So why is one a part of the national politi-
cal narrative, and the other a passing com-
ment in a single crime report? Why do
people who would be (rightly) shunned for
joking about a Labour MP’s murder feel
that there is nothing problematic in joking
about the killing of an Oxford-educated
antiques dealer?There is, at least, an explanation for the
jokes — the Chris Rock formula that you
must always ‘punch up, never punch down’.
By any current system of classification, my
white, middle-class, well-educated friend
was ‘up’. But ‘punching up’ is, however you
romanticise it, still punching. And the ques-
tion of who is ‘up’ and who is ‘down’ is more
complicated than you might think.
The only way in which the white work-
ing classes who voted overwhelmingly for
Brexit are ‘up’ — and thereby deserving of
mockery and opprobrium — is in relation
to newly arrived immigrants, which is why
Remainers are so keen to insist that immi-
gration was the only possible consideration
for voting Leave. (I listened to a friend ofmine holding forth about how all Brexit vot-
ers ‘hated brown people’, and that was why
they had voted as they did. When some-
one pointed out that ending freedom of
movement would only affect the numbers
of mainly white, European immigrants, he
replied — without missing a beat — ‘Aha!
But they’re stupid racists.’)
With Tories, of course, it’s easy — they’re
always ‘up’. Toryism is, as we know, stand-
ing up for the overdog, and Tories can there-
fore be ‘punched’ or insulted as much as you
like. They can be called words that would be
horrible in relation to migrants — scum,
for example, or vermin. For the most part
it seems like a harmless enough trope —
amusing, in fact. My wife went to the Labour
conference and bought me (all copies of
Poems for Jeremy Corbyn having sold out)
a mug printed with Aneurin Bevan’s words
‘Tories are lower than vermin’ and a picture
of a rat. It is of such poor quality that a week
later it was cracked, split down the middle,
and no longer held water. It functions far
better as metaphor than as crockery.
This week the trope does not seem quite
so harmless to me. It seems mainstream now.
Bevan may have used the word ‘vermin’ in
1948, but when he did he was slapped down
by our greatest Labour prime minister, who
wrote that he should ‘be a bit more careful,
in your own interest’ — which, given Attlee’s
habitual understatement, is the equivalent
of a modern politician ‘destroying’ an oppo-
nent. Now those mugs are on sale at fringe
meetings of the Labour conference.
I am sure that part of this is due to the
echo chamber of social media. I work in the
arts, so most of my friends are left-liberal,
bien-pensant group-thinkers who post in
furious and trenchant agreement with each
other. Several of my friends boast of purify-
ing their social media of right-wingers or
anyone who could possibly interfere with
their world view. Usually I am tolerant of
my friends dismissing me as scum, or mock-
ing people I know; this week it angered me.
But then I stopped, stepped away from
the keyboard, and thought about it. I had
to remind myself that my anger was, in fact,
anger about a decent, gentle, funny friend
of mine being viciously murdered. I had felt
that something so meaningless and stupid
had to be part of a bigger political narrative.
But it isn’t. And letting that anger seep into
our political discourse can only increase the
ugly polarisation. I know you would rather
read an article about how Tories are the real
victims here; but there is only one victim.
And he deserves better than that.
Which is why I have not written his name
in this article, or mentioned any details that
would make the case easily Google-able.
The only place I have written his name is on
the list at the back of my church, where the
names are being collected for prayers on All
Souls’ Day; which is the only place where it
matters now.S
ix months ago an old friend of mine
was murdered on his doorstep. This
week his killer was sentenced to life
imprisonment. In both cases, the first I heard
of it was when someone I follow on Twitter
posted a joke with a link to a news story.
Both jokes were whimsical rather than cal-
lous — both were, in fact, musing on which
Sunday evening television detective would
most likely solve the crime — but whimsy
in these circumstances feels like callousness.
The tweets made me very angry.
I read the reports of the trial. The mur-
derer had made a spreadsheet of his poten-
tial victims, for robbery or kidnap, with their
names in one column, planned modus in
another and ‘reason’ in a third. The reasons
varied — often it was ‘Tory’, at other times
‘scum Tory’. But while many reports noted
that his only other attack was against a well-
known Conservative donor whose wife
raised the alarm before he was able to force
entry, this detail, that the murderer consid-
ered being ‘scum Tory’ a reason for premed-
itated violence, was only mentioned in one
report. This, too, made me angry.
Just imagine that someone had been
killed by a right-winger. A murderer who
thought that socialists — or Remainers, per-
haps — were scum, or that being on the other
side of a divisive political issue made them a
legitimate target for violence, and had put
this in writing. It does not take much imagi-
nation, actually, because this is exactly what
has happened in this country.
I was at a dinner party last week, and one
of the other guests announced that he was so
fed up with the toxic political climate after
Brexit, and racism becoming mainstream
within political discourse, that he was mov-
ing to France. France. And I am quite sure
that he genuinely believed that he would be
more comfortable in a country where the
Front National is polling around 28 per cent;
in other cases, the panic seems less innocent.
Stephen Kinnock spoke in the Commons
after another senseless murder of another
good person. ‘Rhetoric has consequences,’
he said. ‘When insecurity, fear and anger
are used to light a fuse, then an explosion is
inevitable.’ And we all knew what he meant,
and who he was talking about. Since then,
news sources have insisted upon the linkMurder and politics
Rage, polarisation and the death of a friend
ANDREW WATTS‘Your dental records suggest
you’re a bit old for handouts.’Toryism is standing up for the
overdog. Tories can therefore be
insulted as much as you like