Trussed Up – how the Daily Mail screws with the national conversation

Trussed Up: How the Daily Mail tied itself in knots over the Tory leadership

 

On 7 July last year, The Other Half and I were travelling home from a holiday on Rügen, Germany’s largest island, which is on the Baltic. As we piled into the taxi from our holiday home to head to the railway station, we caught the radio news.

 

The words ‘Boris Johnson’ featured highly. Our driver told us that it was top of the German news cycle. “Boris Johnson ist total verrückt!” I exclaimed, finding it the best my limited German could manage (translation: ‘Boris Johnson is totally crazy’).

 

He howled with laughter. I rather like to think that he later shared this with friends over a beer, as an anecdote of what at least what one Brit thought of Johnson – and could even convey it in German.

 

It was four hours back to Hamburg. But on an excellent German train, with excellent onboard wifi, that ensured we were glued to the slow-mo car crash taking place back in London.

 

By the time we got home, Johnson was no longer the prime minister.

 

Hurrah!

 

Or perhaps less so.

 

For three utterly exhausting months, the country had to watch – helplessly – as The Conservative and Unionist Party first elected a new leader, then dumped her after she screwed the economy, and then found a quick way to choose a third leader (and second unelected prime minister).

 

And a crucial part of that farce was played by the Daily Mail – ‘the voice of Middle England’ – which loves to pretend that it represents ‘common sense’ etc.

 

Liz Gerard is “Long in tooth and sometimes claw, old poacher turns gamekeeper to watch the Press”, as per her Twitter profile. She has had a journalistic career of over 40 years, including 30 as a night editor at The Times.

 

Here, she has done a detailed analysis of the Daily Mail over that quarter of a year, illustrating its massive influence over Tory MPs and members.

 

It is, in effect, a diary, charting the opinion columns and leaders surrounding the issue.

 

Those of us who are aware of what the Mail is like might not be expecting to be surprised. However, what Gerard has done reveals the absolute precision of a real sub-editor (traditionally paid better that reporters on ‘The Street’ for being more literate etc) and shining a light on how the Mail works against democracy.

 

Concentrating on this specific, tumultuous time, she shows precisely how the Mail terrifies Tory MPs. And indeed, she hardly needs to make much extraneous comment – when you see/read the Mail content in this condensed way, it’s very clear what a danger this is and how much sheer hypocrisy there is.

 

I grew up in a rabidly Mail home; I know what this paper does. What Gerard has done here is brilliant in making it so clear just how the publication works against democracy, the public and political debate.

 

I have never read as many parts of Mail editorials as in the last two days reading this book – and never has it been clearer that so much of it is hysterical, pearl clutching with little relation to reality.

 

Gerard has done us all a favour – reminding us just how bad the Mail is, how and why. It is a malign influence on the country’s life. Read this – and spread the word about why and how.

You can buy the book here. 

You can follow Liz over on Twitter twitter.com/gameoldgirl.

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books

 

The Tories care about people? Well, some of them don't

If anyone ever tells you that the Conservatives don’t care about people, ignore them. The Conservative and Unionist Party most certainly care about people. 

Or at least, some members of the Conservative and Unionist Party care about some people.

 

Unfortunately, if you fall outside the select band, then it really is a case of ‘screw you’. 

 

And the past few weeks have offered two perfect examples of that.

 

At the end of September, I received an email, ostensibly from the secretary of state for health, Sajid Javid MP, on the basis that I had been advised to shield last year, when the pandemic got into full swing.

 

Let’s be entirely clear: I had cancer in 2018. “Had”, in that I am currently still free of it after major surgery – and a massive thank you to my GP practice and my local hospital for ensuring that checks have continued throughout the pandemic – though it could still come back.

 

I have high blood pressure (only diagnosed in 2019, so I’m going to blame the bleedin’ Tories) and I’m overweight.

 

But not exactly being at death’s door. I have had just two days off sick during the pandemic, continuing to work full time throughout, from home – and indeed, being part of a very small team that has won an external award for the work that we have done during that same pandemic.

 

Though of course, if you read the Express, Mail, Sun, Telegraph or other such publications, you’ve probably been told that nothing like that has happened and that anyone working from home hasn’t been ... well, working.

 

For more clarity: although I live in a very small flat, I’m fortunate enough to be able to work at home with a decent physical set up, as I’ve previously been a freelance journalist, self-employed. The OH, though never freelance, was also in the same position in terms of his ability to work from home, prior to his retirement in June 2020, which was planned 12 months before.

 

But let’s consider Javid’s email advice to those who had been shielding – in other words, those who had been described by their own GPs as “extremely clinically vulnerable” to COVID-19.

 

“You should continue to follow the same general guidance as everyone else,” it declares. This can be found at https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. But “in addition to any condition specific advice you may have been given by your specialist in recent weeks ... as someone with a health condition you might also want to think about extra things you can do to keep yourself and others safe.”

 

Okay ... so what might those be?

 

“This could include:

• considering whether you and those you are meeting have been vaccinated – you might want to wait until 14 days after everyone’s second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine before being in close contact with others;
• considering continuing to practise social distancing if that feels right for you and your friends;
• asking friends and family to take a rapid lateral flow antigen test before visiting you; 
• asking home visitors to wear face coverings;
• avoiding crowded spaces.”

So, these are things to “consider”, right?

 

To start with, there is no mention of clinically vulnerable people – or members of their family – being expected to travel to workplaces.

 

There is a sense that those who are ‘genuinely’ clinically vulnerable will be old, retired and not with members of their household expected to attend an external workplace.

 

Still, I suppose it made a change from the paper snail-mail letters ‘signed’ by “Matt” [Hancock] and Robert Jenrick.

 

However, it is a total abrogation of any responsibility for public health from the health secretary. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, having been informed that I must be in the physical workplace at least two days a week, I sat in a room for a hybrid meeting, where the social distancing was not what it should have been. Given my personal circumstances, I was very close to freaking, walking away from the physical meeting and joining it online.

 

I have heard the argument that I need to learn to live with the risks. Yet this seems to assume that I need to learn to live with me increasing the risks to my partner too. That is ethically appalling.

And all it would have taken was for the UK government to say that, if you had shielded last year, then if remotely (there's obviously a joke here) possible, it would be best to continue working from home.

 

Instead, people have been put into an invidious situation whereby employers can demand they do something that increases the risk – not only to themselves, but to others in their household who don't get to make that choice.

And of course, at the time of writing, COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths are rising.

 

And nobody saw this coming as a consequence of ‘Freedom Day’.

 

However, this is not the only example of the state of the UK’s government. Just before the start of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was challenged in a television interview on how to measure his promised ‘levelling up’ between the country’s regions.

He answered: “I’ve given you the most important metric – never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.

“Wage growth is now being experienced faster by those on lower incomes. It hasn’t happened for 10 years or more. That is what I mean by levelling up.”

As it happens, the claim about wage growth is a lie – but then again, his lips were moving – but what a thing to openly state: that life expectancy, falling in the UK for those not as well-to-do as the prime minister, and cancer outcomes* don’t matter.

 

It’s almost like the Conservatives ... some Conservatives ... really don’t give a flying one about the masses.

 

* Just a note to say, let’s not forget that, while his then wife was being treated for cancer, Boris Johnson was busy shagging another woman.

** And another note to say that the cartoon used above is from @chrisriddell50, and I hope he forgives me for using it here.

 

 

 

The language of demonisation – and the language of change

Makeshift Ethiopian Orthodox church at Calais migrants' camp

It’s not often that the media has much actual meat to get its teeth into during the annual silly season, but this summer has been an exception.

There has, of course, been the ongoing issue of many thousands of people attempting to flee into Europe from war and poverty.

That some have then made it to Calais, where they have attempted – and are still attempting – to circumvent security and make it to the UK via the Chunnel, however dangerous the journey, has given rise to a particular strand of coverage in the last couple of months.

The lurid, sensationalist language of invasion and of insects – yes, Mr Cameron, I am looking at you, with your use of “swarm” – has again indicated the piss-poor nature of British public and political discourse.

For some in the right-wing media, it brought with it the equally wonderful opportunity to bash the BBC as Auntie filmed an edition of Songs of Praise from a makeshift chapel in the Calais camps where migrants are staying.

Many are the same sort of people who waste no opportunity to intone how ‘we are still a Christian country,’ but either their knowledge of actual Christianity is sadly lacking or they simply don’t mind being steaming hypocrites who have no intention of actually acting and thinking on the basis of that religion.

The idea that showing human compassion – never mind the variety recommended by Jesus (according to the Good Book) – is automatically a synonym for ‘let them all in’ would be ridiculous were it not for the way that it has been taken up by substantial numbers of people who appear incapable of rational thought.

The vicious hate to be seen on newspaper forums, on social media etc about the issue can make you despair. It’s yet another example of how easy the demonisation of ‘others’ is – and it’s a salutary reminder of how what happened in Germany in the 1930s did happen.

Always easier, of course, when many in the population are struggling, have little security and see little hope for improvement.

Anyone claiming that ‘we’ can easily accommodate a few more thousand etc would apparently be oblivious to the reality that, at present, ‘we’ cannot provide work or a home for all those currently in the UK. And see the previous paragraph.

Mass immigration is also problematic in terms of economics quite simply because, in increasing the size of the available labour market, it helps depress wages: there is a reason that the likes of the CBI do not want restrictions on immigration and even persuaded then Conservative leader Michael Howard out of making manifesto pledges on reducing and restricting immigration.

It’s also worth noting that this used to be the mainstream left-wing view on the subject – before that metamorphosed into Tony Blair and his fellow neo-liberals.

And there is a reason that Margaret Thatcher declared New Labour/Blair to be her “greatest achievement”.

The long-term solution to the migrant situation need to be global and need to involve the sort of peace and prosperity for all that will obviate the need or desire for hundreds of thousands of human beings to take great risks to improve their lives or even to survive. Anything else is mere sticking plasters.

Which brings us rather adroitly to the summer’s second media circus – but one where, unlike the issue of would-be migrants, the right-wing media is failing to control the terms of discussion and use it as a means of further controlling the populace.

The Labour Party’s leadership election has seen the astonishing rise of Jeremy Corbyn – “astonishing”, that is, if you don’t pay any attention to anything much at all.

In case you missed it, things started getting messy when Corbyn got just enough nominations to be included on the ballot – partly as a result of people nominating him in order to expand the nature of the discussion that would occur during the election process.

In addition to this, the election process has been changed, with people able to register with the Labour Party as a ‘supporter’ for £3, and then vote.

It’s a clunky (to put it politely) mechanism – and unfair on activists who have spent years in the party working for it on a voluntary basis – but the aim, of opening up the process and encouraging engagement, is a valid one.

And it is one that has been achieved.

But now we’ve got the horror of loads of Trotskyist entryists trying to vote (for Corbyn, of course), plus loads of Tories doing the same – as openly encouraged by the Telegraph, in an example of why it’s days as a class newspaper are behind it.

For the latter, the idea is that Corbyn as Labour leader would finish the party for decades.

It’s good to know how much some care about democracy.

The Labour hierarchy is in meltdown, running around like headless chickens, while New Labour grandees such as Blair himself and Peter Voldemort Mandelson warn that it would be the end of life as we know it and they should stop the election itself.

Jackboot Jack Straw has weighed in, and even Charles Clarke has popped up to leave most scratching their heads and wondering who he was.

Blair in particular managed to be particularly snide, asserting that, “if your heart’s with Jeremy Corbyn, get a transplant”.

Packin' 'em in in Middlesbrough

Which, given the way the Islington MP has been packin’ ’em in at rallies across the country, and appears to be gaining support from across the spectrum of age, gender, race etc, is a large number of people requiring radical cardio surgery.

One cannot help but wonder how an NHS that was helped on the path to privatisation by Blair will cope.

Behind all this is the belief that a Labour Party headed by Corbyn cannot not possibly win a general election.

Brits don’t want a lefty – look what happened to Michael Foot etc. Actually, what happened to Foot was that he was doing fine in the polls until Margaret Thatcher had a little war that she was able to garner support from. It has not been known, for years, as the ‘Falklands Factor’ for nothing.

But let’s not allow facts to get in the way, eh?

Various right-wing papers have been trying smears.

Having already spoken to the market trader who sells him his vests (when it was all still funny), and then failed to make allegations of anti-semitism stick, the Daily Mail ran out of material for attempted smears and last week turned to an epic piece of fantasy fiction titled “Prime Minister Corbyn … and the 1,000 days that destroyed Britain”.

Alternative histories are a popular sub-genre: perhaps it’ll be nominated for a Hugo.

So a simple question, folks: if Corbyn is ‘unelectable’, why has the right-wing media suddenly gone from pointing and laughter to desperate attempts to smear?

And why are the neo-liberal Blairites running so scared?

Well, the reasons should be clear to anyone.

The right is perfectly well aware that he could actually win (in an interview with the Huffington Post, Conservative grandee Ken Clarke stated this quite clearly) – because the right knows that people actually want an alternative to the neo-liberal hegemony of the last 30 years and it knows that Corbyn presents the possibility of a Labour Party that offers one.

The general public show no sign of currently wanting a Labour Party that, quite frankly, is little different from the present government.

They are sick of career politicians who are smooth and slick – and never give a straight answer.

Corbyn’s campaign has been gracious and he has refused to stoop to the negative (there has been negativity and nastiness from some supporters on all sides).

His policies – far from being the “hard left” that so many are claiming: in that previously-mentioned interview, Ken Clarke described him as not as left-wing as Foot, and Clarke is no fool – are being welcomed widely.

And given the continuing housing crisis in the UK, who can be surprised that the idea of building more council housing would be welcomed?

Who can be surprised that it’s popular to talk of renationalisation of the railways – just as we learn that rail fares are rising by three times the rate of pay increases?

Corbyn’s economic ideas have received backing from 30-plus economists – and even a blog from the Financial Times that explained that his idea of ‘quantitative easing for the people’ is not actually nonsense and could actually work (nor is it wildly radical).

Even some on the right are noting that, while they might disagree with his ideas, it’s refreshing to see a conviction politician again.

Earlier this year, Scottish voters rejected the idea that austerity is the only way – and dumped a party that had treated the country as a sinecure for years.

The idea that Labour can win an outright majority at a future general election by winning some Conservative votes south of the border, at the same time as not losing more core votes in the heartlands (it also lost an estimated five million core voters between 1997 and 2010) and all the while without winning back Scottish voters, is barking.

The idea that the Ed Miliband election manifesto was too anti-business (as former Chancellor and shadow chancellor Ed Balls claimed at the end of July) and too left-wing to win in May is nonsense.

When Miliband announced the idea of a crackdown on non doms, his and the party’s ratings increased. And promising to tackle corporate tax evasion is not a synonym for being anti-business – or if you think it is, then you have a problem.

The right-wing press got lucky in the spring: they latched onto something that caused swing voters the real horrors: the idea of a coalition between Labour and the SNP. There was a reason that, having once spotted the impact of that message, they hammered it home for the final fortnight of campaigning.

To reiterate: the idea that Labour can win a general election on the basis of winning those same potential swing voters, without returning to winning ways in Scotland, and without losing even more core voters elsewhere, is illogical nonsense – at best.

This is not about saying that Jeremy Corbyn is some sort of messiah: it is about pointing out that people want an alternative to the busted flush of austerity – even the IMF has warned the UK that the cuts are too much – and they do not want a party that is interested only in winning for power’s sake.

They want Labour to be an actual opposition – not limply abstaining on Bills that are set to hurt many thousands of ordinary people. And claiming – as some have – that such things would make Labour just a ‘protest party’ is an avoidance of what ordinary people are facing.

People want alternatives – that’s why smaller parties, from the Greens to UKIP, have been gaining support.

This entire process also suggests the possible end of Blairism in the Labour Party – Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate for the leadership, was absolutely mullered in the constituency nominations, securing just 18 as opposed to Yvette Cooper’s 109, Andy Burnham’s 111 and Corbyn’s 152.

All this the neo-liberals and right-wing know.

And that is why they’re not laughing at Corbyn any more.

Whether he wins the election or not, he has changed the nature of the debate and triggered a reinvigoration of political discourse reminiscent of what was seen during the Scottish referendum campaign a year ago.

If you like hegemonies, that’s not good.

So, in the remaining days of the campaign, the best that could happen would be for Kendall, Cooper and Burnham to stop condemning Corbyn and his supporters – and to concentrate on suggesting some policies that show that they do believe in something; indeed, that they believe that there is a meaningful alternative to the policies of the current government.

Because, if they do not believe even that simple little thing – then what is the point of their being in opposition?

• For the record, I am not registered to vote in the Labour leadership election and did not apply to do so.

Freud's slip and the dangers of the unsayable

It’s been an Orwellian week in terms of any concept of free speech in the UK, with two rather different cases provoking the sort of widespread outrage that threatens once more to dampen the inclination to actually saying anything that might go against the accepted view of the (mostly) elite.

It can be all too easy, sometimes, to forget that the test of whether one believes in free speech is not allowing what you agree with, but what you don’t.

And there is a danger that, increasingly, social media in particular is rendering some things unsayable.

Welfare reform minister Lord Freud is under continuing fire days after a recording from a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting was released, appearing to show that he had described disabled workers as ‘worth less’ than their non-disabled counterparts – and therefore should not be entitled to the national minimum wage.

That’s a précis of how the story has been tackled, with calls from across politics, mainstream and social media for him to resign or be sacked, and screams about how it illustrates that ‘the nasty party’ is back.

Also during the last few days, TV personality Judy Finnigan made comments on the TV show, Loose Women, to the effect that, while all rape in unacceptable, some rapes are more serious than others.

A few more tons of metaphorical bricks were rained down on her head – and now, it seems that she and her daughter have had threats of rape made against them via Twitter.

There are a number of points here.

First, the hysterical responses disguise certain nuances and therefore deplete any proper debate.

It is not the first time that the issue of disabled workers and pay has arisen.

Back in 2011 that Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, suggested in the House of Commonsthat disabled people should be able to opt out of the minimum wage, as thismight make employers more likely to consider them for a job.

He was, of course, roundly castigated.

But there is a certain disingenuity in the way that Freud’s latest slip has been tackled in many quarters.

It is worth pointing out that the peer was responding to a question from David Scott, a Tory councillor from Tunbridge Wells, who had said:

“The other area I’m really concerned about is obviously the disabled. I have a number of mentally damaged individuals, who to be quite frank aren’t worth the minimum wage, but want to work. And we have been trying to support them in work, but you can’t find people who are willing to pay the minimum wage.

… “And I think yes, those are marginal areas but they are critical of actually keeping people who want to work supported in that process. And it’s how do you deal with those sort of cases?”

In response, Freud noted:

“ ...You make a really good point about the disabled. Now I had not thought through, and we have not got a system for, you know, kind of going below the minimum wage.

“But we do have … you know, Universal Credit is really useful for people with the fluctuating conditions who can do some work – go up and down – because they can earn and get ... and get, you know, bolstered through Universal Credit, and they can move that amount up and down.

“Now, there is a small … there is a group, and I know exactly who you mean, where actually as you say they’re not worth the full wage and actually I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally, and without distorting the whole thing, which actually if someone wants to work for £2 an hour, and it’s working can we actually …”

You can – and please do – read the fulltranscript (and listen to the audio) at Politics Home.

It’s pretty clear from reading that that Freud was thinking on his feet. This wasn’t a policy statement – but ruminating on a question.

There is no evidence that the ‘not worth it’ aspect of his comments was not an economic comment.

Let’s take issue with that by all means – discussions of economic policies and markets and goodness knows what else often flounder on a simple, basic fact: that they are abstract and exclude the ‘real world’ and real human beings.

Let’s take issue with any sort of suggestion that lowering pay even further could ever be positive. 

But frankly, the approach seen in that exchange doesn’t sound as much ‘nasty’ as just downright patronising and paternalistic.

And if anyone wants to say that ‘the nasty party’ is ‘back’, well, you’d could do rather better by looking at Iain Duncan Smith, who has repeatedly lied about matters related to welfare, and been pulled up for it by the UKStatistics Authority.

By all means disagree with the gaffe-prone Freud, who has form for cretinous remarks – and presumably, Scott, although his comments seem to have been forgotten – but screaming for resignation or the sack because you disagree with something that someone said is way over the top. 

Better, surely, to use such an opportunity to engage with the subject and, as here, ask what can meaningfully be done to help to get disabled people into work.

This case offered an opportunity to raise the issue of the abysmal treatment of disabled people by the government since 2014; the general difficulties in disabled people finding work; the very idea of seeing human beings in purely economic terms, and even a chance to raise awareness of mental illness in particular.

Indeed, one positive on the social media side was the appearance of a list of famous people who had a variety of mental illness conditions, which was an easy way to illustrate that geniuses can be disabled (in our current use of the term) too.

After all, who would question, for instance, whether Beethoven was ‘worth it’?

Similarly, in terms of Finnigan’s comments, behaving as though she has no right to voice her views is ludicrous.

In fact, it was less a view than an observation of straightforward fact.

In the context of whether Ched Evans should be able to return to plying his trade as a professional footballer after his prison sentence for rape, Finnigan observed:  “The rape – and I am not, please, by any means minimising any kind of rape – but the rape was not violent, he didn’t cause any bodily harm to the person.”

“It was unpleasant, in a hotel room I believe, and she [the victim] had far too much to drink.”

Now how can any half-way intelligent person conclude that those comments make Finnigan ‘pro-rape’, as was subsequently suggested on social media by some?

Indeed, many women would go further than Finnigan. A 2010 survey, for instance, revealed that women are less forgiving of a rape than men – and indeed, that many believe that, in some cases, the victim should bear at least partial responsibility.

Disagree with Finnigan by all means, and make the case against what she said, but hysterical shouting down of comments such as that, to the extent that a row blows up and people are threatened (however credible or not the threat is), is completely detrimental to any sensible, considered public discourse. 

As is something that, in effect, would see any political meeting turned into something that has to be scripted in order to avoid something that could be jumped on in such a manner, rather than permitting open discussion that might be far more revealing of far more things.

Be Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (or Islington) all you want, but your disgust should not stop a discussion. 

Indeed, there’s an irony in all this that seems to have rather passed some people by. 

Making certain things unsayable was a factor in the way in which the systemic abuse and rape of vulnerable girls and young women by groups of men from particular ethnic backgrounds was allowed to go unchallenged for so long in Rochdale and Rotherham. 

That point alone should be enough to convince of the dangers of making things unsayable – no matter how unpalatable they may be.