Labour's Darren Jones has just exposed the rotten heart of the Left
I don't share the politics of Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I've never met him and know little more about him than the news coverage I read. But I assume he is well meaning and wants to improve his country. We may differ on how that will happen and what form it might take, but that's what politics is all about.
It turns out, however, that Darren Jones doesn't think the same about me. He thinks I am scum. Not just me, but anyone who disagrees with him. Seriously: everyone who takes a different approach to policy and politics is, to Jones, pure scum. Whereas he, on the other hand, is a veritable angel.
Speaking at the weekend at the Progressive Britain conference, Mr Jones told his audience (and then posted on social media): 'We may be in an era of five party politics. But there's only really two sides. Our side: a politics of love, compassion and community. With the ideas to transform Britain. And their side: a politics of anger, division and blame.'
I don't think I've ever seen a clearer, albeit unintentional, exposition of pretty much everything wrong with the Left. Leave aside the asinine idea that there are 'only really two sides' to political debates; it's astonishing that any grown-up has such a child-like view of the world.
But Jones' view that he and his party represent 'love, compassion and community' and everyone else in the country stands only for anger and division shows how little he and his comrades have learned, not just from the rise of Reform but from the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
Remember Hillary Clinton's reference to the deplorables in the 2016 presidential race? Few things better encapsulated the attitude of so-called 'progressives' to the people they supposedly championed – the ordinary men and women of America who felt let down by government, by the system and by the economy and who were turning to Trump as an outsider – than her dismissal of them as 'racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.' She described them as a 'basket of deplorables.'
But while Hillary Clinton let rip a la Darren Jones on the people who dared to take a different view to her, even she didn't have the gall to voice the idea that she and her party were so pure, so perfect and so truly saintly that they and they alone had morality on their side. She didn't voice it – but you can bet your bottom dollar that she believed it.
Because that belief, as expressed by Jones, is fundamental to the Left's vision both of its enemies and of itself. And when you believe – when you know – that you have morality on your side, you have licence to behave in ways that everyone else can see immediately are far from moral, but which you know must be that, by definition, because of who you are and what you believe.
So when the then shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, called Esther McVey a 'stain of inhumanity' and referred to her being 'lynched' for her part in implementing welfare cuts, he was of course being loving and compassionate.
Darren Jones is regarded as one of the brighter and more sensible ministers, which only goes to show the reality of Labour's problem. So long as it regards its opponents as close to evil, it will never be able to understand them, never be able to marginalise them – and never be able to counter them.
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