🎵 Ohhhhhh Jacob Rees-Mogg ... 🎶

It is a depressing indictment of British politics that the left has emotional but untrue articles of faith on its side, and the right has totally capitulated to the forces of statism and authoritarianism.

Jeremy Corbyn has shaken off most of his dusty geography teacher image and is now becoming a polished media performer. His hideously adoring acolytes greet his every utterance as the profound words of some venerable sage, and go round chanting "Tory scum" and "hang the Tories" wherever they go. And it's not an idle threat, I believe that if they do come to power, there will be "justifiable" violence. If someone doesn't die, it'll be lucky.

For those of us who have a job and better things to do than gather every bloody protest march, the pickings are slim. "Anyone but May" was my message to the world when the Tories were picking a leader, and really, could anyone have done a worse job in front of an open goal than she has? She should have absolutely stomped Jeremy Corbyn into the ground, instead she gave him credibility and made him look prime ministerial by comparison.

And her policies are equally repulsive. Mayism is an awful hodgepodge of big state nannyism and nonsensical market intervention. Honestly, when lefties are pointing out that Help To Buy is a terrible idea and Tories think it's the answer, we have gone through the looking glass.

It all came to a head for me when Jacob Rees-Mogg was accosted by a bunch of Corbynista thugs at a Conservative Party Conference fringe event. He calmly spoke plain words of common sense to the idiot who was screaming at him. He told him some calm facts. He pointed out that someone's policies did not inherently make them a bad person, just someone with a different view. I'd love to say it was a Damascene conversion, but it won't be. Shabbir Lakha will doubtlessly go on to great depths as a third-rate politician, knowing righteously in his heart that only Corbynistas know the true path to enlightenment and anyone who disagrees with them deserves to swing from a tree.

How has it come to this? How have blood-thirsty, thuggish, middle-class Corbynistas come to be so devout? Why does no-one on the right have any useful riposte or any balls? How has a backbench politician become a media star for just calmly pointing totally reasonable and sensible things out to a screaming buffoon? Why does the screaming buffoon now have a media presence?

I don't want "Moggmentum". I don't want a leadership cult politician running the show, of either stripe. I was calm, confident competence. I want opposing views to be heard, discussed and tolerated. I don't want this underlying threat of violence that underlies so much of our politics today.

Jacob Rees-Mogg might well hold some awful views, but the people shouting at him hold even worse views. There isn't a politician out there who doesn't hold some awful views in someone's opinion. In my opinion, they all hold awful views. So maybe someone who can actually calmly speak in the face of thuggery, keep calm and have manners is all we can hope for.

Can we have more of this from politicians, please?

The high moral ground on the left

Well, it's no surprise that Saint Jezza is cleaning up with a certain sector of the body politic. For those whose hearts swell in righteous anger at the murderous, sub-human, cruel and vile Tory; those who like nothing more than a big march through a metropolis and those who feel that it's only good and fair to terrify baristas on minimum wage and bank staff trying to get through the day by smashing windows, throwing trash around and burning things, Saint Jezza is in fact the perfect inspiration.

A kindly-looking, avuncular man who has followed his own moral code all his life, with a belief in the correctness of the ends justifying the means, he has set an enthusiastic and adorable example to thousands of acolytes. For example, his belief in the cause of Palestinians has allowed him to justify turning a blind eye to overt and covert anti-Semitism wherever it may find him. His belief in the cause of a unified Ireland allowed him to ignore the ruthless murders and maiming of innocent people.

Lately, his belief in the non-existence of the Srebrenica massacre meant that it was cool to spend the dinner on the evening of the anniversary of this ghastly slaughter scoffing pizza with a vocal Srebrenica massacre denier.

On the anniversary of the massacre. Let that sink in. I mean, if Theresa May did something like that, the outrage on the left would be able to power London for weeks.

But because Saint Jezza has always been on the right side of history, it's all good. His morality is unsullied by the fact that he's forever hanging out with murderers, terrorists and people with the most hideous of views. His blithely ignoring open Jew-hatred on Press TV, Iran's state broadcaster - that's Iran, that kills people for being gay - in exchange for money, is nothing of import.

John McDonnell and Saint Jezza earn proper fat cat salaries, just like Len McCluskey, but of course that's perfectly OK, because they're all on the right side of history. They all earn their money literally being parasites on the working man, but of course that's perfectly OK, because they're all on the right side of history.

(We will ignore for the moment the slight issue of revisionism transforming things like "overt support for an IRA by any means necessary" into "a vital part of the peace process" when we talk about the "right side of history".)

We are already seeing Stalinist putsches of soft-left MPs, for not toeing the line sufficiently. I'm sure Saint Jezza would never ask for such things, but he's not exactly falling over himself to stop it, is he? He isn't even Secretary General, er, Prime Minister, and already Labour is behaving like a Stalinist party.

Because the ends justify the means.

So here we are. Saint Jezza's fans are clearly quite comfortable with all these things.

They also believe "if you are not with us, you are against us," therefore if you're not an uncritical worshipper of Saint Jezza, you are sub-human and not worthy of civilised discourse. You're a Nazi. You can be, should be and probably will be subject to physical violence.

Of course, worst of all are the venal, Blairite traitors on the soft-left. Their ideological impurity is a stain on the left, that must be expunged even more vigorously than the evil Tory scum.

For those of us on the right, being regarded as sub-human by people on the left is nothing new. Their astonishing arrogance in knowing that their political beliefs make them morally superior has been a source of endless insulting behaviour in the past. Of course, now that the most active and virulent form of left-wing politics has taken over, it's a schadenfreude treat to see Blairites who used to have exactly the same attitude (sans the violence, of course) discover what it's like to be regarded as sub-human by a thug with a different opinion.

And these people are, in their hearts, thugs. I make no apologies to any Labour voters I offend. You regard violence as an acceptable form of political bargaining. If you didn't, you wouldn't have voted for someone who says emollient things but does not do anything to stop Jew-hatred, violence or abuse.

If you're hard-left, at least you're being congruent with your beliefs. This doesn't make you a good human being, though.

If you're soft-left and you voted Labour at the last election, I can only describe you as a self-hating, tribalist moron. Your party hates you more than it hates the Tories. Your blind adherence to "I must vote Labour" is self-defeating stupidity.

Look at the spread of abuse, violence and hatred in politics. Look hard at yourself. If you think that actively hating someone or abusing or committing violence on them for their political beliefs is somehow OK or if you voted for these people, then you're all the problems with society today. You personally. It's not "capitalism" or "free markets" or "bankers" or "Tories" or "libertarians" or "evil right-wing media". You have no right to look down at anyone. You have no moral high ground. Your beliefs or your blind loyalty to a party are poisonous and dangerous.

It's you.

You are the problem.