The only thing worse than a coup is lefty school policy
IT is fair to say that in the current political climate respectful disagreement has becoming increasingly impossible.
In America in particular both conservatives and liberals have come to see one another as an existential threat and the insults exchanged on social media reflect that growing schism
I mean, sure, he was a fuckwit - crude, corrupt and corrosive - but that didn't in itself make him a latter-day Hitler.
Some of that instinct to moderate my response was probably down to my frustration around that time about the increasingly deranged depiction of Corbyn's Labour as being a party one step away from opening gulags in North London.
The hyperbole may have reached its height in a bizarre piece of speculative fiction, printed in one of the grottier tabloids, which had the newly-installed Prime Minister Corbyn skulking behind the curtains of No 10 like a cross between Count Dracula and Josef Stalin. Which is nonsense obviously; the Count's Romany workforce were almost certainly employed on zero-hours contracts
Against this backdrop I was reluctant to stoop to the level of the right-wing press and join the arms-race of apocalyptic pronouncements. I could object while still trying to sound reasonable.
And yet I increasingly worry that was a mistake, because the danger lies in assuming that the increasingly shrill interventions on both sides should be treated as equal; that progressives and populists alike are guilty of over-egging the threats the world faces for political advantage.
The problem lies in the fact that the point at which the left can credibly described as going full-on Chairman Mao generally seems to be set rather lower than the equivalent Third Reich threshold on the other side. Nazi salutes? Let's think for a minute. A solar farm in Norfolk? God help us!
Only this week Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson was branded "a Marxist" for her plans to rework the way academies operate in England.
A slightly scary-looking headteacher - imagine a culture warrior who shares Bellatrix Lestrange's hairdresser - justified the label on the basis that the government was trying to "centralise the state"
Personally I'm not sure that making minor alterations to Michael Gove's school reforms really falls within the parameters of a five year plan.
Perhaps aware that vague fiddling with coalition-era legislation wouldn't curdle the viewers' blood by itself, the headteacher went on some slightly strange detour, describing how Phillipson had tried to intimidate her during a face-to-face meeting, going so far as to not offer a glass of water.
By this point she was no doubt hoping the audience would join the dots and realise that the Education Secretary's brown bob should leave us in no doubt she was the natural successor to Cate Blanchett's evil communist enforcer in that slightly crap Indiana Jones film.
On the one hand the intervention seems odd, but it fits a wider pattern of painting the UK's first left of centre government for 14 years as being unprecedented in its radicalism
In reality this government is occupying very similar territory to Tony Blair; maybe a tad to the left on policies such as public ownership and taxation but conversely somewhat tougher on welfare and immigration. The prospectus is certainly a far cry from the socialist programmes of Atlee or even Wilson, which last time I checked didn't exactly preach communism themselves.
By contrast we have recently seen the departure of a government which had tacked right further than any in recent history.
Consider, for instance, the threat to break international law deporting refugees to Rwanda. Or the anti-union laws which verged on making strikes in certain sectors illegal. Or the Home Secretary who indulged in the sort of rhetoric which once made Enoch Powell a pariah in the same party.
And yet many have convinced themselves that for all the efforts to suggest Muslims are not properly British and Truss' attempt to slash taxes for the rich during the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation you might just as well have had Ed Davey in charge.
Current leader Kemi Badenoch's belief that the Conservatives governed like liberals ignores the fact that barely a week went by when one minister or another did not try to open a fresh front in the war on woke. Peaceful protests about the Middle East crisis were branded "hate marches". There was talk of criminalising rough sleeping. Robert Jenrick demanded a mural of Mickey Mouse be scrubbed from the walls of an asylum centre for fear the place was rather too welcoming to kiddies.
By the end, Rishi Sunak - whose right-wing credentials were probably judged more by his ethnicity than ideology by racist commentators - was do desperate for GB News approval he effectively pledging to bring back conscription.
Reform UK's Nigel Farage is even more convinced that his Tory rivals had gone properly snowflake because they believed in tackling climate change and didn't go along with Lee Anderson's demand to dispatch warships to intercept small boats in the Channel.
He is right in that the last government did on occasion step back from the brink, but that was usually because many of the proposals were declared illegal or unworkable or - in the case of Rwanda - both.
The suggestion that the appropriate response to the objections of courts or the constraints of international agreements is to junk them, is deeply troubling. But it follows the playbook of hardliners encountering an obstacle, whether that is a critical judge or a concerned civil servant, and declaring that the impartial arbiter is shamelessly biased/corrupt/hostile (delete as applicable).
Here is an approach which genuinely does threaten to fracture a decades-long consensus about the checks and balances in place and yet it is frequently presented as a return to proper conservatism, a necessary corrective to liberal elites drunk on power.
In reality leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would be to turn our back on an organisation that Winston Churchill helped to found following the carnage of the Second World War. While rejecting the science on climate change would be to repudiate the bipartisan position which dates back to the tenure of well-known eco-zealot Margaret Thatcher.
For all that Corbyn's election as opposition leader was framed as some unprecedented upending of British politics, I would argue that on almost every domestic policy his programme would be considered base-line social democracy in the likes of Sweden or Norway.
The populist right can themselves point to nations which follow their model but unfortunately for them the blueprint they most seem intent on following is Victor Orban's Hungary. And they say it is the left who have a fixation with Eastern Europe...Orban, if you have not come across him, has a penchant for navy suits and looks like a slightly angrier version of former England football manager Sam Allardyce. But unlike Allardyce, Orban has enjoyed a rather lengthy time in charge, not least because his government has ushered in what some civil liberties campaigners describe as "elected autocracy."
In his case the clamping down on liberal excesses extends to rigging votes, diverting state resources to his own party and curbing the free press; there is no surprise that he is a close ally of far-right forces elsewhere in Europe and frequently praised by Trump.
Whereas the Scandi countries which were in many ways the model for Corbynism take the top four spots in the independent international Democracy Matrix, Orban's Hungary languishes at a less than stellar 78 (close to bottom for any western power).
In this context, it feels like the squeamishness about calling out the worst excesses of Trump and others has to end. The populist label has for too long been used as a euphemism for a political movement which, while not identical to the dangerous nationalism of the 1930s, grows ever more extreme.
The othering of migrants and minorities, the deluge of misinformation, the contempt for intellectuals, reinforcing corporate power at the expense of labour and disdain for human rights are all strategies which should alarm us.
And if calling that out for what it is meets with retaliatory accusations of "Communism" or "Radical Leftism" or similar, this has to be seen in the context that one of those claims has the basis in reality and one is nearly always divorced from it.
That is not to say any government is perfect or does not indulge in the dishonesty or double standards that has arguably fuelled support for more extreme politicians but false equivalence has become deeply dangerous.
Progressive governments which sit firmly in the centre ground - having accepted, for good or ill, many of the economic orthodoxies of the centre right - are not comparable with parties which increasingly adopt or endorse positions which were once confined to conspiracy theories and street thugs.
Trying to find a middle ground between these two points will continue to drag political debate inexorably in one direction. The far right will move ever further and the centre will fret about how far they can follow to try and win back support, without selling their soul in the process.
Which leaves repudiation as the only alternative.It is time to be honest that what we are facing now goes far beyond the political wrangles of the 80s, 90s or even the noughties. Refusing to accept the result of a democratic election and then trying to overturn the result through a mix of coercion and outright violence does not compare, let's say, with scrapping VAT relief for independent schools.
The only similarity between these two things is that some people happen not to like them, but the simple fact is that one is a legitimate decision within a democratic framework and one holds that same framework in contempt. Indeed, it shows a clear desire to destroy it.
Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is either an idiot or a liar. But then that is the thing about fascism, it can make ample use of both...
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