Today, according to Twitter, is #OwenJonesIsAWankerDay.
Normally, I would deplore such dog-piling. It’s what the left does all the time: naming a blameless individual for having committed some imaginary crime such as using the wrong pronoun or making a joke or being pro-Brexit – and then inviting the Social Justice Warrior hate mob to destroy them.
But I wonder if we may need to make an exception in the case of Owen Jones and his ilk, because what they have done to political discourse in Britain over the last few years is dangerous, frightening, and long overdue an almighty backlash.
Like many of the Care Bear Commies who have risen to undue media prominence in the last five years or so, Owen Jones is personally quite amiable. If I were gay, he is the kind of well-scrubbed, nicely brought up young chap I’d be more than happy to bring home to meet my parents.
But the hard-left ideology he aggressively and relentlessly champions in his frequent appearances on the BBC, in his Guardian columns and at political rallies, however, is anything but amiable.
Had Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won the general election, it would have augured in the most oppressive, authoritarian, censorious regime since the mid-17th century when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans banned Christmas. Free speech would have been curtailed, liberty constrained, private property confiscated, wealth redistributed, Jews would have been persecuted, the economy would have tanked.
The fact that Owen Jones is capable of behaving like a cuddly, likeable, well-mannered fellow in a BBC green room, or that Ash Sarkar, with her jaunty Twitter bio advertising that she “fucks like a champion”, or that her fellow media Marxist Aaron Bastani has written a book cheerily promising us “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, should never distract us from the thoroughly evil nature of the ideology for which they have been shilling.
It’s entirely characteristic of the left that it has got its values upside down. It believes that so long as you say it with a smile (or at least with passionate conviction) and so long as you profess how much you care for the world’s poor and oppressed then it doesn’t matter how much actual real world damage your political ideology does. What counts, for the left, is your good intentions — not the results of your good intentions.
Conservatives take the opposite view: we are all flawed as individuals (“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her…”) but ultimately we are to be judged on our deeds, not our thoughts. This is why we are much less obsessed than the left with the notion of ‘niceness.’
If you look at the Twitter bios of people on the left, they tend to abound with “niceness” signifiers: pics of them looking adoringly at their children; bios telling you how much they love their “partner”; twibbons advertising their fealty to the NHS or their keen interest in mental health issues; rainbow flags etc.
People on the right tend not to bother with these because, quite correctly, they see them as smug, superficial, exercises in virtue-signalling which have no bearing whatsoever on the far more important issue of moral character.
Though the jury is still out on how authentically and successfully conservative Boris Johnson’s new administration is going to be, I think we can be sure of at least one encouraging thing: that the seemingly unstoppable rise of hard-left media activists like Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar, Paul Mason has finally been checked.
Until Boris’s massive victory, these leftist hotheads looked worryingly like a government-in-waiting – -and strutted around accordingly, aided and abetted by the left-wing BBC, which gave them far more airtime than their achievements or reasonableness necessarily justified.
“I’m a Communist, you idiot”, Ash Sarkar boasted to Piers Morgan on breakfast television last year, for all the world as if it were an amusing, laudable thing.
It is inconceivable that Sarkar’s equivalent on the hard right would be given the airtime to make such a boast on television.
With luck, we’ll now look back on the last few years as an anomalous period in which the media paid far too much attention to some very dodgy left-wing ideologues whose rabid politics bore no resemblance to those of the country at large.
And if this proves to be the case, then it hasn’t come a moment too soon…
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