“Matt Hancock: I was threatened with ‘public execution’ after affair scandal.”
I’ve read that headline (from a tame Telegraph interview with the noisome former health secretary) over a dozen times now. But still I can’t work out what the problem is.
Matt Hancock is one of the most widely hated British politicians in recent history. Of course a creature like him is going to get the occasional bit of hate mail from the general public. And if the worst he can come up with is someone demanding his ‘public execution’, then I would say he has got off pretty lightly. A ‘public execution’, after all, implies a punishment carried out in accordance with law after due process. If that’s what some enlightened judge decides some day in the future, then who are we to question the majesty and wisdom of the law?
Seriously, though, the creepy Hancock doth protest far, far too much. When you become an MP, let alone a Cabinet minister, and are involved in decisions which affect people’s lives or even their very survival, it is naive beyond measure to imagine that you won’t be exposed to robust criticism, especially in the age of social media.
For once I find myself in agreement with Tony Blair, who apparently advised Hancock how to cope:
“Just don’t look at Twitter. What on earth are you looking at that for?”
In the corrupt and mendacious world of the Westminster politics/media bubble, though, nothing is quite as it is presented. Ostensibly this is a story about the supposedly unacceptable levels of harassment politicians face in the course of their work serving the nation. What it’s really about, though, is ramping up censorship to levels that we all grew up imagining only existed in totalitarian states like Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China.
Here is the giveaway paragraph:
Mr Hancock has started a campaign with Rupa Huq, the Labour MP, to curb the abuse aimed at people in public life on social media. The hope is to establish a permanent body to work to improve public debate.
“Improve public debate”? What a slippery euphemism that is — and the journalist who wrote it ought to be ashamed of himself because essentially he is endorsing the dishonesty of these grubby little would-be fascists.
Public debate is at its best when it is free and frank. What Hancock and his fellow political weasel Rupa Huq are doing is trying to set up some official body whose job will be to decide which forms of discourse are acceptable. That is definitely not free speech. And it is definitely not an ‘improvement’ in public debate.
Once you spot these shyster politicians’ dirty tricks it becomes so painfully obvious it’s just embarrassing. Here’s Rupa Huq, doing the only thing she knows: playing the victim card for cry-bullying advantage.
“Social media gives people licence to — the gloves come off — and they say stuff that they wouldn’t in real life.”
She added: “Half of you think sticks and stones, but you just don’t know what may happen next. There may be people who want to sort of do a copycat attack.
“Women get it worse, women of colour, Muslim women — I’m in a Venn diagram where I’m all three.”
Inevitably, Huq attempts to shoehorn in the killing of Sir David Amess MP.
“But then you stop and think about something like the killing of Sir David Amess, and you think it’s not right, it is not on.”
No, indeed, Ms Huq. Killing MPs is indeed not on. But there is no evidence whatsoever that the killing of Amess could have been prevented if only there had been an official body whose job it was to censor hurtful tweets against politicians. It’s a complete red herring.
Westminster is a sewer. A cess pit. Its scaly denizens cannot be trusted an inch, not even the feisty backbenchers you thought were on your side because that was the narrative you were sold by the lying MSM. Mark Francois, for example. Remember him? Remember how during Brexit, he was the plain-speaking, red-faced, angry-little-man Spartan who wasn’t going to take no for an answer and by golly he was going to stand up for his constituents and the people who voted Brexit and yada yada yada…
Well we got the angry little man bit right. But independent, he ain’t. Francois is just another greasy little cog in the big government machine, as he demonstrated the other day when he shamingly sought to make political capital out of his friend Amess’s death by demanding that there be a ban on anonymous social media accounts.
Now here is Hancock advocating the same thing. He says in the interview:
“I think we should tackle anonymous accounts.”
Of course he does. All the MPs are moving in lockstep on this one. Even though free speech is probably more censored now than at any time since the Second World War, the politicians want more censorship still.
The comments have been switched off for that Telegraph article. Gosh, why could that be? Might it be, maybe, that if the readers were given a chance to comment, they would affirm their loathing for both Hancock and Huq, unconscionable greasy-pole-climbers who’ve done nothing to earn anyone’s respect and who would both serve their country better by resigning immediately, retiring to live in a cave, and never bothering us with their inanities ever again.
The more disgusting, venal, incompetent, and destructive our political class grows, the more it wants to clamp down on our ability to tell us what we think of it. Funny that.