The Latest Dirty Word

By definition it is the job of a radio phone-in host to be controversial - disagreeing and arguing with callers makes for much more interesting broadcasting than meekly listening to and accepting their views - and if the degree of controversy the host courts is a measure of their success, then I imagine that LBC's Katie Hopkins must be considered fairly successful. Ms Hopkins espouses some views which many people find objectionable - to say she is a bit right-wing is like suggesting that water is a bit wet - and if I'm honest, I cannot say I can recall anyone of my acquaintance finding much she has said agreeable, but this week I read of a call she took on her radio show where I admit to having some sympathy with her view, even if the outrage she displayed was perhaps tired and stagey. By the by, am I the only person becoming more than somewhat bored by the way in which these sorts of exchanges between broadcasters and either members of the public or politicians now seem to have to be described? Ms Hopkins was said to have 'destroyed'  the man and it seems that callers have to be destroyed or slain and their arguments shredded, rather than having their opinions dissected and rebutted with logical argument.

It's no longer enough to rebut or refute someone's argument, they have to be 'torn apart.'

Almost inevitably, the subject of the call was Brexit, and the caller - whose opinion was to some extent rejected on the basis that he was from South Kensington almost as much as for the view he expressed - said that there were two groups of people who voted for Brexit, namely " the elderly people and then you have the uneducated and ill-informed…" This fits the mindset of many disgruntled Remain voters who view the elderly as not entitled to have voted (unless they voted Remain) since the consequence of their actions will impact more significantly on future generations than their own, and everyone else who voted Leave as an intellectually challenged bunch, suckered by false promises and fallacious arguments, as though this were the first time that politicians had ever tried to pull the wool over the electorate's eyes. It really is condescending and insulting to categorise 17million people - nearly a quarter of the population - as stupid. I know plenty of people who voted Remain and I know plenty of People who voted Leave: I wouldn't call any of them stupid. But then it seems that vilification is now more than ever regarded as a legitimate form of opposition than is formulating a cogent argument. It is far easier to call the Tories 'scum' than propose alternatives to their policies, simpler to call Jeremy Corbyn a 'lunatic' and criticise his dress sense than listen to his proposed policies and rebut them.

But the latest dirty word to throw at someone is 'populist.' It isn't just the EU referendum result, it is also Donald Trump's victory in the US Presidential election, and the outcome of the recent referendum in Italy that have been described in dismayed tones by many - including David Cameron and Tony Blair - as victories for populism. A populist, which seems to have become such a pejorative term, is defined (in my dictionary at least) as "a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people" and "a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people." Who, apart from the common people, would a politician wish to represent? The elite, perhaps? Now that would go down well with people for whom 'elite' - literally, those who are "superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group" - is such a derogatory term. Funny, isn't that both Tony Blair and David "Call me Dave" Cameron tried to cultivate the image of being regular guys, yet  seemed singularly to fail to win over the majority of regular guys and thus attributed their failures to populism, that is to say, the vote of the regular guys. Still, holding two diametrically opposed views at the same time is not unheard of, and I am certain that many of the critics of Boris Johnson's comments about Saudi Arabia - he accused the Saudis of abusing Islam and acting as a puppeteer in proxy wars - will have been equally fierce opponents of Britain's close ties with a country accused of human rights abuses.

A lunatic in an ill-fitting suit, or more properly, the Leader of The Opposition.

Not that Boris has been entirely constant in his views either. Despite being the poster boy for the Brexit campaign - a role in which I felt his lack-lustre performances betrayed a lack of conviction - Boris had expressed support for Britain's continuing EU membership as recently as October 2016. It struck me that, in the interests of fairness, Parliament felt that a personality like Johnson was needed on the Leave side to dilute the more pungent views of Nigel Farage and to oppose the heavyweight Tories on the Remain team. He was very much like the skilled player forced to even up the teams in a pick-up game of football by playing with the less able, and resenting it.

Another politician apparently holding two completely contrary views following the outcome of the referendum is John Major. “The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy," he said, an expression first coined by John Adams in 1788, and one that reminds me of doublespeak: Major might just have well have said that the referendum result was doubleplusungood. He added that he found it difficult to accept that “48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens.  I don't recall Major saying anything similar when 62% of those who voted in the last general election did not vote for the Conservatives. A quite salient point was made by Communist Party general secretary Rob Griffiths (and I admit that those are words I never thought that I would write) when he said, "Tories have never been big fans of elected democracy, especially when they lose. So it is no surprise when those who support the anti-democratic European Union are more contemptuous of the voice of the people when they don’t agree with them.”

Two former Prime Ministers unable to accept their lack of current relevance. Picture: Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images

He might equally have said that no one seems to be fans of democracy when they lose, since we now seem to have descended to the politics of the school playground, where insults are more common than rational argument and twenty-five percent of the population are decried as 'stupid' and the majority of those who voted in the referendum are apparently 'tyrants' simply because they did not bow to the wishes of those who consider themselves their betters.