Every journalist should have the courage to betray his party. Does Owen Jones?

You know what’s tough these days? Being a left-wing polemicist, that’s what’s tough these days. You don’t need to take my word for this. Just ask Owen Jones. Here he is, complaining about the “unfree media” that makes it “impossible to have a rational conversation about Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, or just politics full stop.” 

Now you may be tempted to say ‘Aw shucks, too bad for the poor booby‘. But this would be a needlessly ungenerous reaction. Because he has a point. True, it’s a point occluded by leftist posturing about the unfree press but, beneath all that guff, there is a point to be made here about the nature of modern political engagement and how that all too easily crowds out common sense. There is, that is to say, a tragedy of the commons at work here. Especially on social media which increasingly (and unfortunately) is the prism through which those of us who toil in these vineyards view the world.