I was always shocked by the level of vitriol among New Statesman and Guardian readers when a writer stepped away from the comfort zone of received wisdom and cuddly “I’m a nice person too” leftie-ness. Suggest that perhaps Hamas is anything other than a resistance movement or that people who vote Conservative might be people too and the sky falls in.
Where the stock term of self-righteous abuse used to be “fascist” – remember Rick from the Young Ones? – it is now “neo-con”, which consigns the target to the same ideological hell as George W. Bush.
Since I’ve started this new blog I have not been called a neo-con. Instead, the insult of choice is “socialist”. There is, I have noticed, a different tone to critics of my posts here: more patronising and dismissive, less fired up with charges of treachery and, from time to time, actually quite funny.
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