Nish Kumar is Jo Brand’s most obnoxious defender

We are all aware that Jo Brand saying battery acid would be a more appropriate liquid than milkshakes to throw at people was a joke. It was a bad joke, but it was a joke.

We are all aware that the chances of a Radio 4 listener hearing the joke and being inspired to hurl battery acid at a right-wing politician are slim to none. It remains such a morbid and mean-spirited jest that it should not be made, let alone by people whose jokes are being funded by the taxpayer, but it is foolish to classify it as incitement.

What rankles is the pungent hypocrisy of Brand’s liberal and left-wing defenders. If the joke had been by a right-wing Twitter troll of Jess Phillips or Jeremy Corbyn the demands to deplatform them would have been ear-splitting. Few of them defended Mark Meechan when he was dragged to court for jokily teaching his girlfriend’s pug the Nazi salute.