The speed with which tragedy turns into farce these days is quite something. Within minutes of Sir David Amess’s death being announced, social media was filled with sizzling hot takes. The back-and-forth centred on whether the decline in ‘civility’ and the use of dehumanising language in politics was to blame for the murder of an MP. It recalled nothing so much as the recriminations after Jo Cox’s death, except that the teams here had, as it were, swapped shirts at half-time.
Back then, the left more or less directly attributed Jo Cox’s murder to the language used by the partisans of Brexit: ‘traitors’, ‘saboteurs’ and so on. Back then, the right accused them of playing politics with a tragedy. This time, voices on the right made a more or less a direct link to Angela Rayner denouncing Tories as ‘scum’. And those on the left pooh-poohed it as tasteless political opportunism.
