I must stop hating politicians

Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our age, as anybody who’s read Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale can vouch – but we have never obsessed about them quite so much. What is hate in its 21^st century, British sense? And why are some varieties of hate seemingly justified and good, and some appalling?

In the public sphere, hate often seems ludicrously hyperbolic. A certain kind of person on the internet spent much of the last 14 years ranting about, and at, the Tories; appending the hashtag #GTTO (Get The Tories Out) to every passing thought and blaming the Conservatives for anything and everything they didn’t like. This was bitterly ironic, given that party’s habit of governing like a milky continuation of New Labour. As the new Tory leader says, they talked right and governed left. But talk was all that mattered to these frothing detractors, who greeted each silly policy announcement – Rwanda, selling Channel 4, fracking – as Armageddon, despite the fact that none of them actually happened, or ever stood much chance of happening.