We’ve been Rotherhamed

I think we need a new source of ultimate evil for people taking part in political discussions, because Godwin’s Law has been outreached of late. Mike Godwin, a US attorney, correctly identified that every political debate online will, eventually, end up with someone being likened to Adolf Hitler. ‘Eventually’ was the key word — but that was in 1990. Nowadays the arguably controversial Austrian politician is invoked at the outset of discussions, and after that there’s nowhere left for people to go to display their contempt for whoever it is they’re speaking to, or about. Both Brexiteers and Remainers are like Hitler. Leftists and Tories. We’re all like Hitler, immediately, these days. The chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, Mohammed Amin, compared Boris Johnson with Hitler for saying that Muslim women wearing the full veil looked like pillar boxes. Come on, Mo — old Adolf was a bit naughtier than that, wasn’t he? It’s only my opinion, but I reckon that if Hitler had confined himself to commenting humorously on the way some Jewish people dressed he wouldn’t have quite the same amount of bad press he gets today. Incidentally, I wonder who people used as the source of ultimate political evil in discussions and debates before about 1930? Robespierre? Genghis Khan? Or were people just much, much less stupid then? Less apt to dive straight to the bottom?

Mr Amin’s intervention made me warm a little to Boris’s leadership campaign, as did some of the comments compiled by a newspaper to demonstrate that the albino blunderbuss was indeed Hitler, or perhaps worse than Hitler. Such as his patently correct assertion that colonisation is not remotely responsible for the parlous state of Africa today. When lefties start banging on about imperialism being responsible for African poverty, despotic governments and chronic underachievement, ask them to explain the anomalies of Ethiopia (never colonised, yet as wretched, if not more wretched, than the former colonies which surround it) and Singapore (colonised 200 years ago and now the most successful country on the planet).