Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Jeremy Corbyn must rein in the thugs

The protest that greeted Jacob Rees-Mogg’s talk at a Bristol university on Friday night shows that something sinister is happening in British politics, according to today’s newspaper editorials.

The Times says that while Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘younger admirers’ might be blind to the idea, the Labour party and Corbyn’s ‘personal brand are tainted with an ugly and retrograde thuggishness’. The paper says the experiences of Claire Kober, the outgoing Labour leader of Haringey council, is a case in point. Kober used an interview in the Times on Saturday to document her experiences at the hands of some of Corbyn’s followers. It seems clear, says the paper, that while Corbyn is ‘riding the wave’ of ‘youthful idealism’, he also owes his success partly to the ‘revival of Bennite bullying, often laced with misogyny and antisemitism’. This type of politics should have been ‘buried’ back in the 1980s, the Times says.

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