Why not let politicians call each other ‘scum-sucking pigs’?

David Wright, the Labour MP for Telford, should get out more, he should be more inclusive. I have attended many Conservative party conferences and mingled late at night with the delegates, and I have to say it always seemed to me that the party was composed almost exclusively of scum-sucking pigs. Sometimes I would go to these conferences with the notion, maybe at the back of my mind, that perhaps next time an election came around I might vote Conservative, given the state of the country and the Iraq war and Harriet Harman and what have you. But the scum-sucking pig stuff cured me of that within four days.

But then attending a conference for a few days is not really good enough. It is like visiting Marrakech on a weekend mini-break, as I did recently, and concluding that all Arabs are sexually repressed criminals — which is fine colloquially, the sort of casual observation you might share with friends over a glass of wine but which might not, if we’re honest, stand up to the closest of scrutinies.