There is a quiet but growing anger in Britain over the way in which the pro-EU political and media elite are exploiting the tragic murder of MP Jo Cox by a lone gunman. While only some have so far stooped to the depths of the Daily Star, a number of Labour MPs and left-wing journalists have also said or deliberately implied that Brexit campaigners are to blame. And both the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn have openly threatened to repress people with views that are regarded as ‘politically incorrect’.
The appalling Daily Star headline, produced without a shred of evidence or justification, has caused particular upset, but Twitter and Facebook came alive last night as huge numbers of ordinary people used them to express their disgust when South London Labour MP Neil Coyle used an appearance on Newsnight to attack Leave campaigners ahead of the EU Referendum, saying they had published “dangerous material” with risked “inspiring the hard-right”.
“I think that the kind of nonsense that they inspire online from anonymous accounts and actually the core content of the poster they launched today, look at what they are putting out and I just think that they are a very dangerous, and they risk inspiring extremist elements on the hard right in this country,” he ranted.
Then, this afternoon, veteran leftist and Europhile Jonathan Freedland published a piece in the Guardian online in which he implicitly blamed Nigel Farage and other anti-immigration and pro-independence campaigners for “injecting poison into the political bloodstream.” Here is part of his dishonestly worded piece of demonisation:
“The poster Nigel Farage unveiled on Thursday morning turned that dog-whistle into a foghorn: under the phrase ‘Breaking Point’, it showed a snaking cue of conspicuously dark men, suggesting these were EU migrants descending on Britain. (In fact they were Syrian refugees arriving in Slovenia, with no chance of getting anywhere near Britain.) It was unambiguously racist.
“And throughout this campaign, there has been a drumbeat denouncing ‘the Westminster elite’, castigating all politicians, along with anyone in authority or in a public position of expertise, as either a liar or the corrupt dupe of a wicked Brussels conspiracy.
“Perhaps this had nothing to do with the cruelty that deprived two children of their mother yesterday. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the killer struck at this moment. Maybe it’s a coincidence that he targeted an MP who was a passionate advocate of remaining inside the EU, and whose signature issue had been a campaign to admit Syrians in desperate need of refuge.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence that she was a member of a political class that has been reviled for years and with heightened fervour in recent weeks. Maybe it’s a coincidence that she was an advocate for a position depicted by its most fevered opponents as unpatriotic and verging on treason.”
So there you have it, Brexit campaigners accused Remainers like Jo Cox of ‘treason’ and then she gets shot. What outrageous nonsense from a supposedly responsible journalist.
Nor was he the only one, as the Guardian also gave space for a piece of spiteful, witchunting Remain hysteria from Polly Toynbee under the headline “The mood is ugly and an MP is dead”, in which she too put the blame on Nigel Farage, and by implication, the entire Brexit campaign. “If you vote ‘Leave’ now, you’re sympathising with the racist madman who shot that poor woman”, is the intended but deeply specious message:
“This attack on a public official cannot be viewed in isolation. It occurs against a backdrop of an ugly public mood in which we have been told to despise the political class, to distrust those who serve, to dehumanise those with whom we do not readily identify.
“It’s been part of a noxious brew, with a dangerous anti-politics and anti-MP stereotypes fomented by leave and their media backers mixed in. Only an hour before this shooting Nigel Farage unveiled a huge poster showing Syrian refugees fleeing to Slovenia last year, nothing to do with EU free movement – and none arriving here. Leave’s poster read: ‘Breaking Point. We must break free from the EU and take control of our borders.’ Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas and many others condemned it as ‘disgusting‘, and so it is.”
In reality, what is truly disgusting is the way in which the entire Westminster elite, personified by David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and Speaker John Bercow, have between them managed to turn the tragic death of Jo Cox into an excuse to put the entire Referendum campaign on ice, not for one day, which was wholly justifiable as a mark of respect, but for effectively five days out of the last seven. The Recall of Parliament on Monday basically means that the campaign has been called off – on the say-so of two men who would have lost their jobs if it had continued in the direction it was going.
With the speed with which the opinion polls where shifting, and 20% of the public saying they still had not completely made up their minds, to grind the campaign – which was clearly going against them – to a halt is nothing less than an attack on democracy.
Although it is masquerading as grief and respect, this is in fact an assault on the rights of millions of voters to receive as much information as possible and to have the reasons and subjects they need to talk about their voting intentions with their friends, neighbours and workmates.
But if Brexit campaigners dare to ignore this diktat from a Prime Minister who was seven days from losing his job, until a lone man with a history of mental illness and, according to his family, no interest in the referendum, decided, for reasons unknown, to murder his MP, they will be attacked as cold-hearted monsters.
It’s a gigantic act of moral blackmail by David Cameron, who blinking back the crocodile tears, has seized the opportunity to derail the referendum campaign. He is ruthlessly exploiting the senseless murder to turn what was looking like being a defeat which would have destroyed both his beloved EU and his entire reputation, into a confused shambles of a contest in which an irrational and undeserved sympathy vote may yet save his skin. It could turn out to be the electoral theft of the century!
So, finally, our TV news is now full of Cameron and Corbyn posing as sad men of reason and dignity while in fact exploiting the sad death of Jo Cox in a most revolting way. Because, even as they spoke about ‘democracy’, both explicitly threatened to step up the Politically Correct reign of moral and legal terror against anyone who dares to raise objections to their shared campaign to replace the British people in their own country, and to bury forever the last broken fragments of a freedom which has existed in these islands for a thousand years and an identity which goes back many times further.
Here was Cameron: “Where we see hatred, where we find division, where we see intolerance we must drive it out of our politics and out of our public life and out of our communities.”
And Corbyn echoed him: “It’s the well of hatred that killed her… we will not allow those people that spread hatred and poison to divide our society, we will strengthen our democracy, strengthen our free speech.”
“Drive out intolerance”. Strengthen free speech by stopping people saying things with which they disagree. Eat your heart out, George Orwell!
The hypocrisy and ill-concealed totalitarianism would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. Because if it turns out that Thomas Mair had any sort of political motive at all, it will surely be the way in which his town has been transformed, in which his childhood is now a foreign place, in which the jobs and traditions which gave structure to his community have been globalised out of existence, and in which anyone who has dared to object has been ignored, ridiculed, sacked, arrested or beaten up by gangs of thugs mobilised by the party of Jeremy Corbyn and sponsored by David Cameron personally.
Truly, if the plot by these out-of-touch fools to use Jo Cox’s death to stop the British people at last saving something like a say, and then use it as the excuse for a further clamp down on popular dissent, then they will only have themselves to blame if the tensions that would have come out through the safety valve of a Brexit vote burst out instead in something they will like much, much less. Much the same, of course, could be said about a growing number of nations in Western Europe. As passionate believers in freedom and democracy, we urge the ‘political elite’ – at both EU and national level – to stop doing things which widen the gulf between rulers and citizens, to admit that their various interlinked ‘Projects’ have gone too far, and listen to the people.
