The MP and the far-right thugs

When she takes the Tube, Anna Soubry no longer stands at the edge of the platform: she’s worried someone might push her onto the track. She goes into the House of Commons via a side entrance, and she’s careful to wear shoes she can run in. She calls them her “Brexit bovver boots”, she told Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson in The Times. The Conservative MP made headlines last week, when she was harassed and jostled by a group of pro-brexit protesters on College Green in Westminster. Soubry reckons she’s pretty fearless. She went to a tough comprehensive in Worksop, and as a prominent Remainer, she is used to being at the sharp end of British politics: she’s lost track of all the death threats she’s had; three people have received custodial sentences for harassing her; and even her 85-year-old mother has been sent a threatening letter at her home. Yet this time, she was “rattled”.

I’m not surprised, said Dawn Foster in The Independent: as Soubry sought to give an interview to Sky, a group of about 20 men screamed “scum”, “Nazis” and “slags” at the tops of their voices, and made to follow anyone who walked past them. “The sheer volume of vitriol was unnerving.” I routinely broadcast from outside Parliament and there are often protesters on College Green. This time was different though: I felt “genuinely unsafe”. The protest wasn’t an expression of free speech; it was an attempt to intimidate and silence anti-brexit opinion (and women: these activists mainly target women and ethnic minorities). Yet nor was it really about Brexit. If the protesters hadn’t been so intent on drowning out our voices with their vile chants, they’d have heard me arguing against a second referendum. No, these are far-right agitators trying to get themselves noticed, in the hopes of attracting visitors to their social media pages and donations to their causes. And to listen to their jeers is inevitably to be reminded of the far-right hatred that motivated the killer of Labour MP Jo Cox.

Among the self-styled “yellow vests” harassing Soubry – and later arrested on suspicion of public order offences – was a man named James Goddard, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail. He has taken part in several pro-brexit protests, yet until then, he was mainly known for his anti-muslim rhetoric. He has called for a stop to all Muslim immigration and a ban on the building of mosques, and he is a supporter of the #ourboysjustice campaign: this was launched in March, to push the conspiracy theory that three white boys accidentally killed by a drink-driver in west London last year were, in fact, the victims of an Islamist terror attack that has been covered up by the police. There’s not a shred of evidence to support this notion: the driver of the car wasn’t even Muslim, he was of Hindu background. Yet the campaign has gained considerable traction online.

We can all agree that Goddard and his ilk are an unpleasant lot, said Brendan O’neill in The Spectator – but their tactics, however deplorable, were not invented by the far-right. Left-wing activists have long branded their opponents as fascists and Nazis, and used heckling to silence dissenting views. On campuses, I’ve seen pro-israel speakers derided as scum and murderers; I’ve seen feminists critical of transgenderism being shouted down and even physically attacked. If you think its easy to express pro-brexit views, ask Jacob Rees-mogg about the way Remainers have tried to drown out his voice (on College Green, as well as elsewhere). To the “noplatformers, the shrill virtue-signallers and the rest”, I say this: see that mob outside Parliament? That’s what you look like to many people. I defend your right to protest; but don’t turn around now and blame the Right for debasing the political debate.

There was a time when yobs like Goddard got their kicks from football hooliganism, said Matthew Norman in The Independent. The polarising Brexit debate has drawn them “into the political arena and amplified their voices”. These people are unpleasant, but should be seen for what they are: a “small but disproportionately noisy substratum of the aggressively dim” that is best ignored. “Nothing aggrandises” them like a “sense of martyrdom, or superheats their infantile resentments” like attempts to “suppress what is, however distastefully indulged, their right to free speech”. As for the claim – made by some Brexiters – that Remainers should accept Brexit for fear of inflaming the far-right, that is, for want of a better word, “appeasement”. No, we have to accept that however Brexit pans out, the country will remain divided. There will be sporadic acts of violence, which the justice system will have to punish. But “vicious disagreement and name-calling is no threat to democracy – it is the ugly end of it, and wants managing with the lightest possible touch until it straddles the borderline with criminality”.

“These are agitators trying to get noticed, in the hopes of attracting visitors to their social media pages”