When an elected politician is killed, it should concern us all. A long-standing acquaintance of mine therefore shocked me by applauding the recent murder of Ann Widdecombe. Widdecombe was actually retired, having left the House of Commons in 2010, but she had the audacity to continue speaking her mind. Whether you agreed or disagreed with her is irrelevant: she was a 78-year-old woman living happily on her own and her life was cut short by a man who entered her house and then clubbed her to death with 21 blows of a hammer.
‘How can you not be appalled?’ I asked my friend (a man).
‘Well, she spouted hate, didn’t she?’
‘Did she? So she deserved to be clubbed to death while eating lunch in her own kitchen?’
‘She had it coming. The kind of toxic politics we now have is new.’
Except, it isn’t — hate in British politics isn’t new. ‘Tory scum’ was the insult of choice during my own student days in Southampton. I reminded my friend of this and it became clear, from his flabbergasted face, that he had never before considered calling every Conservative Party member ‘scum’ to be hateful.
Yet, we all know what to do with scum, don’t we?
For the record, I was a socialist throughout my university years. I hung out with other socialists and lived with quite a few. I can assure you that many of them — not all, but too many, maybe even the vast majority — despised anyone who belonged to the Conservative Party; in fact, they despised anyone who was ‘conservative’ with a small ‘c’. And because most of Britain was then socially conservative, this small band actually loathed the rest of the country.
It’s therefore hypocritical that today’s lefties blame only the political right for hate, when they themselves have a long tradition of hating. Once we look at how ‘left’ and ‘right’ are generally described, though, this remarkably distorted view should come as no surprise.
Socialists and left-wing ideas are invariably called ‘progressive’, even by the Daily Telegraph (that supposedly right-wing newspaper!), whereas right-wing politicians and policies are labelled ‘reactionary’, ‘fascist’ or plain ‘evil’. Naturally, ‘left’ has come to be equated with good and ‘right’ with awful.
The distinction is simple and easy to understand. After all, socialists are fighting inequality and oppression, aren’t they? My socialist friends all consider themselves to be principled, unlike their greedy capitalist opponents (myself included) who only think about profit.
Because socialists believe they have right on their side, they end up behaving as if they are morally superior. This self-righteousness isn’t new, but I’m so sick of being sneered at, I’ve decided to call it out.
You see, my friends, you are not the only people with principles: I, too, wish for a better world. What we disagree on is how to get there. Funding the myriad projects so dear to you all requires wealth. Wealth-creation, in turn, needs entrepreneurialism. And I have not seen a better economic system for unleashing entrepreneurialism than a capitalist system.
Ergo, I’m a capitalist precisely because I want equality. Just because we wish to take different routes to the same destination does not make me your enemy.
During the second year of my Ph.D., I went Inter-railing. In the UK anyone up to the age of 26 can buy a cheap rail pass that is valid for one calendar month. The Inter-rail pass allows travel on most trains in Europe. To my delight, some countries in the Eastern Bloc were included, even in 1988.
I drew up an itinerary crisscrossing as much of Hungary and Yugoslavia as we could take in during our month and set off with two university chums. The trip was eye-opening.
Hungary had few visitors then, so we were the objects of curiosity. Younger Hungarians were especially keen to practise their English. Not a single one of them told us they would choose to live in a socialist country. This made a big impression on me. If socialism was a grand utopia, why didn’t everyone love it?
Because, they said, we’re not free. They could not even leave their country, let alone travel around Europe by train.
One night in Budapest a student from the University confessed that life felt pointless: he was hoping to be a surgeon and had passed all his exams, there were still more to come and yet at the very end, he would be paid the same as a street cleaner.
This struck me as absurd. One of my travel companions simply shrugged him off. ‘Well, we need street cleaners, too,’ she said.
Time and again, I have come across this same dismissive attitude. My ex-wife, who was born in Moscow, gave a talk one night to a group of Western socialist friends about what it was like growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Her experience of living under a socialist régime did not fit into my friends’ world views. Scepticism crept into the room, as if they knew better, even though not one of them had ever set foot in Russia.
Their reaction was unsurprising. If you genuinely believe you’re on the side of right, your instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction is that any contradiction must be wrong. Which is why, during our conversation about Ann Widdecombe, it was a jolt to my friend that a phrase he had taken for granted could possibly incite hate.
‘Tory scum’ has been repeated by no less a person than Angela Rayner, our tax-dodging former Deputy Prime Minister, who called a Tory MP ‘scum’ during a debate in the House of Commons in 2020 and crowned her credentials the following year by calling all Tories ‘scum’ at a Labour Party conference. After Widdecombe’s death was announced, plenty of lefties took to social media to celebrate her demise, including a trans woman (i.e. someone born biologically male) who wrote ‘I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony’.
The great irony is that Ann Widdecombe believed passionately in free speech and would have absolutely defended the right of her many detractors to express their views. (Here’s a link to a speech she gave at the Oxford Union in defence of free speech, which was published by the group Academics for Academic Freedom as a tribute after her murder. It makes for compelling reading.)
I disagreed with Widdecombe on many issues, but that is no reason to be gleeful at her brutal murder. Democracy cannot survive unless we’re able to work alongside those with whom we may vehemently disagree. Shabana Mahmood, our Home Secretary, struck a dignified and empathetic tone in her moving statement in the House of Commons (excerpt below):
‘Today, is a dark day in our political life.
But we must also use it as an opportunity to celebrate Ann Widdecombe’s memory.
She was a unique figure in our politics.
A distinctive and devoted public servant.
The likes of whom we will rarely, if ever, see again.’
Mahmood also mentioned that Ann Widdecombe did not take herself too seriously. The same cannot be said of many of her detractors on the left. It must be unbearable to be so utterly, absolutely, unambiguously certain about what’s wrong with this world and who is to blame.
Window into Other Worlds 