The abuse directed towards supporters of other candidates by online advocates of Jeremy Corbyn is unpleasant. As Alastair Campbell says, the cybernystas are similar to the cybernats, the Scottish nationalists who became a byword for intolerance on social media during the referendum campaign and afterwards.
Corbyn secured nomination for the leadership because some MPs wanted to “broaden the debate”. One of many paradoxes has been that this broadening seems to consist mainly of Labour people telling fellow party members to join the Tories.
Actually, it was Yvette Cooper who started it, accusing Liz Kendall of “swallowing the Tory manifesto” before Corbyn had even joined the campaign. All his supporters have done is to add swear words and to widen the invitation to join the Conservative Party to anyone refusing to sign up to their full left-wing checklist of policies.
It took Carl Gardner no time on Twitter to compile 50 examples of the cybernystas’ foul-mouthed injunctions to join another party. “Piss off and join the Tory party Mr Danczuk” was one of the milder ones, aimed at Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP who called for the election to be halted because of “infiltration”.
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As someone who has long taken the view that Tony Blair was, on balance, a good prime minister, I may have become desensitised to this stuff. A lot of it seems to come from the same sources as “Blair rage”, from a feeling of frustration at having been marginalised in politics for so long.
Indeed, a lot of it I have had thrown at me for years, about how Blair didn’t really win elections – a wet blanket with a red rosette could have won in 1997, Blair “lost” four million votes and all the rest. Along with its opposite: Michael Foot and his policies didn’t really lose the 1983 election – it was the SDP breakaway or the Falklands War.
So the seething was there, just below the surface. All it took was Labour’s defeat in the general election to trigger the irrational spasm – irrational in the sense that, having been beaten by the Conservatives, the cybernystas are now organising a Tory party recruitment drive.
