I must stop hating politicians

Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our age, as anybody who’s read Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale can vouch – but we have never obsessed about them quite so much. What is hate in its 21^st century, British sense? And why are some varieties of hate seemingly justified and good, and some appalling?

In the public sphere, hate often seems ludicrously hyperbolic. A certain kind of person on the internet spent much of the last 14 years ranting about, and at, the Tories; appending the hashtag #GTTO (Get The Tories Out) to every passing thought and blaming the Conservatives for anything and everything they didn’t like. This was bitterly ironic, given that party’s habit of governing like a milky continuation of New Labour. As the new Tory leader says, they talked right and governed left. But talk was all that mattered to these frothing detractors, who greeted each silly policy announcement – Rwanda, selling Channel 4, fracking – as Armageddon, despite the fact that none of them actually happened, or ever stood much chance of happening.

I can understand these levels of hatred for actual dictators or very bad people, but the Tories? They seemed so feeble and unserious. And why waste your energy on politicians? I wasn’t a fan, to say the least, of Gordon Brown. But I once found myself sat next to him at a wedding reception and made affable small talk, the way one would do with any stranger. 

So I’ve been taken by surprise by the strength of my feelings about the new government. I was expecting them to be awful, and foolish, and I was right, but what’s the point in hating a fool?

But then, they are loathsome, and in a way I wasn’t expecting. There is something about their petty malice, their utter want of talent, their combination of blankness and entitlement – ‘We will continue to engage with the (farming) industry and explain how the process works’k a spokesman said on Monday. And then there is how they dodge any difficult question by replying ‘I’ll take no lessons from you’, like a little prig of a student. 

We have Lord Hermer, attorney general, whose attitude to the law is that of a maniac. We have David Lammy with the visibly working cogs in his brain moving very, very slowly. We have the robotic stare and cyber monotone of Bridget Phillipson – the first AI minister! And unlike their predecessors, Labour ministers don’t just talk, they actually do things – things like destroy the food security and the energy security of the country. It would be more understandable if they really were the ideological communists their more hysterical detractors claim they are. But there seems to be nothing but spite and posturing behind their curtain. So I find that I hate them, which is a new experience for me with a British government.

But what can you do with this kind of ‘hate’? ‘Anger is an energy’, Johnny Rotten once memorably claimed in song, but is it? I’ve always found such anger with politicians silly, and certainly unproductive: anger is naff. How we chuckled back in the 20^th century at Kenny Everett’s character Angry of Mayfair, with his permanently tumescent umbrella, or at Lucy in Peanuts – ‘it’s all the fault of the head beagle!’ – or at Basil Fawlty’s eternal boil about strikers. 

Maybe it would be better to project insouciance and unflappability than to hate. To keep one’s cool. This was how Jo Brand got away with saying of Nigel Farage: ‘I’m thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?’ Brand was characteristically laconic, and one of the Good People, which meant everyone knew she was joking, obviously. Plus Nigel Farage hasn’t actually done anything; it’s very easy to make light of hate that isn’t really hate.

Brand’s kind of nonchalance is a luxury of affluence and a society where the institutions function. Now, thanks to successive governments since at least 1997, they don’t. A certain kind of person hated the Tories for Rwanda, but didn’t care about the way that they wrecked the police.

When the country doesn’t work and politicians actively target livelihoods, people will get angry. And those are the perfect conditions to cultivate hate – actual hate.