Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Brexit voters do feel betrayed. So why can’t Boris say so?

Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and making life hell for politicians, they claimed.

Their ostentatious offence-taking would be a tad more convincing if they had ever said anything about the bile heaped on Brexit voters these past three years.

Where were these people when it became positively vogue to refer to lower middle-class Brexit blokes as ‘gammon’? Where were they when Brexit voters were being branded xenophobes, fascists, the facilitators of the most hateful period in Western Europe since the 1930s?

Where were they when Lord Adonis compared seeking a clean Brexit to appeasing the Nazis, or when David Lammy said the ERG are as bad as Nazis? When asked to retract that comment, Lammy said that, if anything, his comment had not been ‘strong enough’. So the ERG are worse than Nazis? That was the mad implication. Boris has never, not once, said anything as toxic as that about his fellow human beings.

Yes, that’s where these overnight smelling-salts offence-takers over Boris’s bad language were when incredibly toxic comments were being made about anyone who thinks we should leave the EU — they were making some of the comments.

If you think Boris Johnson’s perfectly reasonable use of the phrase ‘surrender bill’ to describe the Benn Bill was an act of far-right provocation that will lead to violence and death, then you must have been really shocked when Brexiteers were being branded useless lumps of meat (gammon). And when the Guardian recently asked,

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