James Kirkup James Kirkup

In defence of Sarah Vine

The first job of a columnist on a big newspaper is to be noticed. If people aren’t talking about the things you’ve said, what’s the point? By that measure, Sarah Vine is a good columnist. Her name is known. At the Daily Mail she says things that people notice and talk about. She does it on Twitter too. Over the weekend, she had this to say about the anti-Brexit march through London:

“There are no leavers there because they would be lynched. These people are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot see anyone who disagrees with them as anything other than a monster. The rhetoric against people who voted to Leave characterises them as sub-human.”

That is a mixture of fair comment and daft hyperbole. There weren’t any Leavers there because it was an event backing a cause they disagree with; Tories don’t go to Labour conferences, and vegetarians don’t go to butchers’ shops. If Leavers had attended, there’d have been some tutting and perhaps squabbling. But no lynching; for all the awfulness in the Brexit debate, this is still Britain. We’re going through a rough patch, but we still don’t do that. 

As for “sub-human”, “monster” and the rest, well, she’s got a tiny wee bit of a point, even if she goes way over the top to make it. I voted Remain so I have no axe to grind when I say that some Remainers have often failed to respect and understand the motives of Leavers. Some Remainers have trafficked in stupid and insulting caricatures. You don’t have to search #FBPE for long to find people suggesting the Leave vote was driven by bigotry or stupidity or both. (Similar sins are found on the Leave side too, of course; the five million people who signed that petition are just ordinary people, not sneering Islington metro-liberals.)

But I’m not writing this to analyse Sarah Vine’s tweets; life is rather too short for that.

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