Dan Hodges on the politics of anger
Anger is a driving force which motivates many people who are involved in politics. If channelled in the right way it is not necessarily a negative thing.
I was very angry, just before turning 18, when my father was rung up on the day he was supposed to go into hospital for a heart valve operation, and told that shop stewards representing porters and cleaners had blocked my dad's heart operation on the grounds that they supposedly knew better than doctors whether it was an emergency. (That was about the time some NHS shop steward was quoted in the press as saying "If someone dies, so be it." My father was one of the people whose potential death that union was treating as acceptable collateral damage in an industrial dispute.)
That anger was an important driving force for my becoming involved in politics, but I channelled it in what I regard as a positive direction: supporting Mrs Thatcher's plans to put the national finances on a sound footing so that sort of thing would be less likely to happen to anyone else.
Where anger becomes a negative thing is when it translates not into a desire to promote policies which one believes will solve the problem but hatred of individual human beings.
I referred yesterday to a tweet by a Guardian journalist, Jack Monroe, who accused David Cameron of using "stories about his dead son" to justify selling the NHS "to his friends."
As I blogged yesterday, the death of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to any parent and should be right off the table so far as political criticism goes.
I would regard it as completely out of order if anyone on my own side, or anyone else for that matter, made reference to the death of Gordon Brown's baby son as part of any political criticism of him, and for me it is equally out of order for anyone attacking David Cameron to do so.
There is an interesting piece in the Telegraph by Dan Hodges at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11252159/Ukip-and-the-hard-Left-are-both-blinded-by-Tory-hatred.html
in which he compares his email exchanges with activists in an anti-Cameron campaign who were defending Ms Monroe with UKIP activists who took exception to something he had written about their party.
I don't think either UKIP or the left have a monopoly (or duopoly, even) on the problem of getting too angry in the way they pursue political debate. I think the degree of anger right throughout our political spectrum should concern anyone who wants Britain to have a healthy and inclusive political system. And I think those people in any party or none who allow their anger to ride them and push them over the line between criticism and abuse have a problem.
I was very angry, just before turning 18, when my father was rung up on the day he was supposed to go into hospital for a heart valve operation, and told that shop stewards representing porters and cleaners had blocked my dad's heart operation on the grounds that they supposedly knew better than doctors whether it was an emergency. (That was about the time some NHS shop steward was quoted in the press as saying "If someone dies, so be it." My father was one of the people whose potential death that union was treating as acceptable collateral damage in an industrial dispute.)
That anger was an important driving force for my becoming involved in politics, but I channelled it in what I regard as a positive direction: supporting Mrs Thatcher's plans to put the national finances on a sound footing so that sort of thing would be less likely to happen to anyone else.
Where anger becomes a negative thing is when it translates not into a desire to promote policies which one believes will solve the problem but hatred of individual human beings.
I referred yesterday to a tweet by a Guardian journalist, Jack Monroe, who accused David Cameron of using "stories about his dead son" to justify selling the NHS "to his friends."
As I blogged yesterday, the death of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to any parent and should be right off the table so far as political criticism goes.
I would regard it as completely out of order if anyone on my own side, or anyone else for that matter, made reference to the death of Gordon Brown's baby son as part of any political criticism of him, and for me it is equally out of order for anyone attacking David Cameron to do so.
There is an interesting piece in the Telegraph by Dan Hodges at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11252159/Ukip-and-the-hard-Left-are-both-blinded-by-Tory-hatred.html
in which he compares his email exchanges with activists in an anti-Cameron campaign who were defending Ms Monroe with UKIP activists who took exception to something he had written about their party.
I don't think either UKIP or the left have a monopoly (or duopoly, even) on the problem of getting too angry in the way they pursue political debate. I think the degree of anger right throughout our political spectrum should concern anyone who wants Britain to have a healthy and inclusive political system. And I think those people in any party or none who allow their anger to ride them and push them over the line between criticism and abuse have a problem.
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