Hypocritical Remainers use inflammatory rhetoric and welcome the deaths of Brexiteers

“They don’t like it up ’em.” Lance Corporal Jones was right, as evidenced by the tsunami of hurt feelings and reproaches engulfing the House of Commons as Remainer MPs assume the mantle of victimhood in reaction to hearing their beloved anti-no deal statute scorned as the “Surrender Act”, their sanctimonious whingeing dismissed as “humbug”, and their self-entitled defiance of the will of 17.4 million voters denounced as “betrayal”.

Never has the truism “the truth hurts” been more vividly illustrated. It has become an article of faith among the Westminster nomenklatura that by speaking truth to power (as they, the Remainer establishment, have become through usurped authority) the Prime Minister they have hobbled is endangering their lives. It does not seem to have occurred to these self-absorbed narcissists that they have said far worse themselves.

It is a characteristic of the left to regard the past – especially their own past – as a foreign country which their opponents have no visa rights to visit. Since when were Remainers or leftist MPs so sensitive about the language of political discourse? Heading the crusade for emasculated, politically correct debate is Jess Phillips, MP who in 2015, long before the EU referendum had inflamed passions, declared she would “knife Jeremy Corbyn in the front, not the back”.

To any rational observer of the political scene, that is a perfectly legitimate, if robust, metaphor. But it hardly entitles Jess Phillips to pose now as a champion of mealy-mouthed, deferential language. Imagine if Boris had said that about Jeremy Corbyn: the clever money is on Phillips to have been first to excoriate him. Earlier still, in 2014, does anyone remember John McDonnell’s “joke” about Labour activists wanting Esther McVey, then DWP minister, to be “lynched”?

Last June, Ed Davey called for a Remain alliance “to decapitate that blond head in Uxbridge and South Ruislip”; now Liberal Democrats are scandalized that the same blond, along with much of the country, refers contemptuously to the Benn legislation, designed to neuter the British government and send it helpless into EU negotiations, as the “Surrender Act”. What else is it?

Recently, on the Andrew Marr Show, David Lammy, MP was asked if he would take back his comparison of the ERG to the Nazis and replied that, if anything, his comments were “not strong enough”.

Nor was intemperate abuse of Leavers by Remainers restricted to parliamentarians. Four days before the referendum Guardian columnist Nick Cohen characterized the Leave campaign as “a know-nothing movement of loud mouths and closed minds”, after observing: “It is as if the sewers have burst.” Since the referendum decision the more fanatical Remainers have embraced a ghoulish narrative that many Leave voters have died, which they undisguisedly regard as a good thing.

Advocating a second referendum, novelist Ian McEwan cited “1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.” Last January Polly Toynbee tweeted: “What was ‘the will of the people’ is now ‘the will of dead people’. From Saturday, new young remain voters on register tip the balance v old dead leavers. Time for a Final Say Referendum.” Some might think that a trifle hubristic, coming from a septuagenarian.

These people are disgraceful. Worse still is the hypocrisy of the Remain camp’s sudden conversion to anaemic political discourse. The moment at which it became obvious, to the few people who did not yet know, that the Blair-confected Supreme Court was a power-usurping, constitution-demolishing arm of the Remain establishment was when anti-government counsel, while making a formal presentation, referred to the Prime Minister as “the father of lies”, without receiving any rebuke from the bench.

Yet it is the Prime Minister who is being accused of “inciting hatred” by Paula Sherriff, MP and a horde of similar humbug merchants. A weasel phrase has been inserted into the political narrative, deploring Johnson’s “comments about Jo Cox”. What comments? The Prime Minister did not raise the subject of the murdered MP, her name was tastelessly dragged into the debate by Labour.

The Prime Minister’s unexceptional reply was: “But what I will say is that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.” That response does not imply, as his critics have disingenuously claimed, that he was misrepresenting the murdered MP’s views on Brexit, which were well known, but that he was paying her the compliment of assuming she was a genuine democrat who would have respected the outcome of the referendum, thus helping to unite the country.

While the hysteria and indignation being generated by Remainers (apparently the circus in the Commons chamber on Wednesday evening was the business that urgently required the quashing of prorogation) is typically self-indulgent, it also has a more sinister sub-text. Already suggestions are being floated of imposing restrictions, beyond those already in force, on what MPs may say. This is nothing less than an attempt to extend the PC thought policing that has straitjacketed free speech in Britain to Parliament, where privilege has always protected free expression.

What kind of politics would we have if terms such as “surrender”, “betrayal” and saboteurs were banned? How else to describe the conduct whereby 495 MPs voted to trigger Article 50, the Withdrawal Act was passed and 85 per cent of current MPs were elected on manifestos pledging departure from the EU with or without a deal – followed by a cynical volte-face, to the point where Brexit has been delayed by more than three years, a further extension to negotiations has been mandated and a Remainer coup has removed the government’s power to govern.

The Remain establishment’s putsch against the decision of 17.4 million voters, in the largest democratic exercise in our history, has reduced Britain to the condition of a failed state. But don’t reproach those subverters of the constitution and of democracy with what they have done – it might put thoughts of revanchist revenge into the minds of millions of betrayed voters. Whatever reaction eventually comes from the public, presumably at the ballot box, voters will have made up their own minds about Westminster’s current incumbents. That is what they really should fear.

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