Mini Encyclopaedia of Bile

Owen Jones gets it off his chest:

I never wanted to be a writer or appear on television, but I was always pretty keen to find a way of getting my beliefs across. It’s been heartening to find how many agree, but to be honest, I’ve always loved a debate.

There’s a fair few who disagree with some or all of my arguments without regarding me as a sort of Second Coming of a demonic pre-pubescent-appearing Lenin who’s going to eat the firstborn of every Daily Mail reader.

A minority of others though. Woah. They really hate me.

 

In some cases that’s a bit of an understatement. If some of the more zealous Twitter right-wingers are especially agitated, it’s a bit like that opening scene in 28 Weeks Later where the zombies scramble through the window, growling and hissing.

 

That makes it important to distinguish between disagreement, however passionate, and pure bile, even if that’s made harder by a sense of constantly being in a room with, er, flesh-eating zombies - or trolls, anyway - screaming at you.

Thing is, it always comes across as though they’re rattled, rather than proving hurtful, which I suspect is the partial aim. Above all, it’s a convenient way of avoiding having to engage with my arguments - just make it about me and my real motives, and they think their work is done.

So I’m keeping a little encyclopaedia of these attacks, because they’re so commonly used against not just me, but anyone else who thinks, “hang on, the status quo isn’t very fair is it?”

 

Obviously these are sanitised versions, they’re often a little bit, er, richer in vocabulary. I’ll probably have to update it from time to time…

1) You look like a 12-year-old! Funny you should say that, I’m actually 58. Facelifts can pay off.

2) You’re a champagne socialist! I will never be able to refute this until I live in a hut in the Highlands, grow my own vegetables and adopt a primitive bartering system, and even then I’ll risk more abuse if I develop an exotic taste and start foraging for, say, blackberries.

3) Your family is too privileged! Ah, bugger, you’ve got me there. You’ve found out my mum was an IT lecturer at Salford University and now all my arguments about a living wage, workers’ rights, house building, tax justice and social ownership lie in a smoking rubble of caviar and left-wing hypocrisy. Note: will never ever be used as an argument against people they agree with, even if they’re 6th in line to the throne.

4) You’re a careerist! All I was thinking when I was penning a left-wing book for radical publisher Verso was - oooh this socialism writing malarky is a proven way of reaching dizzying heights of power and fame. Just think of, y’know. Them.

5) You’re really in it for the money! Planning an IT start-up? Maybe thinking of a niche iPhone app that will prove a sensation? Forget it, socialism is a proven money-spinner!

6) You get paid for writing books and newspaper articles you big hypocrite! Because apparently socialism means ‘people not being paid for their labour’. Which is odd, because I actually thought that’s what I was supposed to be fighting for.

7) Why don’t you give all your money up to “the poor” you big hypocrite! Because apparently socialism means a return to a system of 19th century Victorian philanthropy, based on the odd charitable scrap thrown from the table rather than a welfare state in large part funded by better-off people paying their taxes properly.

8) You’re a self-publicist! Admittedly having hired Max Clifford, all those staged appearances with C-list celebrities leaving Mayfair nightclubs and featuring on I’m A Celebrity was a bit suss. I never really got this one: given I don’t have a “publicist” or anything like that I think it means I sometimes say ‘yes’ when TV or radio people ask me to come on their programme.

9) You’re using “the poor” for your own devious ends! If you build support for slashing social security by painting an image of the feckless and work shy hiding behind closed blinds, this does not apply.

 

If you speak out against, say, cutting tax credits, sanctioning unemployed people, or driving hundreds of thousands of people to food banks in the 7th richest country on earth, you are clearly only cynically exploiting the vulnerable to build your own profile.

10) You’re after a safe Labour seat! As I penned another article criticising the Labour leadership’s stance on austerity, I thought, any minute now they’re going to give me the pick of Yorkshire.

11) No-one elected you to speak! Well this would be a novel system, if we elected everyone with an opinion in newspapers or on TV. Let’s get the Electoral Reform Society on to it and come up with a workable plan.

12) You’re a Communist! Just had a quick flick through Lenin’s The State and Revolution and he seems to think communism goes a bit further than a living wage, workers’ rights and public ownership of utilities.

13) You’ll end up right-wing! Just ask that frothing-at-the-mouth Daily Mail somewhere-to-the-right-of-Ghenghis-Khan columnist Tony Benn, as he pens yet another column savaging his evil left-wing past.

14) You’re driven by hatred and spite towards the rich! Well, if my proposal for a 50% income tax band for all earnings above £100,000 finds me guilty of that charge, what about that old commie Winston “eat the rich” Churchill and his 99.25% top rate of tax?

15) You’re pretending to be working-class! The argument for this seems to rest on the fact I have a slight Northern lilt, which I think has something to do with having grown up in the North for the first 21 years of my life.

 

It’d be pretty bemusing to the average resident of Stockport who’d regard my accent as bordering on the slightly plummy side. But obviously all Northerners have flat caps and work down mines thus everyone who has a slightly Northern accent is pretending to be working-class. QED!

16) You’re irrelevant! OK, fair enough - maybe a dozen or so unsolicited tweets of abuse might be better directed elsewhere in that case?

17) The BBC giving you a platform shows how left-wing they really are! Tell me about it! Nigel Farage can’t get on for neither love nor money! Must be those notorious Communists Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil putting in a word for me.

18) You went to Oxford you big hypocrite! And when they gave me a place, I was given a house on Millionaire’s Row, a peerage, an army of butlers and shoe polishers, the Queen’s phone number, and Honorary Membership of the Bullingdon Club where I spent my time (when I wasn’t coked off my face, obvs) smashing up restaurants with future leading members of the Cabinet.

 

Thing is about this objection is a tiny handful of us made it into Oxford from one of the biggest sixth-forms in the country - Ridge Danyers in Stockport - and to be honest I always thought the problem with Oxbridge is a lack of students from places like that.

 

I’m more worried, say, a young working-class kid from a sixth-form in Sheffield will see these slights and go, ‘ah, better not apply to Oxford, they’ll think I’m a Old Etonian aristocrat with a taste for shooting grouse if I get in.’

19) You’re from the posh part of Stockport! "Stockport’s famous playboy quarter, the Monte Carlo of Greater Manchester, where Russian oligarchs buy waterside apartments so they can lounge on their billion-pound yachts in the nearby Manchester Ship Canal," as Mark Steel put it. Otherwise known as Cale Green, about 10 minutes walk from Stockport train station.