THIS IS THE LEFT III

As if we didn't know already, Twitter is a sewer of the left.  For several hours yesterday the tech giant featured the words 'Tory Scum' on its trending list, despite the phrase featuring in just a couple of thousand tweets.  Many of those tweets were quoting Angela Rayner, who understandably came in for a lot of criticism yesterday after having used the term at the recent Labour party conference.

However, while the majority of tweets expressed anger over the murder of David Amess, there were some sickening messages.  A strong stomach is required to read through the following, bearing in mind that the MP's body was not cold when these hateful messages were conceived...

Some of these tweets have since been removed.  Mark J Doran, who tweeted about mental health services, has since locked down his account following a backlash.  His profile bio includes the hashtag #Corbyn and he runs a blog about music.  'Andy', who tweeted the image of a violin, is a Remainer who refers to Britain as 'the sick man of Europe'.  He also applauded Angela Rayner's scum remarks.  'Rob' has a Labour rose on his profile.

Sick messages were also widespread beyond the 'Tory scum' thread.

Some of these messages were left in response to tributes by politicians from across the political divide.  However, not all the nasty comments were left by anonymous faceless accounts.  Arfon Jones, a member of Plaid Cymru and a former police and crime commissioner no less, had this to say...

Jones later deleted his tweet and issued an apology, saying that he had only intended to express his 'concern about the toxic nature of our political discourse'.  Unfortunately for Jones, some users quickly pointed to another recent tweet of his, one in which he applauded Angela Rayner's scum remarks.

This brings us neatly back round to Angela Rayner, whose own tribute to the murdered MP was brutally torn apart.  Her tweet amassed more than three thousand comments, the vast majority of which were negative.  To put that into perspective, her party leader's tribute attracted barely a thousand comments and most of those were from people calling for Rayner's head.

Rayner is facing increasing pressure to apologise for her scum comments.  Just a reminder of what she actually said: "I’m sick of shouting from the sidelines and I bet youse lot are too.  We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, mysoginistic, absolute pile of banana republ, Etonion, piece of scum - and I held back a little - that I have ever seen in my life".

Many leftists continue to defend Rayner and say that her words have no bearing on violent acts.  While we can now be fairly certain that Mr Amess's killer was an Islamist and not a leftist, she can probably breathe a sigh of relief, but let's not forget that two Conservative MPs were confronted outside their own conference by assailants using the words 'Tory scum'.  Surely no coincidence?

There is also a huge double standard at play with some of the arguments being perpetuated in Rayner's defence.  The following tweet sums it up perfectly.

No irony, no empathy, no shame.  This is the left.