When Right Wingers Whinge

That there Michael Fabricant. He's a bit of a card. What with his silly wig and self-deprecating humour, he's the sort of MP tailor-made for social media. Good old Fabbers. At least, so I thought.

I could never appear on a discussion prog with @y_alibhai I would either end up with a brain haemorrhage or by punching her in the throat
— Michael Fabricant (@Mike_Fabricant) June 20, 2014

Oh dear. The mask has slipped. The bants, the joshing, it's crumbled away leaving something behind suggestive of a deeply unpleasant personality.

I'm not going to spend any more time on Fabricant, especially when Dan Hodges has done a good job. Instead, I'd like to turn my attention to the clots who would defend him.

Who should we find at the head of the pack? Surprising no one, it's the idiot Delingpole. Now chief pinhead at Breitbart London, James has completed his long hike from rock to crock journalism - as his short piece covering for Fabricant shows. Here, his argument amounts to "it's wrong to punch Yamin Alibhai-Brown, but nothing at all wrong with wanting to punch her." Profound.

As it happens, I will concede that Twitter is home to bands of people who do jump on comments made by politicians and celebs. But no way are hard right fools like Fabricant victims in this regard, it comes with the territory. The powerful and the privileged have long had the power to determine how people with certain shared characteristics are represented officially and in the media, against their will. Twitter and social media are taking pickaxes to the hierarchy. Symbolic violence - look it up, Jimbo - is getting a rougher and rougher ride. You can't expect to say how you'd like to punch an Asian woman in the throat and get away without being challenged any more.

And they hate it. For Delingpole and co, free speech is being able to speak their limited, lazy minds without any comeback. It's part and parcel of their so-called libertarianism, a fancy-sounding word that lends their anguish and brittle selfishness philosophical cover. If Fabricant and Delingpole want to make violent statements, here I agree with them, they are completely free to do so. But it's pathetic even by schoolyard standards to cry about "PC conspiracies" and bigoted leftyism when people answer back and force our right-whinging heroes to justify their words.