Why are “compassionate” socialists often so horribly callous?

The hilarious jape by left-wing Labour MP, John McDonnell – that,  given an Ashes to Ashes scenario, he’d like to go back to the 1980s and assassinate Mrs. Thatcher – reminded me of an experience I had in 1990, when another left-winger gave me a lesson in compassion I have never forgotten.

I was working in TV news when the IRA murdered a great supporter of Mrs. Thatcher, the Conservative MP, Ian Gow. He was killed, one presumes, because he held strong pro-Unionist views on Northern Ireland, and had even resigned as a junior minister in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement (I’d better explain, for younger readers, that politicians occasionally used to resign on matters of principle, rather than always having to be hounded from office for misappropriating taxpayers’ money or doing disgusting things with rent boys). Despite that resignation, Gow remained loyal to Mrs. Thatcher, and was a key organiser during her 1987 election campaign. One presumes that his loyalty to such a hated Prime Minister partly accounted for his death.

One day, as we held our early evening programme conference all our eyes were on a video feed featuring his shocked widow, evidently in a state of great distress, desperately trying not to cry. 

The producer next to me laughed. “Look, she can’t stop grinning,” he jeered. “She must have really hated the bastard!” 

In that instant, I realized just how derangedly vicious and irrational the Left’s loathing for Mrs. Thatcher, all her works, her party, and her colleagues and supporters, had become. My fellow-journalist had evidently allowed himself to fall into the grip of an irrational hatred that blinded him to the swinishness of his own behaviour. 

I was relieved to note that everyone else at the meeting seemed as shocked and embarrassed by his callousness as I was.  I muttered something about Mrs. Gow no doubt being in a state of shock – as if she needed excuses made on her behalf. Undaunted, he went on grinning at the TV, still apparently enjoying the poor woman’s misery. 

Although my colleague’s attitude was evidently not shared by anyone else at that meeting, it has proved to be a fairly universal one amongst large sections of the  Left - towards the Tory Party and Mrs. Thatcher in particular - ever since.  

I’m not going to try to explain the strange hold The Great Lady still exerts over the psyche of lefties – I tend to avert my gaze when children throw silly tantrums - but I would like to ask a more general question: why do so many people who see themselves as caring and compassionate, as wanting to help the weak and the oppressed, as possessing enormous hearts overflowing with sweetness and light, so often behave so vilely? (This phenomenon was brilliantly captured by Michael Wharton, alias the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple, when imagining a liberal TV producer "hacking at the furniture with an axe or setting his desk on fire in a frenzy of compassionate hatred”.)

No doubt, these compassion junkies would argue that their urgent hunger for “social justice” or “fairness” (or any of the other meaningless phrases which tend to agitate their tear ducts) more than excuses the odd intemperate remark or lapse in standards of civilized behaviour. 

But I suspect their anger has more complex roots. 

I remember returning with a friend to our Cambridge digs at around two o’clock one morning, slightly tipsy. As we walked down the middle of a bog-standard lower-middle class/upper-working class road of small terraced houses – exactly like the one we were heading for – this passionately left-wing Labour supporter astonished me by suddenly shouting at the top of his voice, “Wake up, you bastards!”

I asked him to shut up.

“They’re all asleep,” he roared. “I hate them all. Bastards!”

After pointing out that most of these people worked for a living and therefore, unlike us, needed to get up in a few hours’ time, I asked him why he hated them.

“Just do,” he replied, angrily, evidently confused by his own reaction - as was I.

It took me years to figure out what my companion’s outburst had signified: many “compassionate” left-wingers resent ordinary people who don’t qualify for victim status, who don’t see themselves as oppressed, and who don’t need or ask for help – in other words, many lefties don’t really care about ordinary people: they just care about those exceptions who, whether through bad luck or fecklessness, can’t look after themselves, or simply choose not to.

Mrs. Thatcher, more than any other post-war British politician, spoke for and represented ordinary Britons who took care of themselves and their families and resented the suggestion that the state should do anything for them other than provide the amenities which their taxes paid for.

Self-sufficient bastards!

The crime which caused a news producer to glory in Mrs. Gow’s anguish was to be married to a key supporter of the woman who spoke for those who wouldn’t allow left-wingers to force other people’s money on them to demonstrate their almost limitless love for humanity.

As for that wretched Labour leadership hopeful, McDonnell, it’s interesting to note that Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, hasn’t yet condemned his vile remarks. No doubt because, as a caring, compassionate, loving socialist, she also loathes the truly ordinary people who make this country great.