The Corbynite fury with tabloid readers

Usually Labour’s more irritating, hysterical fanboys wait until after an election to lose the plot in public. Just think back to the pig-mask pickets, ‘TORY SCUM’ graffiti on Whitehall and Oliver Twist-style protests after the 2015 election, as if the nation had just elected a cross between Hitler and Thatcher, rather than one of two boring technocrats in different coloured ties.

But this time around they’re getting the theatrics in early. Corbynistas have been buying up all the copies of the Sun, the Mail and the Express they can get their hands on and either binning or burning them. They’ve taken umbrage at the tabloids for their surprisingly anti-Jez stances – particularly the Sun, which today had the Labour leader on its front page peeking out of a bin like Oscar the Grouch below the headline: ‘Don’t chuck Britain in the… COR-BIN.’

The trend seems to have been started by writer and popular Corbynite tweeter John Niven. Riffing on the Mail’s headline – ‘Let’s reignite the British spirit’ – he tweeted a video of him burning copies of the offending papers. Others joined in. ‘John I officially love you’, one gushed, ‘we are saving ours for toilet roll!’. ‘Job done at local Waitrose’, tweeted another, without a glimmer of self-awareness.

Niven responded to his critics by either referring to them as ‘dog-fuckers’ or claiming to have had sex with their mothers. He later logged off to go play golf.

Here’s the thing about the left’s anti-tabloid fury, which went into full-blown Nazi-lite mode today: it’s not really about the tabloids at all. It’s about the people who read them – the blue-collar men and women who these 140-character c***s think are so mindless that they lap up Sun editorials like pigs with their heads in slop. That’s who they really hate, who they think are scum, barely good enough to wipe their arse on.

For the many, not the few, eh?

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_