“How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Samuel Johnson’s additions to Goldsmith’s Traveller, has seldom felt so apposite. In the Britain of 2025, where political speech is policed by human-resources pieties while actual violence stalks the margins of our democracy, the most potent weapon is not the policeman’s truncheon but the casual slander. And it is the Labour Party that now wields that weapon with the greatest relish.
Sir Keir Starmer, technocratic mask fixed firmly in place, declares that the immigration policy of Reform UK is “racist” and “immoral”. Shabana Mahmood, our Home Secretary, reaches for the more exotic “ethno-nationalist” and, “worse than racist” (whilst herself delivering what amounts to a carbon copy of Reform’s offering). Peter Kyle, that arch-suburban wit, jeers that Nigel Farage shakes “like a shitting dog”. And David Lammy, the man who would be Deputy Prime Minister as well as custodian of the justice system, announces that Farage once “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, an historical absurdity given that Farage entered this world in 1964, nineteen years after the League of German Girls and its male counterpart were disbanded by the Allies. Lammy later muttered a partial retraction, but the broadcast stain remains.
The bien-pensant counsel is that Reform UK should rise above it all. Jacob Rees-Mogg, crashing Labour’s conference with a courtly mockery, later advised me that Farage ought to refuse to rise to the bait and cultivate a magisterial aloofness and dismiss the insults as so much fifth-form crudity. Sky’s Darren McCaffrey told me this week that it was merely “normal political rough and tumble”. Lammy is “just Lammy”, you see, just like a summer shower, irritating, inevitable, and not worth the umbrella.
Reform UK’s decision to punch back is not petulant but prophylactic
This counsel is however dangerously naïve. Lammy is no jocular back-bencher; he is the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary. Words issued from such a perch travel, amplify and mutate, and in a nation where political assassination is no longer a medieval memory, they are heard by ears far less stable than Sir Keir’s focus-grouped, lanyard bedecked moderation.
Since the millennium, four serious attacks on Members of Parliament have taken place, three of them fatal. Jo Cox was cut down in Birstall by a right-wing fantasist; Sir David Amess was murdered in Leigh-on-Sea by an Islamist fanatic. Stephen Timms survived a knife to the liver; Mike Freer left politics after a suspected arson attack at his constituency office. Others have been attacked. A New Statesman poll this summer found that seven in ten voters now fear political violence. Ours is an anxious, febrile republic in all but name, and the air tastes of cordite.
Enter the theory, unlovely in phrase but apt in meaning, of stochastic terrorism. The phrase describes how sustained, mass-mediated dehumanisation raises the statistical likelihood that some lone actor will decide to convert insult into injury. One does not need to dial a telephone number or pass the proverbial brown envelope; one need only brand a target a Nazi, a traitor, a roach. Somewhere, some twitchy soul will take up the implied instruction.
Lammy’s Hitler-Youth smear sits perfectly in that mould. It is not merely intemperate; it is an invitation, a validation. It was delivered, perhaps not coincidentally, days after the Home Office slashed Farage’s police protection by three-quarters, despite an up-tick in credible threats. This is not the rough housing of Westminster; this is a powder keg politely labeled “diversity and inclusion”.
Faced with that reality, Reform UK’s decision to punch back is not petulant but prophylactic. In criminology it is called the “broken-windows” doctrine: leave small transgressions unrepaired and soon the neighbourhood belongs to bigger criminals. Apply the metaphor to political discourse and the principle holds: allow the Hitler slur to pass unchallenged today and tomorrow someone smears in swastikas, first on posters, then on pavement memorials. A culture that tolerates rhetorical arson will, in time, get the real thing.
Consider the grisly counter-example provided by Labour’s own handling of Islamist extremism. On 2 October 2025, an Islamist rammed a car into worshippers at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, killing two men and injuring three more before armed police intervened. The Home Secretary, Ms Mahmood, called the attack “horrific”, yet declined to ban that very evening’s pro-Hamas demonstrations in nearby Piccadilly, she merely “wished” the marches were not going ahead. Wishes, alas, are lighter than vehicles. She is after all the Home Secretary. She could and should have had the demonstration cancelled.
Two years of governmental squeamishness, stretching back to the 2023 spike of 147 per cent in anti-Semitic incidents recorded by the Community Security Trust, have convinced the street mob that the law will avert its eyes. Contrast the swiftness with which police handled last year’s right-wing rallies after Southport: kettle, disperse, prosecute. The message is unmistakable. There is justice for some, indulgence for others, and the line of demarcation follows the fashionable prejudices of the day.
That is why calling out Labour’s venom is more than a party-political necessity. It is an act of civic hygiene. To leave such rhetoric un-rebuked is to set the seedbed for tomorrow’s lone-wolf assassin. You may prefer Rees-Mogg’s aristocratic hauteur, there is a certain charm in it, but the era no longer affords that luxury. The age of such gentility has passed, the age of concealed-carry politics has begun.
Nor should we imagine this is purely a British malaise. Across the Atlantic, the assassination of American conservative Charlie Kirk last September illustrates that the logic of stochastic violence is transnational. “Punch a Nazi” memes proliferate; eventually someone punches, or worse. There is no moat wide enough to keep out the contagion once the language of political dehumanisation is mainstreamed.
Reform UK, of course, is a convenient bogeyman. It is newer, brasher, insufficiently deferential to the establishment HR technocracy. Calling it “racist” spares Labour from the tiresome labour of rebutting actual arguments about wage compression or the arithmetic of housing supply. Yet the principle transcends partisan preference: if today’s target is Farage, tomorrow’s may be a feminist who demurs from gender orthodoxy, or a Labour MP insufficiently enthusiastic about open borders. Once the sorcery of the smear is licensed, no one is safe from the next witch-finder.
That is why the wider commentariat’s complacency is so culpable. To dismiss Lammy’s smear as “just Lammy” is akin to shrugging at a cracked window on the ground floor of an empty house. You will either repair it or you will shortly be evicted by squatters. Politics, like property, abhors a vacuum; leave the field to the vandals and the vandals will rule.
So yes, Reform UK’s counter-offensive may appear thin skinned, bristling, even confrontational. Good. A society worth inhabiting must prove itself capable of self-defence. Civility is not the absence of conflict; it is the civilised conduct of conflict within agreed bounds. Labour’s current leadership has taken a sledgehammer to those bounds, and it falls to the insulted party to insist they be rebuilt. I can tell you, being doused by flying milkshakes sounds funny, but I can assure you as it flies through the air towards your face, you know not if it is battery acid.
Call it overreaction if you wish. I call it ballast against anarchy. The alternative is to drift, unmoored, into the politics of the car bomb and the bodyguard. And that, perhaps, would be worse than racist.
