Extreme Stimulation

Mainstream patriots and other reasonable persons will be relieved to find that extremist attitudes on the far right are being fuelled by toxic rhetoric in the mainstream, rather than the other way around. Fascists, racists and other mavens of militant self-pity share the vocabulary of the Conservative Party because they are "stimulated" by Boris Johnson, who is part of the political mainstream so could not possibly have been stimulated by them. To claim otherwise would imply that the race-baiting, migrant-bashing, Muslim-monstering, Windrush-deporting, citizenship-stealing policies of the Conservatives, their little yellow enablers and their New Labour forebears might somehow be construed as extreme in themselves. Nevertheless, it is of course undeniable that genuine upholders of British values must long for the old civil days of polite yet robust political discourse, when sensible Conservatives and Labour centrists could agree on the definition of a scrounger, a shirker, a Saddam-lover or a bogus asylum seeker, and the only grounds for legitimate divergence were whether they were all being treated harshly enough.