Coarse language and the Labour party | The readers’ editor

Let’s be clear: Nick Cohen should not have sworn at Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in his column last week, headlined “Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn”. It was against the spirit of our guidelines, which state that swear words are rarely acceptable in text and then usually only when quoting others.

His highly charged piece urged Corbyn’s allies to recognise that they were backing the wrong man as Labour leader and concluded: “In my respectful opinion, your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.” Not regular Observer prose, by any measure.

Assiduous readers would have recognised that Cohen was freely adapting a quote he had included earlier in his piece. The author Robert Conquest had been criticised for being a cold war warrior when he published his 1968 history of Stalin’s reign, The Great Terror. When, wrote Cohen, Conquest was vindicated, his friend Kingsley Amis suggested another title: “I Told You So You Fucking Fools!”

This is not to excuse, but to explain. It could have been edited out, but far greater editorial discretion is allowed in the Comment pages than elsewhere in the paper. Columnists are employed to have decided views, often harshly expressed, though rarely do they resort to profanity. But, as many readers pointed out, it flew in the face of the rules that we apply, not only to ourselves, but to commenters below the line, who will see their contributions removed if they swear prodigiously. So we apologise to them and we apologise to those who wrote to say how offended they were by the language.

Equally, I received many messages from those keen to say they were not offended by the language, but by what they saw as Cohen’s patronising dismissal of their political ideals.

That is not an area for apology. We have a free press, and Cohen is entitled to his view. As a lifelong supporter of the left, he despairs at the state of the opposition and Corbyn’s leadership. Opinion polls show Labour 19 points behind the Conservatives, despite an unfettered government driving ahead with a hard Brexit that Cohen believes will damage the country, and hospitals, social care and schools struggling on ever-diminishing resources. Cohen fears Labour will never be in government again.

Readers hit back. “Nick Cohen should reflect on the unarguable fact that the pre-Corbyn Labour party had run itself into a dead end,” wrote one. “It would be suicidal for Labour to revert to the type of programme that has so manifestly failed to win over sufficient voters in the last two elections.

“The 10 policy pledges Corbyn issued during his leadership campaign are not a ‘hard left’ or socialist programme. They are a series of middle-of-the-road, social democratic propositions that are easily defensible on the doorstep and in the Observer’s opinion columns. I acknowledge that Corbyn has stumbled from time to time. However I cannot blame him, given the poisonous behaviour of a majority of his parliamentary colleagues and the relentless sneering he has faced from all media.

“If the Labour party machine would rally round and present a united front with the party’s membership in defence of the 10 pledges, we could together carry Corbyn through the enormous difficulties he faces in reviving Labour’s fortunes. He could then retire with our thanks for having done what was necessary to give us hope for the future.”

Another added: “Nick needs to come into the 21st century. He seems to be still living the cold war; he sees Stalinism in every expression of socialism. We have moved on and we have rediscovered the relevance and hopefulness of socialism, not utopianism but participative, collective, democratic socialism.”

One can’t help wondering what level of protest there would have been had Cohen used the same language to address, for instance, hard-line Brexiters or rightwing austerity policies, both recent targets of his venom and subjects that readers feel passionate about, but whatever your view on the validity of Cohen’s claims about Corbyn, I believe his argument was seriously undermined by that intemperate last sentence.

observer.readers@observer.co.uk