The Vermin Club

Kit Kowol has a piece in The Critic about political name calling in relation to Angela Rayner referring to Tories as ‘scum’. He suggests ‘rhetorical appropriation’ is the right way to deal with it. Entertaining and worth reading.

Name calling in politics. Get it right, and in just a few words you can create a pithy line that permanently defines your opponent. The term “guilty men” to describe those who supported appeasement, for example, was one that haunted Conservative politicians for decades. Get an insult wrong, however, and you can look dangerously out of touch, especially when the insult refers to voters — think of Hillary Clinton’s reference to “deplorables”…

Labour Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, described the Tory party as being “lower than vermin”. Like Rayner’s, Bevan’s words were aimed more at shaping his image within his own party than communicating with the country. Known for enjoying the hospitality of wealthy Conservative socialites, most famously the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, Beavan made his “vermin” comment during a speech describing the poor health that he and his friends experienced in his native South Wales. As a result, Bevan claimed, “no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction” could eradicate from his heart “the deep burning hatred for the Tory party that inflicted those experiences on me”. While the speech and the furore surrounding it certainly helped secure Bevan’s reputation as a working-class warrior — you can even buy t-shirts with Bevan’s words emblazoned on them — it also induced an equally strong reaction on the Right in the form of the creation of the Vermin Club.