George Kerevan: Debate is sliding down a slip-of-tongue slope

WE live in an age when the slightest gaffe, fluffed line or over-hasty comment made by a politician is broadcast around the world in seconds. Worse, such faux pas remain forever on YouTube to remind us of human fallibility. Think Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy “bigoted”. Or vice president Dan Quayle saying: “I have no problem communicating with Latin American heads of state – though now I do wish I had paid more attention to Latin when I was at school.”

But when is a gaffe a genuine case of foot-in-the-mouth? One to be treasured but not taken too seriously. And when is it more a case of a sentence, perhaps not fully thought through, being opportunistically wrenched from context and deliberately misused for political purposes?

In the last few weeks we have seen a number of cases of the latter – comments twisted out of proper context or become the subject of synthetic anger. Witness Diane Abbot, Joan McAlpine and Tom Harris, a wonderfully ecumenical bunch.

I do worry because we are in danger of hobbling genuine debate and censoring the colourful side of politics. In this age of electronic media and instant replay, it has become too easy to blow a stray remark out of all proportion while artificially demonising the politician who uttered it. The end result will be a pale, doleful, repressed public discourse. Worse, by concentrating on stray remarks we are in danger of diverting from real issues.

Diane Abbot MP, the Labour shadow health minister, got into trouble when she tweeted to a journalist: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game.” She was duly smacked on the wrist by Ed Miliband and apologised “for any offence caused”.

Yet Ms Abbot is no racist – her son’s godfather is the disgraced Tory politician, Jonathan Aitken. Calling her a bigot is either silly or duplicitous. Worse, it lets real racists – those who murdered Stephen Lawrence – off the hook. That does not mean she is blameless. Ms Abbot (Harrow County Grammar and Newnham, Cambridge) affects to be a left-winger. This is nonsense as we discovered when she sent her son to a private school (annual fees currently £12,267) instead of the local comprehensive in her Hackney constituency.

Ms Abbot needs to pretend that she is one of the people, especially to her working class, black constituents. Hence her contrived references to “white people” and her comment in 1996 that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” were unsuitable as nurses in her local hospital because they had “never met a black person before”. Personally, I find Diane a refreshing addition to the monochrome male backbenches at distant Westminster. But rather than exhibit synthetic anger at her attention-seeking tweets, we should spend more time exposing her political hypocrisy.

Next in the firing line came Nationalist MSP Joan McAlpine, the respected former editor of the Sunday Times Scotland and a columnist for The Scotsman. During a Holyrood debate she said (and let’s get the quote right): “I absolutely make no apology for saying that the Liberals, the Labour Party and the Tories are anti-Scottish in coming together to defy the will of the Scottish people, the democratic mandate the Scottish people gave us to hold the referendum...”

Joan’s words provoked a mini political tsunami. Tory MSP Jackson Carlaw accused her of “political racism”, whatever that is. Yet one thing that has characterised the long march of the SNP has been its refusal to cast the independence debate in anti-English terms. The party’s title is the Scottish Nation-al Party, not Scottish National-ist Party. Its official ideology is not ethnic but social democratic and internationalist. It’s case for independence is economic and centred on the democratic deficit caused by London centralism.

To twist Joan’s remarks to try and tilt the independence debate in an ethnic direction – by accusing the SNP of what it manifestly is not – is opportunistic. But it also risks creating the sort of dangerous, anti-intellectual debate Joan’s detractors claim to disavow.

Finally came Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South. Harris possesses something rare in British politics, a sense of humour. Back in June 2009, he was the first Scottish Labour MP to call for Gordon Brown to quit as prime minister, so he also has a kamikaze streak. This week Harris was forced to “resign” as Scottish Labour’s internet adviser after posting on the web a spoof video that some claimed equated Alex Salmond with Adolf Hitler.

YouTube devotees will know that it has become a standard internet joke to take a particular scene from the German film Downfall, about Hitler’s final days in the Berlin bunker, and substitute mock subtitles lampooning modern politicians. The sharpest and cruellest (because he did have a bunker mentality) depicted Gordon Brown. Tom Harris updated this spoof to show Salmond supposedly in despair at Joan McAlpine’s speech (little does Harris know Salmond).

To believe that Harris intended any link between Salmon and Hitler is silly. But his clip was only medium funny and, above all, it was a needless distraction that allowed the Nats to counterattack after the synthetic furore around Joan McAlpine’s speech.

Not for the first time, Harris has shown he lacks tactical insight. But if it was wrong to castigate Joan McAlpine for sins she did not commit, it is equally wrong to beat Harris over the head for making a bad joke.

Sadly, I doubt if any appeal to reason will stop minor political comments being blown out of proportion. Our relentless 24/7 media needs rows – real and feigned – to fill the airwaves. Plus there are too many publicity-hungry, Z-class politicians willing to be outraged on cue in order to get an undeserved quote.

But unless we treat politics as a battle of ideas – in true Scottish Enlightenment fashion – rather than an excuse to undermine an opponent’s credibility, then the next two-and-half years of the referendum debate could turn very nasty. And very dull.