George Osborne and Donald Trump are so good at whipping up hate

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/13/george-osborne-hate-immigrants-families-children

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I now need a big, black, felt-tip pen beside me in the mornings when I’m reading my paper, so that I can quickly blot out any image of George Osborne that may appear. Because I can’t read with him smirking at me. It’s just too horrible. On Sunday, I had to blot out Donald Trump as well. Equally horrid.

“You’re so immature,” says Fielding. “Do you honestly believe that if you cover them up they’ll go away?” No, I know they won’t. That’s why I do it. It’s my impotence speaking. Because there seems to be nothing I or anyone else can do to beat them. They’re so good at their job – whipping up hate.

It’s so easy, and they know it. Lots of us love a bit of hate. It has a thrill to it that tolerance does not. And what is more exciting than a mass hate-in? Donald and George are so good at picking hate figures. Donald has, rather wildly, gone for Mexicans on a grand scale. Immigrants are always good for an easy bashing, but George’s recent cunning choice is poor families who have more than two children. Even if they’re working, and even better if they’re unemployed. It makes them sound irresponsible. He’s on to a winner there. Who could disagree that one shouldn’t have children if one can’t afford them?

Bugger nuance: misfortune, background, education, lack of social mobility and all that middle-class lefty slop. George knows it counts for nothing, because he knows the way to the bottom of the cesspit of the human heart, and how to dredge up its most selfish and destructive fears and longings and make us vote for him.

So I’m scared. His tricks are working so well that hardly anyone seems to have noticed his fibs and blunders. Soon he’ll have made a frightful mess of things, it will be too late to mend them, and our grandchildren will be up the creek without a paddle. I, too, am full of hate. I don’t know what to do with it. Except to blot out the horrors with my felt-tip.