Hope Not – Hate!

Hannah Spencer is not to be blamed too much for the studied incoherence of her acceptance speech. For a start, she is young, and of the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist is quite a lot hopey and certainly not overtly hatey. And, then, we always have to factor in that her speech was a political speech. It spoke with forked-tongue, even while claiming not to. Madeline Grant called it “tweeslop”. It was Mistress Dingy as Dungeon Master. The entire speech alleges that if you follow me, we can do our best for everyone. In the course of all this she used the word hope three times:

• “I believe that is through offering people hope, and a chance to do things differently. Do things better.”
• “We ran a hopeful campaign backed by thousands of volunteers and activists.”
• “Come and join the Green party so we can spread hope and win everywhere else across the country too.”

She didn’t use the word ‘hate’, but it was implied by the word ‘hope’.

And, in fact, a simple binary operated:

• Hope = Green
• Hate = Reform

Or again:

• Hope = Left
• Hate = Right

Where ‘Hope’ = Denial That There Is A Problem: or, more subtly, ‘The fact that you think there is a problem is a problem.’

And where ‘Hate’ = Acceptance That There Is A Problem.

(NB: This language of Hope and Hate does not help Conservatives or Labour at all. It is probably in their interest to abolish this language and logic. Someone alert Starmer and Badenoch.)

Notice how the politics of Hope is, in fact, the politics of hoping that circles can be squared. Someone had some fun going around Spencer’s constituency and explaining to some of her voters exactly what the Green party stood for. All very amusing.

There is a deeper problem here, and it is this very language of Hope Not Hate.

For – paradox time! – hope is hateful.

Punctuation is very important.

In order to reveal the true nature of the conspiracy called, indeed, self-called HOPE NOT HATE, we have to study where the punctuation marks should fall.

The Hopeful want you to suppose that the punctuation is as follows:

• Hope, Not Hate.

as if they are offering you an alternative, a choice: here is something beautiful on the one hand, and here is something vile, unspeakable, something like a Reform candidate (e.g. the candidate formerly known as Matt Goodwin, now known as Matt Badloss), on the other. It’s a no-brainer. Yes, indeed, they assume you are not overly endowed with brains.

But in fact the punctuation is:

• Hope Not – Hate!

That is, it is an instruction. Do not hope! they say, in admittedly slightly antiquated style. Rather, and they use the imperative mood: hate! And thus their many followers allow the zealotry and enthusiasm, as we used to call it, that is, the crazy and the cognitive-dissonance-concealing-certainty come into their eyes: they are switched on like automata, and swarm in to condemn and call out anything that resembles a pea under the hundred mattresses of their hypersensitive and hyperstupid moral sensibility.

Now, I am not saying that Hannah Spencer is necessarily a full Hope not – Hate! person: but she has adopted the lingo.

Last month our attention was brought to Hope Not – Hate! by Toby Young’s notice that they were busy smearing him on their website, by alluding feebly to a couple of emails written a paradigm-shift ago. On examining this, I found that they were also trying to cook Matt Goodwin’s goose prior to the election in Gorton and Denton. Yes, indeed, Goodwin is considered hateful by the self-appointedly Hopeful.

Goodwin is interesting. Originally an academic, he wrote about the ‘far Right’, discovered they were sounder than he had at first thought, and, after his conversion, left the university and came out of the closet. And this has upset many people who thought he were alright, he were, when he were an academic, when he were being critical of the far Right. But they cannot forgive him for what followed. Like many who invert Oscar Wilde and come to love the thing they kill, he became far Right himself. And this, to our enemies, is far more offensive than simply being on the Right. They say: what? He was a safe pair of hands, but now he is a manipulator.

Here is what it says on the Hope Not – Hate! website about Goodwin. In one article:

Islamophobic… Right-wing agitator… asked “to what extent, if at all, is Islam compatible with western liberal democracy?”…said “Trump is right” on immigration… shook hands with Steven Bannon…

And in another:

Matt Goodwin was once a serious academic who sought to understand the drivers of far-Right extremism and warn about its dangers. He has since morphed into something very different. Over the past few years Goodwin has established himself as one of the most influential Right voices in British media. … All of this is a far cry from the Goodwin of old. From 2011 to 2015, he sat on the government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred. … The Goodwin of 2011 would be deeply alarmed by the Goodwin of 2026…

Right, right, right. But, dear Hope Not – Hate!, what do you think? Yes, you have discovered that Goodwin has changed his mind. Well done. But what do you think about the questions Goodwin has raised. Do you think Islam is compatible with Western liberal democracy? You imply and insinuate that Goodwin is wrong to answer and perhaps wrong to ask. Ah, perhaps, then, Hope Not – Hate!, you want us not to ask?

Not-asked-and-not-answered!

That is very hopeful and hateful, if you don’t mind my saying so.

Until you tell us what your attitude is, Hope Not – Hate!, and whether you think there is any sort of issue about factionalism, sectarianism and sedition in the state, then be quiet. And, by the way, I can tell you, since I was glancing at Book V of Aristotle’s Politics yesterday, that Aristotle thought that differences of ethnicity were a cause of stasis: his word for civil discord.

Aristotle, that racist.

Let’s move away from Hope Not – Hate!

Too much hate there.

But the same logic (the tweesloppy one of hope-good and hate-bad) is evident in academic circles. Professor Martin Shaw gets quite angry about the fact that Professor Matt Goodwin has used “his scholarly credentials to normalise Right-wing anti-immigration politics” without ever noticing that he, Professor Martin Shaw, has used his own scholarly credentials to normalise boring Leftish opinions about genocide, racism, the CND.

You’ll find this Hope not – Hate! logic everywhere.

The Hopeful get very hateful when they talk about the people they consider hateful.

E.g. Antifa. Antifascists are a self-satisfied band of haters. They hate fascism. Fascism deserves hate. Fascism is defined as the hateful. But perhaps we should spell Antifacists Auntiefascists: for aren’t they strangely moralising and contemptuous and deprived and interfering in exactly the way we remember from the Aunts in P.G. Wodehouse, the bad Agatha ones, I mean, not the good Dahlia ones? So Antifa should be spelt, by us, Auntiefa. I jest, but it is fairly well established that Antifa is a well-oiled machine designed to provoke police into violence and then film it. Agitators, provocateurs. And the ICE protestors in Minneapolis were demonstrably up to the same game. Trying to catch others out in doing wrong, and ignoring their own wrong in so doing.

Oh, and what about the Just Stop OIL (Just Stop, Old Ignorant Ladies) incident, when a retired aged vicar and a retired schoolteacher feebly tried to break through the glass within which the Magna Carta was boxed? Yes, those ladies were just a few more Auntiefascists. Probably thinking well of themselves, thinking of themselves as hopeful, not hateful, whereas in fact they are following the imperative Hope Not – Hate! and damaging public property.

Hope Not Hate sounds inclusive. But it is exclusive. And, as such, it is hateful. It justifies its hate by hating haters, but it is still hateful. So it has not escaped the logic. And it has not squared the circle.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.