McCarthyism.

Watching a Parliamentary committee interrogating Jeremy Corbyn yesterday, I was struck by what a vituperous group politicians are when they think they have someone caught in their political headlights.

The case Mr Corbyn had to answer was, is the Labour Party racist and more specifically is it anti-semite. 
Racism is a hot topic around the dinner tables of the political class, sadly much more so than the devastation of George Osborn's savage cuts to welfare have been to the working class areas, particularly in the North but then the ideological juices are inflamed much more when the damage is seen to be done outside the confines of ones own territory simply because, all it demands is rhetoric and little action.

Irrespective of context or the local conditions on the ground, anti-Semitic judgements are held non rigour by swathes of people, in part because of the tragedy of the holocaust, in part because Hezbollah, representing the Palestinians have made plain their determined to wipe out the Jewish nation. In this context the tragedy of the Palestinians is brushed off and the hard line enactment of Israeli policy is never felt to be sufficiently brutal for people to fall into the anti-Israeli camp, as it seems certain members of the Labour Party have shown and voiced sympathy for.  

Corbyn, in being questioned by the committee was the centre of both, right wing conservative vitriol whilst, at the same time, he also came under attack from the labour members of the committee because he has become reviled by the the Blairites for shifting the Party away from the centrist-right policies which the "Son of Thatcher" had propagated.  

I have watched many committee meetings but rarely has it been so clearly evident that the people asking the questions were not interested in the response and were there simply to carry out a kicking. Unfortunately for them Corbyn is no fool and in my opinion stood his ground in defending himself and the party he leads, but it is symptomatic that when the nation needs everyone to pull together and form some sort of economic cohesion we would rather stand at each other's throats over that invasive, overpowering modern phenomena "political correctness" which makes us all cuckold to the real dilemmas within our society.

At least McCathy in America had one obsession, communism within the American society.  In the UK the hydra has many heads and many enemy's and the tragedy is that tiptoeing the line to avoid condemnation makes everyone an enemy of himself.