There probably comes a point in any country when it is forced to ask itself why the flying fuck it allowed certain people anywhere near it’s government. In America, the obvious example is Donald Trump: it still baffles me how any modern, educated society could allow such an obnoxious charlatan anywhere near it’s political system. Here in the UK, the two names which first spring to mind are Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: both are repulsive, arrogant scumbags who just entered politics for their own puerile gratification. All three of these insults to humanity barely deserve to be allowed to sweep the streets, let alone help run a country.

After today I would add Lee Anderson to this list. To be honest I hadn’t heard much about him before, but when I heard this news that he wants to bring back the death penalty, he automatically struck me as abhorrent. Capital punishment has no place in any civilised society: that is as obvious and unarguable to me as the fact that the earth is a sphere. As soon as the state gives itself the right to kill people for whatever reason, as soon as judges are given the right to say who lives and who dies, we step back towards the dark ages. We should not have ignoramuses who support it anywhere near our government. He has also spewed a lot more obnoxious, right-wing crap which I don’t want to detail here. Yet, as Owen Jones explains quite thoroughly here, there is reason to see Anderson as nothing more than a troll, spewing more and more controversial bollocks just to provoke a reaction. Like Piers Moron, Anderson is trying to frame himself as some sort of champion of free speech, reviled by the so-called ‘left’ for daring to say what we want to ban or outlaw, pandering to the Sun-reading cretins desparate to get their baseless xenophobic views aired. Yet the truth is, any thinking person can see him for what he and those like him are: loudmouth luddites fit only to be ignored.