So what do we do? I think now is the time to get serious…. It’s kind of fluffy to talk about hope at the moment. I mean hope is great but in the meantime there’s always spite. Spite is good if you can’t get to hope. Carry on living and carry on working to spite those people.

I was under the impression that for Laurie Penny, quoted above, spite had long been a default position, a familiar and rather comfortable mental state. Hence the apocalyptic psychodrama, the enthusiasm for vandalism and violence, and for physical obstruction and mob harassment, and likewise the grandiose air of entitlement, and the bizarre fabrication of threats. Along with her disdain for the concerns of taxpayers as “anodyne and inconsequential,” and her complaints that remembering birthdays is both a ghastly imposition and “unpaid emotional labour.” And – oh yes – her pride in the abuse of people who politely ask for some basic civility.

So. Not, I think, a new development.