On Sunday, the lead story in The Observer was around this suggestion made by Kirstama, Labor's Brexit spokesman,

that the Johnson administration, with the help of its outriders in the tabloid press,

is deliberately whipping up the prospects of pro-Brexit riots in the hope that this might provide

some kind of justification for using the Civil Contingencies

Act in order to get around the Ben Act or the surrender bill in the parlance of Johnson

and his advisers. Firstly, how seriously do you take that threat? And secondly, what do you

think it says about where we are now that it's even a topic of discussion?

I don't think that they have anything that clearly worked out.

I think that it's more of Dominic Cummings-inspired emulation of Trump, which is to inject unstrategic anger and panic into a political situation, which you can then game.

If the other side are furious, and you have a bunch of Labour MPs, gamut, gammar looking, lathering their lips with spittle, preposterous with impotent rage,

screaming at the other side.

Either you have that, or you have the other thing, which is this precious language about

civility, which language is always loaded in favor of power and incumpancy, because it's

the language of status, of deference,

and of obedience. And it's seriously demobilizing and leads to just acres and acres of pious

pomposity about, you know, is it really fair to demand civility from both sides? When we know

that there's only one side knowingly inside racism and violence

is civility what we really need yada yada it's a complete distraction but it creates the kind

of polarization that the right benefits from Trump knows this Bolsonaro knows this the right

wing sort of trolls know this I mean this is basically where it comes from.

This is the internet's inspired model of politics as a sort of spiral of trolling and vigilantism.

You know, so you get the alt-right trolls sort of goading everybody one minute. And then you get

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