Slugs and melts: inside the language and culture of the Corbynite left Not every Jeremy Corbyn supporter spends evenings shaping up for a fight on Twitter. And not everyone screaming at journalists […]

Not every Jeremy Corbyn supporter spends evenings shaping up for a fight on Twitter. And not everyone screaming at journalists on Twitter is a Jeremy Corbyn supporter.

But among a certain group of socialists – perhaps a few hundred – a subculture of memes, in-jokes and social media brawls is developing its own language.

You may have heard of some of it: the phrase “Jeremy Corbyn is the absolute boy”, uttered recently on Newsnight, is an example, while the “Ohh Jeremy Corbyn” chant that rocked Glastonbury is another related phenomenon.

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Critics hear much of this Corbynite repartee and consider it juvenile at best, dangerous at worst. Immediately after i spoke to a host of one podcast known for its Corbynite support, its Twitter account was banned for a week for threatening a journalist with a cricket bat, something they now describe as “an error of judgement”.

But where does this aggression come from? And what do some of the figureheads of this movement have to say about the online controversy?

Your average person on the street won’t have noticed, but there are a handful of terms are helping to turn Labour’s youthful, election-time support into a whole online identity of its own.

‘We’ve been sneered at’

Glossary: “The absolute boy” Jeremy Corbyn is the absolute boy. A laddish expression of support, similar in usage to US equivalent “Jeremy Corbyn is the man”. Attributed by Reelpolitik’s Frayne Reid to “our mates”, but now in use by sympathisers as high profile as Lena Dunham

Matt Zarb-Cousin, who served as a spokesperson for the Labour leader until earlier this year, has thrown himself into the fray with enthusiasm.

From calling former Labour MP Michael Dugher a “useless slug” to calling a wide range of politicians, commentators and civilians “melts”, he has led the line for a group of hardcore Corbyn supporters with little time for civility.

He has sparked a degree of outrage from onlookers not used to seeing a former spad comporting himself in such a way, but Zarb-Cousin – or just “Zarb” to his fans – tells i he’s a free man now. And they had it coming.

“You’ve got to put this into context,” he says. “For the past two years since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, what’s been happening in the party hasn’t even been granted intellectual curiosity, never mind sympathy, by the mainstream commentariat.”

“We’ve been sneered at, denigrated and called all sorts of names. If you’re not willing to engage with us, why should we engage with you?”

At the more grassroots level, the Reelpolitik podcast dispenses hour-long episodes devoted to furious, vulgar insults with an undercurrent of leftist conviction and historical context.

A more confrontational tone

Glossary: “slug” An enemy of the Corbyn project, especially right-wing Labour MPs who believe left-wing policies are not only unpopular but undesirable. Connotes sliminess. Debatably coined by David Brent in The Office.

Jack Frayne-Reid, one of the hosts, decided to join Labour after Ed Miliband’s defeat to get involved in a “fightback”, but was shocked to see open hostility towards him and other new members when Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership.

“It was sheer contempt,” he says.

“For a year, I was really open to this consensus approach that we saw in Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet.

“But it became very clear to me, especially last year when the coup happened, that my politics are not wanted in the Labour Party.

“At that point, out of frustration, I took on a more confrontational tone.”

Both Zarb-Cousin and Frayne-Reid mention as an example of provocation a remark by Financial Times political commentator Janan Ganesh, who posted and then deleted a tweet in August 2016 that read: “You can do analysis of Corbyn and his “movement” (I have done it) but the essence of the whole thing is that they are just thick as pigshit.”

“Corbynistas have been labelled a lot worse than melt or slug,” Zarb-Cousin says.

Slugs vs melts

Glossary: “melt” Someone who, through moral cowardice, undermines the Corbyn cause. Particularly columnists of the “he can’t win” tendency. Also a general insult.

The nascent Corbynite slang is a mixture of otherwise apolitical laddish insults and Twitter insults, but the most focus has landed on those two words.

It’s not that every opponent of the Labour left is either a slug or a melt (or both): most Tories are just Tories and therefore understood implicitly to be evil.

The terms are largely reserved for the political centre and the forces that fought Corbyn for control of the red banner.

“Slug is what you’d call someone who is a Blairite, a centrist, which obviously had its time, but that time isn’t now,” says Zarb-Cousin.

A slug, on the whole, is someone who is seen to be actively undermining the Corbyn project despite identifying ostensibly with the Labour Party. It is more often deployed against actual politicians “There is an element of treachery to a slug,” says Kieran Morris, another host on Reelpolitik.

Melt, on the other hand, is commonly used on journalists and commentators, especially those who doubted Corbyn’s ascendancy because “he can’t win”, rather than through genuine disagreement.

Zarb-Cousin describes a melt as “someone who parrots rhetorical devices”, while Frayne-Reid considers it to be “somebody who displays political cowardice”.

It refers to the soft left, especially in its willingness to compromise to get ahead in a mainstream media career.

“Melt has a lot more weakness to it than slug,” says Morris. “It gives in under pressure.”

Stop hitting yourself

Glossary: “salt” What the left does to slugs, usually in the form of a 140-character retort on Twitter.

The obvious question is why such hardline Labour activists would spend so much time and effort on members of their own party when there is a Conservative government in place and plenty of right-wing columnists in the press to complain about.

“The reason we attack centrists is because they get to appear on TV as the “left” voices,” says Frayne Reid.

“On The Papers, they’ll have an incredibly right-wing person on, and then Polly Toynbee, who’s not that left-wing. There’s this massive disparity when a huge number of people voted for someone way to the left of Polly Toynbee, but the centrists get to play the left in the media.”

The constant poking at centrists, then, is a method of differentiation as well as a form of revenge for left-wingers who feel they should be in the limelight while Corbyn is leader.

“There are a lot of journalists who are great,” Frayne-Reid says. “It’s not like everybody’s rubbish.”

Jeremy Corbyn: one of the lads

Glossary: “seen off” When someone (often a melt) is comprehensively defeated through debate or insult, undermining their reputation in the future.

There is an element of laddishness to the Corbynite Twitter subculture at the moment, something which has not escaped the notice even of its own female members.

Ellie Mae O’Hagan, a left-wing journalist for the Guardian and elsewhere, recently tweeted that “the vernacular of Corbyn supporters” is “pretty masculine” – albeit reimagined in an inclusive way – and labelled it “annoying”.

Frayne-Reid and Morris of Reelpolitik are aware of the potential for putting off allies through their behaviour, and Frayne-Reid says he “understands” if someone would want to join the Greens or the SNP to avoid the in-fighting – even if he believes the fight for Labour is crucial.

For Abi Wilkinson, also a freelance commentator, the free-for-all is not “particularly alienating”, and she says specific language choices aren’t the problem at a time when both left and right can get “pretty nasty” in online arguments. “I think the vast majority of people don’t engage with it at all,” she says.

“I guess a lot of it is about signalling group membership.”

Glossary: “toad” Similar to slug. Reelpolitik point out that the term was levelled against Labour leftists by John Golding in his account of the ideological battles of the 1970s and 1980s, Hammer of the Left.

Suze Marsupial at the New Socialist, an upstart left-wing website, has argued that, while it is abrasive and often dripping in unpleasant irony, the language of the Corbynites is not offensive per se.

“It is noteworthy that the Corbynite slang is remarkably unproblematic in its derivation,” she wrote.

“Despite the irreverent laddishness of much of the current electoral left meme culture, these insults are neither gendered, racist, nor homophobic.”

Tom Whyman, another left-wing freelance journalist and philosopher, wrote a curious piece about modern leftist language which makes the case that we’re all “the lads” now – at least insofar as we share the precariousness of modern capitalist society:

“The lads are, therefore, most likely people just like you and I – assuming for the sake of argument that everyone reading is a ‘fellow millennial’. The lads are young, urban-dwelling, precariously employed; through their shared class-interest, they accrue a sense of camaraderie.”

Meffs and wizards

Glossary: “Jeremy Corbyn is the Prime Minister” The claim, part joke and part hope, that in the absence of leadership from Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn has actually become the Prime Minister. “It’s absolutely true. Incontrovertibly true,” asserts Morris.

For Morris, part of the reason for the abject rudeness – which, yes, goes well beyond slug and melt to unprintable epithets at times – is about cutting sheltered members of the elite down to size.

“The intention is always the same, which is that it’s directed at cossetted liberal and centre-right journalists who have spent their entire lives avoiding ridicule for the things they’ve said and done. People get creative,” he says.

He defends the practice of labelling political figures with inventive insults, highlighting the fact that Mayor Joe Anderson being called a “pie-crust snorting wizard” made it into the Liverpool Echo and Paul Nuttall being called a “bad Bootle Ukip meff” has become part of national political discourse.

“At its heart, it’s completely juvenile,” says Morris. “Twitter can seem like it’s much more important than it is.”

In the corridors of power

Glossary: “cop (for the police)” An insult often directed at someone attempting to engage in left-wing political discussion with suspected hidden motives. Attributed to writer Sam Kriss, who confirms: “I absolutely invented that.”

Corbyn himself has faced numerous calls from opponents within and without the Labour Party to “call off” his supporters. He has even done so, on occasion.

The debate over whether he is responsible for the darker corners of Corbynite social media has raged since his victory in 2015.

Channel 4’s Cathy Newman, speaking to i before the election, said the wrath of the Corbynites can be “terrible”, even though the leader himself and his advisers have “absolutely no truck with the abuse that circulates”.

“I think some of his critics would say he didn’t do enough in the early days to rein them in,” she says.

And party grandee Harriet Harman has called for a “one strike and you’re out” rule for those who target female MPs.

“It’s not good enough for Jeremy to say, ‘I don’t do it, I don’t agree with it, I don’t condone it’,” she said last month. “As a leader you have to say, ‘This is what I’m going to do to stop it.’”

Preying on the weak?

Glossary: “(massive) Tory” An insult, levelled at Tories and non-Tories who express opinions which could be interpreted as Tory.

All of this hangs over the Corbynites of Slug Twitter, as they have been called. But there is a subtle distinction between what they do and the sometimes mindless, venomous rambling that pops up in the replies of public figures, especially women.

The battles of the young Corbynistas, often on the periphery of the media themselves, at least imply a competition to be won: if you want your clan to supplant another clan, you have to goad them into fighting and beat them in public.

Of course, in practice, the result of this is sometimes little different from harassment.

Frayne-Reid, for his part, says he has “no time for any kind of misogynistic, transphobic, racist, ableist or homophobic abuse”.

“I will undoubtedly have missed categories of prejudice out there but you get my drift,” he adds, encouraging people to drop the podcast a DM if they think they’re “preying on the weak in any way”.

‘I’m just a person’

As to how far the behaviour of his supporters has penetrated Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle, that’s a matter for debate.

“They’d be aware of ‘absolute boy’,” Zarb-Cousin confirms.

“I’m not sure about slug or melt or anything.”

But scything into centrist journalists isn’t about party activists in party hats trying to win hearts and minds for the party. It’s about a combination of fun and revenge.

“I’m my own person, I’m not employed by the Labour Party any more and I can do what I want,” says Zarb-Cousin.

“If someone’s rude about me, I’ll be rude back. I’m not a politician, I’m just a person.

“If someone’s rude to you in the pub, you’d respond accordingly. I don’t think we’ve got any reason to allow ourselves to be bullied.”