There are two types of extremist in Britain we must resist both

AS so often in my life, after a few days of reflection I've found myself looking at both sides of an argument thinking "a plague on both your houses".

- George Chesterton

That's the polite version anyway. Since the spectacle of parliamentary procedure being overturned for fear of mob violence, we've witnessed a week of "my threat is worse than your threat" and "my fear is worse than your fear" one-upmanship. Our national teenage crush on binary bullshit merely demonstrates what all extremists seek to avoid revealing: that they are as unpleasant as each other.

The hard Left think Labour are being controlled by the evil Zionist lobby while the Right say Labour are in thrall of an Islamic mafia. The same goes for the BBC. Both conspiracies can't be right. Failure to confront the illegalities of some pro-Palestinian activists invites the far-Right in. The Tommy Robinsons of this world abhor a vacuum.

We have to be able to separate our feelings about the war in Gaza from questions of the law, democracy and freedom in the UK. If we can't do that we might as well let Jeremy Corbyn's wife run the country. It is evasive and disingenuous to reply to justified concerns about threats to MPs and their families by saying, "Yeah, but what about all the people who've been killed in Gaza?"