It has been my experience living in Britain for over a decade and during the Leave Referendum that no matter what left-wingers say or don't say, the British Press will convince the idiots that they're bad in some way.

If there's one thing the whole Corbyn affair showed is that trying to avoid being tainted by the billionaire-owned Press is a mugs game and just reinforces the effectiveness of their manipulation.

If you're constantly shifting in what you say and avoiding strong statements of principle to avoid the risk that the press paint you as something that sounds bad, you end up making yourself seem shifty, vague and unprincipled, which paradoxically makes it easier for the Press to paint you with anything they feel like as slandering is far more believable against people who don't stand firm by what they claim to believe.

That recipe of "don't say or act in ways that the Press might call 'extremist'" has been tried again and again, most notably with Corbyn, and the result was invariably either failure or the party in question morphing so much it ended up having nothing to do with the original party (Labour's change from what it was before Blair being a perfect example of the latter).

From what I've seen in more than one country putting accommodating to the criticism of people who are your adversaries above your own principles doesn't work, whilst taking principled stances and not dancing to the tune played by the billionaire Press is something that at least historically worked, even in the UK (which is how the country ended up, at least for a while, with power in the hands of people who created things like the NHS).

This, by the way, is also my experience in other countries in Europe I lived in - once I returned to my own native Portugal were I also became involved in Politics (I was a member of the Green Party in the UK for a while when I lived there), I saw the exact same thing happen in the small leftwing party I became a member of (which had surged from an historical 5 or 6% to about 14% of votes by the time I became a member) as the leadership was played with very similar tricks (in this case it was mainly about being called "extremist" by the mainstream supposedly left party) and ending up collapsing the vote in the party down to 2%.

"Pragmatism" in genuine left-wing parties that puts even the strongest of moral principles (and being against child mass murder is probably one of the strongest principles there is) aside fearing criticism from others, all driven by the desire to gain votes in order to gain power, just makes a party and its leadership look shifty and unprincipled - "just more liars trying to get our votes" - which is deadly if you're a left-wing party as left-wing ideologies are about doing what's best for the many, not the few.

More in general and going back to my original post, if even one's principle that "mass murder or children is unacceptable" can just be put on the shelf like that out of mere fear of what's essentially "what will other people say" mixed with "what if we don't get more votes", then one doesn't actually have principles and what drives them as a person is something else altogether than principles.

Personally, I don't think you can be genuinely somebody who wants "the greatest good for the greatest number" (the core left-wing principle) if you can't even openly put forward the best suggestions to stop children being mass murdered because you fear what the billionaire owner press might say.