" If you just treat the trolls as background noise we can still discuss without pandering to their need for attention"
What else Dave?
It seems to me that we need to look at the political Parties, what they are and what they have become
THe Conservatives have always been what they claim to be - conservers of the status quo.
Thatcher summed up the role of her party beautifully with her "return to "Victorian values"
She was either stupid or honest enough when she laid open her Party's politics by siding with mass murderer Pinochet and describing him "a hero of democracy"

The Labour Party came into being, as its title describes, to represent the interests of working people in a Capitalist society
It was never revolutionary or extreme in any way -it was created by working people out of the Trades Unions as their voice at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Given occasional lapses, it did that pretty well for the first fifty odd years
It ascertained that working people didn't carry the can back after the Wars and virtually reconstructed Britain - free medicine, affordable homes and a way of paying for it without penalising those who couldn't afford to.
It seems to me, my MP, Harold Wilson, was the first to sell out big-time; from there, the party has represented the wealthy and treated politics as a career rather than a calling
Now Labour even has its very own war criminal to put alongside all the Tory ones.
Jim