Earth Salt

“Shame on you!” shouted the peaceful protesters at the Conservative Party Conference, “Shame on you!” How dare you seek to bring prosperity and peace and how dare you try to foist any of that nasty dignity upon us? Don’t you know it is our right to look like cave dwellers, to believe in the Earth Mother and eat only what the good lady bestows? Except animals, of course and why would we work for and be led by animal murderers? Meat is murder and work will be the death of us and might is not right and the meek will inherit the earth once you filthy Tory scum have finished despoiling it.

Ah the dear old, queer old left; the salt of the earth, so much so that their preferred habitat ought to be a cellar. I watch with amusement as ever more outlandish charges are brought to bear against a party which, while being very far from perfect are at least trying to grapple with real, tangible, solvable problems. Yes, the Tories are devious and manipulative and will seek to dress up their policies in different clothes but, you know, that’s politics. And at least they have, um, policies, a thing the Labour Party appear to have completely forgotten about as they seek to out-left each other in JC’s brave new imaginary world.

How do they get that way; how do you make a lefty, assuming it isn’t genetic? (Although hereditary leftism is a possibility, given that like moths battering themselves against the killer light a huge number of lefties declare themselves Labour from birth, that it is in the blood. Cut them in half and they have Labour written right through. Somebody should do medical research on them.) But for those who are not born into the movement there must be a process of some kind and assuming they can’t all be mentally deficient, I imagine it goes something like this:

Start from a desire to make the world a better place and begin to associate with the eternally aggrieved. Suppress the gag reflex until you can mouth breathe in their presence and become a vocal defender of freedoms and liberties for the oppressed masses. Get Billy Bragg’s back catalogue for free on Spotify on your smart phone and learn all the words. Perhaps you buy a guitar and sing those songs until you are as convinced as he is that you learned them at the feet of the Jarrow marchers; make their story your story.

Your feet itch, you long to march so you attend a trial protest, just to see what it’s like. You feel the thrill of shouting ‘pig’ at the police with impunity and rush through some narrow streets away from the cordon, later telling your circle on social media how you were kettled by the agents of the fascist state. Start slowly, but steadily build your confidence until you can one day spit, hurl bricks and scream “Tory scum!” without any doubt in your red, red heart and dismiss as hate any voice that dares to question your credentials or your mission. Add salt for that bitter, bitter taste and relinquish forever the ability to imagine an act of humanity perpetrated by somebody who voted for living within our means.

Where Labour lost it.

For balance I should also elucidate the way in which righties are probably made: Watch with dismay as your old friends start dressing like street dwellers. Try to understand their convoluted, colander-like arguments and attempt to intervene by injecting facts into the conversation. Give it up as a lost cause, shrug, get a job... grow up.