A Nasty Taste in the Mouth

My drive home is the best part of my day, providing the weather isn’t appalling. Last night it was still light, the sun was setting in a glorious red blaze and no insensitive idiot had managed to kill himself and snarl up the traffic. (Am I alone in hoping all motorway accidents that hold me up are fatal ones? Somebody must pay, as far as I’m concerned, damn it!) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, driving home I get to listen to all sorts of people interviewed on Radio 4, my station du jour, every jour.

On The Media Show last night I heard professional offendee Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She who wishes for white men to become extinct was bitterly whining about never getting a Press Award because, you guessed it, there is a conspiracy of white men against wimmin. (There was also another guest who could not pronounce the plural ‘women’ insisting on referring to many ‘woman’. I’m guessing this was in a bid to show some lexical parity with ‘sheep’.) I always love listening to YAB because it reminds me how truly glorious it is to be rational, level-headed, devoid of hate and oh yes, white and male.

Then, on PM, we got Jonathan Freedland reporting on the Trump sensation and how it had taken by surprise everybody except the millions upon millions who absolutely get it. In trying to explain the phenomenon he revealed his own prejudices by adopting a slightly smug tone and describing Trump as extreme and repellent, on the assumption that everybody listening would nod along and share his exasperated sighs. Oh, what a nasty taste he was having to experience on our behalf. I do love it so when the bubble dwellers peer out of their misted-up portals and imagine the soft focus, dream-lit ‘beyond’ bears any resemblance to those who actually inhabit it.

All very harmless you might think, this inability to imagine a contrary narrative, until you contemplate that it is exactly this willing blindness to other people's reality that was highlighted yesterday by the tip-of-the-iceberg conviction of six Pakistani rapists in Rotherham. We're all talking about it now but for years although their crimes were common knowledge, the many officials to whom it was repeatedly reported, refused to believe it. Turns out that ‘progressive’ thought is actually harmful; not merely hurt feelings, but real bodily and mental harm with lifelong consequences.

And still the social justice warriors actually believe their own tribal sloganeering and their wistful brotherhood-of-man lyrics. They believe everybody ought to think as they do and if they were in charge you would be compelled to. Naturally there is a referendum element too. This article by the insufferable Rafael Behr yet again totally misreads the motives and the commitment behind those of us who wish to be rid of the uber-socialist Kleptocracy of the EU. And of course, Polly Toynbee does her level best to tell her loyal readers how to despise and pity the poor, stupid people who just won’t think properly.

But outside the narrow confines of the sneering elite socialist thought factory, Brexit is not something musingly wished for by a minority of shallow thinking Little Englanders. It is a long-desired outcome of around 50% of the voting age population of the UK – especially those who can actually remember an optimistic world before the cloying embrace of all that legislation to control what we do or say or think, or even look like. The Yasmins and Jonathans and Rafaels and Pollys and all the little cogs in the statist machine don’t have the wit to imagine that anybody could think outside their little red box. Here’s hoping for (if not quite expecting) a rude awakening come the referendum.