Stormz in a Teacup

For a while now I have been struggling with unlocking the secret to a fair society. Nobody seems especially happy with democracy because it doesn’t always produce the outcome you want. This most recently happened in the good old disunited kingdom resulting in the installation of an opposition-busting 80-seat Tory majority. Since then you can hardly pick up a newspaper, turn on the radio or television, or dive into social media without being harangued by hair-shirt wearing extremists who are bleating about extremism.

The reality is that Boris Johnson is a pretty centrist figure politically and for all the outrage at him once using words like picaninnies and commenting on water-melon smiles; for all the accusations of racism over comparing burkas to letterboxes; for every imagined slur the left wing can conjure, nothing he has said or done comes even close to what his newly recruited voters believe, say and do every day of the week. Boris is popular; his detractors can neither understand why, nor tolerate that simple fact. And this is because the left as a whole just don’t grasp human nature.

On Friday there was outrage that Dominic Cummins is reportedly paid a salary approaching £100k by the Conservative Party. So what? Seamus Milne is paid more by Labour, but to make it appear far more heinous and ‘capitalisty’ the headline used the descriptor ‘three times the average wage’! The politics of envy in microcosm. To be honest I was surprised that a man who has just helped save us from Corbynism was being paid so little; I mean, Michael Heseltine gets about that much every year for doing nothing except big-up the EU¹. But the fact remains that headlines like this will gain traction with a certain sector of society.

Working people will shrug, possibly say something like “Nice work if you can get it” then get on with whatever fills their day. But those who fill their days with finding things to be offended by will… why they will turn to the great sage of their age, the seer known as ‘Stormzy’, who will articulate for them as few orators have done before. Move over, Churchill, step aside Socrates, a new sage is in town, motherfuckers. I don’t know what it says about society when hard on the coat tails of the messiah Corbyn, his emissary on earth is a hate-filled homophobic misogynist; at least judging by his own words.

Remember Stormzy? Who?

And words is all they are, for now. Such words may encourage others to take up sticks and stones but then that does Boris’s job for him. That the left is no more than a juvenile rabble which believes in impossible dreams just becomes more starkly revealed. They preach peace and love, but justify violence and hate to get it. Socialism constructs its own fantasy reality but when it gets into power it fails to live up to even its own limited mythology.

For the many, not the few is fine as a soundbite, but it also encapsulates the politics of envy. Kinder, gentler politics sounds all so noble, until the Momentum hate mob piles in. And in Corbyn and McDonnell – whom many revere as demigods, rather than the demagogues they really are – the simpletons of socialism have found guides, not to the promised land, but back into the wilderness of political exile. You’ll excuse me if I don’t buy into the fantasy.

¹. I honestly don’t know what Hezza gets paid by the EU, but why let the facts get in the way of a popular trope