Britain has its first punk-rock government

The most surprising thing about the letter from Guardian and Observer journalists moaning about Suzanne Moore’s supposed ‘transphobia’ is that it contained 338 signatures. This must be the first time a newspaper has had more writers than readers. What an extraordinarily bloated institution — how does it survive? Through those often advertised workshops where Owen Jones explains to people how to write a column? Most bizarre.

Surprise number two was that these hacks were prepared to get themselves worked up about a perfectly reasonable piece, for once, by Moore — but found no problem what-soever with Steve Bell’s disgusting and frankly racist depiction of Priti Patel in a cartoon. Patel, Indian and Hindu by ancestry, was portrayed as a bull with horns and a ring through her nose. All this on International Women’s Day, too. The left likes its minorities and chicks only when they toe the line and don’t get uppity, as I have mentioned before. The left likes clients, not people.

If I had been drawing Ms Patel, it would have been with a safety pin through her nose and a spiky hairdo. With every day that passes it seems to me more and more that we are experiencing Britain’s first punk-rock administration, pogoing up and down on decrepit institutions and cheerfully gobbing in the direction of its enemies — the swamp, the blob, the establishment. It is a fairly glorious thing to behold. One hopes it endures longer than the 18 months or so in which punk was in ascendancy (roughly autumn 1976 to the spring of 1978, since you asked).

The social impact of punk was far more lasting and important than the music, which, by the time the Sex Pistols had dissolved, had already become a jaded and boring caricature of itself.