I suppose this magazine is probably not the best forum to launch a movement to sweep away the British middle class, much along the lines of Pol Pot’s adventure in Kampuchea in the late 1970s, but one can only play with the cards one has been dealt. The more one reads the newspapers, the more inescapable becomes the conclusion that these are the people who are responsible for almost all that is bad, verging on wicked, in our society. Not the lower-middle class, incidentally (the petit bourgeoisie so despised by Marx they were denied even agency), but the comfortable tranche above them. The middle-middle. The professions, by and large. And, dare I say it, the people at Glasto (frankly, on stage and off).
I have been reading the excellent report by Penny Mordaunt and John Mann into anti-Semitism in this country, which the two authors say left them ‘stunned into silence’. My only quibble with what is, frankly, a harrowing report which shames our country is their apparent surprise that anti-Semitism has been ‘normalised’ among the British middle class. They wrote: ‘We heard about the noisy demonstrations and how intimidating people find the current environment, but as we dug deeper what really scared us was the increasing normalisation of far more extreme, personalised and sometimes life-changing impact directed at individuals purely and simply because they are Jewish. Worrying dilemmas of where Jewish professionals believed that their professional body was actively discriminating against them but where they required membership from this body to be able to work and acquire the necessary protections.’ They concluded with a plea to those in the middle-class spheres of activity – so the arts, most obviously, but more obviously still, the BBC – to undertake some kind of training programme. I would have them hoeing rice paddies in 35°C heat, in shackles, but perhaps that’s just me.
Did they think that among white Britons it was the working class that harboured anti-Semitic tendencies? That may have been true among a minority in the 1930s, but surely not since. It is our country’s insufferable chattering classes who reach for their keffiyehs on their way to Waitrose. There is no aspect of wokedom which these morons will not swallow, be it the post-rational trans idiocies, cringing before the Black Lives Matter flag and denouncing Israel without having the slightest idea of what is actually going on in Gaza and with no appetite to learn.
The working class don’t do any of that stuff. Nor is it much use insisting that many anti-Semitic attacks come from Muslims. Of course it is true, but it is also beside the point. The hatred in a fairly large-ish swathe of British Muslims for Jewish people is a given – but is also given legitimacy by the actions of the affluent white folks who presumably think it wrong to murder homosexuals but when Muslim countries do it, it’s fine. The problem is, these people – the middle-middle – have an influence way beyond their number. They run everything: our courts, our schools, our universities, our broadcast media, our arts establishment, our museums. Their visceral (and in the end suicidal) loathing of Great Britain and its history is matched only by their gullibility when faced with anyone who speaks Arabic or who claims that they have been subjugated as a consequence of their race. Except Jews, of course, except Jews.
Let us move away from anti-Semitism for a moment and consider the case of Courtney Wright, aged 12, from Bilton (near Rugby) and what happened to her when she wore a Union Jack dress to her school’s ‘Culture Day’. What happened was this: she was taken from her classmates and kept in isolation, while the rest of the school pandered to all the other thrilling, vibrant and diverse cultures present. Other kids wearing St George’s flags were similarly segregated and told that their choice of dress was ‘inappropriate’, while those in burqas, niqabs and Nigerian costume were cheered to the rafters by the thick-as-mince teachers. Courtney’s dad, Stuart Field, said: ‘She should not be made to feel embarrassed about being British. And she shouldn’t be punished for celebrating British culture and history; nobody else I’ve spoken to can quite get their heads around it.’
It is our insufferable chattering classes who reach for their keffiyehs on their way to Waitrose
The school later offered an unreserved apology and said that it was considering how the incident could have been ‘handled better’. Well, you handle it better next time by sacking the idiots who told pupils and staff that the Union Jack is the symbol of our cultural heritage and if you don’t like it you might be better off living somewhere else. Or how about this? Don’t have a bloody ‘culture day’ – instead concentrate on getting the kids through their examinations with decent grades, seeing as the school’s academic record is predictably awful and well below both the national average and the average for the area.
Pol Pot had the teachers working in the paddy fields. It seems a rather extreme answer to the problem, but so widespread is this pseudo-progressive mindset that I’m really not sure what alternative will do the trick. Either with the teachers or the middle- class anti-Semites.
But back to Glastonbury for a moment. As might have been predicted, various deputy heads at the BBC have been sacked as a consequence of that debacle with the tuneful and likeable rap band Bob Vylan. But the point I tried to make when writing about the festival two weeks ago remains true. It is not, as the BBC thinks, a coming together of the nation. It is instead a mass rallying point for the middle-middle and a forum for their stupid politics. The overtly political nature of Glastonbury was not denied by the festival founder Michael Eavis. He said: ‘If you don’t like the politics of the event you can go elsewhere.’ Is that clear enough for you, Tim Davie? Next year, go elsewhere.
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