It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning.
Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders and teachers call students ‘despicable’ and ‘homophobic’ when they understandably ask a fellow classmate ‘How can you identify as a cat, when you are a girl?’
Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention
Those who identify as young while having one foot in the grave have not yet benefitted from this strange new belief system – but give it time. We may look back with incomprehension that in 2018 the Dutchman Emile Ratelband had his attempt to make himself legally younger by 20 years quashed, even though his plea was easily as sensible as that of navvies who call themselves Nina and thus must use the female restrooms: ‘When I’m 69 – I am limited. If I’m 49, then I can buy a new house, I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I don’t get an answer’.
That doesn’t stop the great and the good from attempting to bathe in the funky fountain of youth, though – grumpy old woke bros such as Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and their pin-up Jeremy ‘The Absolute Boy’ Corbyn are forever standing alongside blue-haired students and telling old feminists not to horde rights. (As Victoria Smith points out in her brilliant book Hags, identifying as young will bring women only mutton/lamb mockery.)
The then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttered at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: ‘A gang of angry old men… are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth… By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. I had a social-media scrap with a Remoaner who told me that my generation was done and his was about to take over; when I checked his age, he was two years older than me.
But even more than Remnants, if any group likes to identify as young, it’s the climate-change hysterics. Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention. More than any other issue this one has been seen to divide the generations, symbolised by Extinction Rebellion choosing the witless schoolgirl Greta Thunberg as their leader when she was only 15. But now some actual young people appear to have had enough of these giant toddlers who to have nothing to do with their time apart from obstruct those who have places to be and livings to earn.
This week in Stratford, East London, schoolchildren were seen remonstrating with the overgrown tantrum-havers of Just Stop Oil – staging a ‘slow march’ during rush-hour – for making them late to lessons, in some cases ripping their banners from their hands. A refuse collector nearby summed it up nicely – ‘Get to work, you lazy ****s’.
It’s becoming ever more evident that climate change is a class issue. These East End schoolkids understand – where adults have tried to skate around the issue, not wanting to be seen as Enemies of the Earth – that the climate change mob were born into privilege and thus are able to treat learning lightly. No matter how they waste their days, they’ll never be forced to choose between heating and eating.
It was telling that the children who tackled them were a multi-racial group – like the East London workers who in 2019 pulled an XR protester from the roof of a rush-hour tube train, leading a spokesperson to admit that the move had been a ‘huge own goal’. A subsequent hastily deleted tweet comparing themselves to Rosa Parks probably wasn’t the cleverest move, considering that climate-change protestors are – as an ex-director-general of the BBC once put it of his own corporation – ‘hideously white’.
I’d like Jon Snow – who said of a Brexit rally that he’d ‘never seen so many white people in one place’ – to cover the next climate protest. They’re so white they make the Lib Dem conference look like the Notting Hill Carnival.
They’re white because they’re posh. Even their monikers give the game away; the first tranche of XR leaders gloried in such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattison (more hyphens than Debrett’s) the latter of whom opined ‘Air travel should only be used in emergencies’ – despite having been on a number of recent skiing trips. Another comrade, Zoe Jones, was shown on social media enjoying safari holidays in Uganda, boozing on the beach in New Zealand and bungee jumping over the Nile; that’s not a simple carbon footprint – that’s a carbon clown-shoe footprint.
It’s not that the climate change mob are against flying per se – they’re very much in favour of ‘travel’ for themselves and their mates from ‘uni’ – they just don’t like it when the great unwashed follow the herd down to Greece on holiday. Like the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey asking ‘What is a weekend?’ it’s hard for people who do what they enjoy (or do nothing) to understand what holidays mean to those who do essential jobs, or jobs they don’t particularly enjoy, just to make a living.
But there’s a shining light at the end of the dimly lit eco-bulb tunnel. Kids of the kind who told Just Stop Oil to get a move on aren’t an exception, but a sign of brighter times ahead. A 2021 survey in the USA inspired the journalist Daniel Roman to write a piece called ‘Has the woke wave peaked? Shock poll reveals Generation Z rejects cancel culture.’ The findings were very encouraging. Overall, no one admitted caring much for cancel culture; the only group in which more respondents viewed it positively or neutrally than negatively were the notoriously miserable Millennials. More members of Gen X (1965-1980) and Boomers (1946-64) viewed it negatively (46 per cent for Gen X, 50 per cent for Boomers) than positively or neutrally (29 per cent for Gen X, 27 per cent for Boomers). But the real shock came from those born between 1997 and 2008, only 8 per cent of whom viewed cancel culture favourably, while 55 per cent had a negative view – higher than Gen X or Boomers.
I’ve never felt comfortable disapproving of youngsters, so I’m happy to discover that it was just the wrong sort of young people that I disapproved of all along; the mouthy posh ones who always push their way to the front. These East End schoolkids are far more the ticket – and politicians should take notice. The thing about pandering to the youth vote is that young people who have anything about them don’t identify as young, but as what they’d like their adult lives to be like. And I’d bet they’re no keener on living in a censorious, narrow-minded cancel-culture than we old folk. It’s time for those who identify as young to grow up – and learn from the mouths of babes what actually matters to everyday people of all generations.
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