Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rock’s quiet right-wingers

The least tolerant people in the universe have turned their howling rage on Kate Bush for saying something vaguely Tory

issue 10 December 2016

They will be sitting there right now, listening tearfully to the song for one last time on their dinky little iPods, before deleting it for ever. ‘-Heathcliff — it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home, so co-wo-wo-wold, let me into your window.’ No, Kate. You are never coming in through our windows again. What about the cuts? What about the refugees? What about Brexit? How could you? The window is closed, double-glazed and with a mortice lock. ‘Wuth-ering Heights’ — which once I loved — is dead to me. Also that one about going up a hill or something. That’s gone too. Die, Bush, die.

They are strange people, and perhaps mentally unhinged, the liberal absolutists who for 20 years or more have decided what we are allowed to think and say without ever having actual hegemony. The cater-wauling and outrage on social media sites when dippy songwriter Kate Bush mentioned that she rather admired Theresa May was a wonder to behold. Evil, evil! Everybody has to share precisely the same inane, one-dimensional values as them, and recite the same empty shibboleths, or they will be defriended and expunged from existence. These, uh, liberals are surely the least tolerant people in the known universe. I think they have become ever more intolerant of late because they know that at last the game is up, that the rest of us have had enough — in the UK, across Europe, in the USA. And so the shrieking reaches a pitch which is slightly too high for the human ear to comprehend: that’s true dog-whistle politics for you.

It’s no great surprise that Kate Bush may be a closet Tory — only that she let it slip in an interview, when most musicians know what hell awaits if they dare to admit to right-of-centre leanings.

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