Tread carefully! Your garden is saturated with racial meaning – and so is Ikea

Is your life saturated with racial meaning? The most common answer to this question, when I ask friends and acquaintances, and sometimes people in the street going about their business, is: ‘Your inquiry makes no sense whatsoever. It sounds like the sort of pretentious and thoroughly bogus question dreamed up by some idiotic sociology lecturer in a third-rate polytechnic. Now go away, I have lost my place in the queue at Burger King and will have to wait ages for a bacon double cheeseburger.’

The correct answer, however, is ‘yes’. Our lives are saturated with racial meaning — I have it on good authority. I don’t know what it means, but nonetheless we are all soaking wet with racial meaning, all of us. You especially, probably. This is the view of a man called Dr Ben Pitcher who is — as coincidence would have it — an idiotic sociology lecturer at a third-rate polytechnic. The ‘University’ of Westminster, to be precise, an institution ranked 106th out of the 121 universities in the Sunday Times University Guide, and for sociology ranked 81st out of 89 in the Guardian (which knows a sociologist when it sees one).

Dr Ben has been unpicking the racial subtexts and tropes and memes which infect our lives and, um, saturate us — and of course he has concentrated his attention, as is only right, on the racist excrescence which is Gardeners’ Question Time on BBC Radio 4. This long-running temple of filth must be seen ‘in the context of the rise of racist and fascist parties in Europe’ and indeed ‘the crisis in white identity’. That’s why, you see, those supposedly cosy and genteel old coves on GQT are always telling people to root out invasive alien species from their gardens and fling them on the compost heap or burn them or poison them or something.