Why I’ve joined the SDP

I was down the pub with my wife last week, out in the tiny smoking section, when a woman with a glass of beer sat down beside us and opened a conversation. She was from Delhi, she told us, before announcing somewhat grandly that she was an ‘academic’. I suppose I should have got the hell out there and then, but I was enjoying my cigarette. Anyway, we chatted briefly about the university at which she worked and shortly after this she said that at the moment she was ‘preparing for 29 March’ and was aghast at the whole Brexit business.

Oh, I said, I voted Leave. She responded somewhat acidly: ‘And this is where the conversation ends. I cannot talk to irrational people.’ I demurred a little… um, you know, I don’t think I’m actually irrational and it’s a little bit rude to suggest that I am.

At which point she told me to ‘check your privilege — I have brown skin and you are old and white’. I suggested to her that when it came to privilege, holding a university post wasn’t too bad, was it, which was when she called me a ‘jackass’ and the conversation sadly ended.

It seemed to me a bit rich that a woman who came to the UK on a nice scholarship and had landed a good job in a university could be so blithely dismissive of the views of the majority of people in this country, even if it is a small majority. She struck me as being smug and stupid, a fairly lethal combination. So I looked her up on her university website. Remember that comment of hers about not wanting to talk to irrational people, a comment made solely because I had told her I voted Leave? Well, she teaches a course about Brexit at her university.