A strange and oddly self-pitying video is doing the rounds on social media, featuring the broadcaster and multimillionaire landowner Jeremy Clarkson. In it, he bemoans the fact that villages are losing their soul. There’s no village doctor, no village shops, no village schools, no village bobby and increasingly no village pub. “The pub’s the hub,” he explains, “and should always be. A village without a pub is just some houses.” Welcome to the real world, Jezza.
In more than a few towns and cities, there is no local doctor, no shops, no schools, no bobby on the beat. In huge areas of Bristol, for example, there are no pubs and haven’t been for years. Go to Knowle West or Patchway: not one pub in either of them, And who’s fault is it that Clarkson’s beloved rural idyll has suffered like our towns and cities? In many ways, it’s his.
Clarkson is a Tory. He adored Margaret Thatcher and is close friends with ‘Lord’ David Cameron. As a Tory, he will have voted for a party that delivered huge cuts to – ooh, let’s see – the NHS, the police, schools and imposed crippling austerity on working class people. Clarkson campaigned against the government’s plans to ensure greedy landowners like him could no longer avoid Inheritance Tax, money that is needed for, you guessed it, the NHS, police, schools and so on and so on. Could I make it any clearer?
Like so many of these wealthy blowhards, Clarkson wants to have it all. He wants lower taxes but he also wants better services. And of course, if you cut tax, there’s more money to spend on vital services. Except there isn’t. It’s the economics of the mad house.
The far right Reform UK Ltd owner Nigel Farage makes no effort to conceal his disdain for all aspects off the state and would happily torch the entire public sector, as would the increasingly unhinged remnants of the Conservative party, ‘led’ by Kemi Badenoch. It is vital that we realise that when the gobshites of the right refer to ‘cutting waste’ that they regard everything and anything in the public sector as waste. NHS? Care homes? State schools? Don’t need any of them. Put it out with the recycling.
Clarkson merely repeats one of the main tenets of Thatcherism, the philosophy that you can have it all and basically fuck everybody else. She didn’t believe in society and everything that’s wrong with our country today can be directly traced back to her destructive years of running the country into the ground.
I’m not some kind of out there lefty, a Corbynista dreamer who thinks that everything should be run by the state and that everyone should be paid the same. But by the same token, I do not want unfettered capitalism, a perverse sense of Darwin-like economics whereby only the strong, and wealthy, survive. In order to bring about my halfway house – actually, just left of the centre ground, but still – we debate the things we see as essential and desirable in a civilised society and take it from there. Strip away the extremes, like Farage and Badenoch’s ugly fuck-you-poor-people and the so called popular leftism of the Greens and the fading Corbynistas, and you soon have a basis for a new deal, of kindness, compassion and fairness. A country devoid of those three words is not one I would be proud to live in.
We need to see through the right-wing polemicists and populist politicians and understand what they are really saying. They are the establishment, despite pretending somehow that the likes of you and me are, they control the means of production and most of the media. The immense fame and popularity of Jeremy Clarkson, who I believe to be a brilliant broadcaster and communicator, allows him access to vast sections of the media, denied to almost everyone else, which is to say the lower orders. To repeat, the reasons for the destruction of villages, as well as towns and cities, is 100% down to philosophy he subscribes to. And that’s why he needs to be challenged. If you love the slash and burn of the Thatcher years, then don’t be surprised when it swallows many things you love, too, like the rural idyll.
