If you are among the many people who think the world has gone mad, a quick flick through the daily newspapers, which these days are only read by a couple of million pensioners with too much time on their hands, will do little to change your mind. There are only two stories. In near unanimity, they are all cheering on Nigel Farage’s “war on wokery and net zero” and they are all reporting Prince Harry’s pitiful whining about how his father, King Brian, won’t speak to him. Our obsession with, and our tendency to bow and doff our caps to, the super rich establishment knows no bounds. Nothing else matters quite as much as knowing our place in the world.
Despite protestations to the contrary, the nicotine stained man frog Farage is the very epitome of the establishment he pretends to dislike. A privately educated multimillionaire former city trader, whose carefully cultivated man of the people persona is entirely fake. And his opposition to wokery, the true meaning of which is being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues especially issues of racial and social justice, is no surprise when you understand it’s true meaning. His opposition to net zero, the only meaningful strategy for tackling the scientific fact of climate change, is more nuanced and maybe has more to do with his rich pals in the petrochemical industries getting even richer. Farage’s trick is to turn something very complex and by a cynical combination of shape-shifting, distortion and outright lies into something that is, apparently, undesirable. Today, the gutter press, which is pretty well all the press, does his bidding for him.
Meanwhile, Prince Harry’s comments about Brian cover as many, if not more, column inches. Harry, it seems, loves his country, wants his children to come to Britain to see if for themselves but can’t afford the extra security costs now that the courts have decided that the lumpen proletariat shouldn’t have to pay them for him. Brian, insists Harry, could sort all this stuff out, but complains that he won’t speak to him. Honestly, who gives a flying fuck about Brian and Harry’s private struggles? A couple of million newspaper readers, perhaps? Having read Norman Baker’s book And What Do You Do?, I have moved from mild mannered royal agnostic to fully-fledged abolitionist.
What we have in both Farage and King Brian is a reminder that the class system that has long blighted our country is alive and kicking. Working people are being persuaded that a far right, low tax, small state disruptor, who wants to turn the UK into a version of Trump’s America is on their side. And we have long been led to believe that we are mere subjects to a monarchy that rules over us, calling on God repeatedly to save the head honcho, in this case King Brian. (Harry’s somewhat tactless and arguably crass comments about his father’s health appear to suggest someone will need to save him soon.)
Disparate powers they may be, but they are, to put it crudely, two cheeks of the same arse. Neither Farage nor Brian have the first clue how ordinary people live their lives, nor particularly in the case of Farage, no interest in so doing. Rather than being agents for change, they are obstacles to it. The class system, which sustains the illiberal elite, needs to maintained at all times and it is especially helpful if you can persuade us, the lower orders, that doing things that make us worse off, like Farage managed with Brexit, are actually good for us.
Two stories dominate not just the press but also the wider media, to the exclusion of all else. The things that really matter, like people being able to put bread on the table and being able to see a doctor, are not, to the elite, worth talking about.
There are no children up chimneys these days but poverty is rife. The broken Britain, bequeathed by 14 years of Conservative misrule, will take years, maybe decades, to repair and the last thing we need is to turn to an even more extreme and divisive country under the Fagash Fuhrer Farage. And let’s take an axe to the royal family, if only to slim it down to a less unaffordable model, putting them to actual work, as royals do in other countries. We certainly need to stop looking up to people who only got where they have by way of inheritance and privilege.
The world hasn’t suddenly gone mad because it was mad already. We can do our bit to make it a bit less mad, by ceasing to bow and doffing our caps to those we somehow deem to be better than us, because they aren’t. And in terms of Farage, he is far, far worse than us. Above all, just don’t buy the newspapers. They’re lying, they’re gaslighting, they’re misleading and they are the voice of the establishment, trying to tell us what we should think. Above all, they hate you and everything you stand for. Don’t believe a word.
