“Only liberals drink skimmed milk to go with their faux leather sandals,” says the MP for the Victorian age, Jacob Rees-Mogg “Full fat, creamy milk will nourish your inner Tory.” It will also give a nice coat to your inner arteries, too, but that’s not what this posh dimwit is getting at. He’s engaging in culture wars.
I don’t know who drinks skimmed milk, nor whether they wear faux leather sandals. I suspect Mogg made it all up, as he usually does.
I try not to because it’s too thin for my liking, so I compromise with the semi-skimmed variety. When I was a kid, thick milk was all there was and we had little choice in what milk to have. Science later concluded that drinking full fat, creamy milk wasn’t particularly good for you and business reacted by offering the consumer choice. But even if it was true that it’s only liberals who drink skimmed milk it is stretching things a little to suggest the full fat variety will nourish your inner Tory.
The Merriam-Webster describes the word liberal as follows: ‘Liberal’ shares a root with ‘liberty’ and can mean anything from “generous” to “loose” to “broad-minded.” Politically, it means “a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change.” Mogg suggests that the opposite of liberal is a Tory. That may be true – we’ll come back to that in a moment – but isn’t the opposite of liberal actually illiberal?
Dictionary.com defines illiberal as:”
adjective
-
narrowminded; bigoted.
-
Archaic.
-
not generous in giving; miserly; stingy.
-
Chiefly Literary. without culture or refinement; unscholarly; vulgar
That is exactly how I see those who are illiberal, the exact opposite of liberals. And here is where Rees-Mogg , possibly inadvertently, makes my argument for me. The Tories, according to him, must be narrow-minded and bigoted and all the other insults he invites. And that is exactly what they are.
Some folk suggest Rees-Mogg is just having a laugh, a harmless bit of fun, but this isn’t how the pin-striped poseur operates. His modus operandi is hate and division, he literally wants to ramp up arguments between any group of people that he can, just like his fellow Tory MP Sue-Ellen ‘(Call me Suella) Braverman who describes anyone who disagrees with her as being part of the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” Whatever these cretins are smoking, keep me away from them.
As with being woke, being liberal is a good thing. Being generous, broad-minded and being active in supporting social and political change is surely better than Mogg’s loathsome interpretation. Be woke, be liberal, be kind. Be off with you, Mogg.
