America [7]

Conan the Barbarian said that barbarism was the natural state of mankind. “Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

CS Lewis said that we were too inclined to believe that Chivalry was part of the natural order: that you would automatically expect someone who is very skilled at beheading Saracens in the crusades and awfully adept at blowing up Germans in the Somme to be very polite and humble and gentle the rest of the time. But this is untrue: we spent centuries artificially hammering into soldiers the idea that if you were merciful and honourable and magnanimous, you were not only a better person, but actually a better soldier: that it was macho to be kind. We came up with this ridiculous notion precisely to rein in the natural tendency of single men in uniforms to act like psychopaths.

Similarly, we invented the absurd idea that while nothing matters more than Sports and the whole of your national and local prestige depends on how good you are at Sportsing; nevertheless if you come second in the Sports you have to pretend that you don’t really mind. And we did it for the same reason: if sixteen rugger-buggers got cross every time they lost a match, the grounds-men at Twickenham would spend all their time clearing dead bodies off the pitch. The riot police still have to be on standby every time there is a significant soccer match.

So pick your side:

1. People are naturally good but it is possible, through lies and propaganda, to cause them to temporarily become bad.
2. People are naturally bad, but it is possible, through education and religion, to cause them to temporarily become good.
3. Some people are naturally good and some people are naturally bad and at any one time one group may have the ascendancy.
4. “Goodness” and “Badness” are meaningless terms. Your choice of Alignment is a preference for shiny armour or chaos death spiky bits and nothing else.

By all means quibble with words. You can say that by “good” I mean “the collective; the idea of sharing” and that by “evil” I mean “individuality, egotism, the idea of advancing yourself” and that I can only ask which position is better and which position is worse because I have already decided the answer.

Must barbarism always ultimately triumph? 

I see your Robert E Howard and raise you a Michael Moorcock. If everyone were what I call good then we would all sit around listening to the Incredible String Band and drinking diet coke, and nothing would ever get made, and we would all starve. But if everyone were what I call evil, then every game of football would turn into a genocidal race war, and we would all end up in the gutter eating each other’s corpses. We need to find a path down the middle: we need some sort of, I don’t know, Cosmic Balance that will keep the collective and the individual in some kind of equilibrium.

Or is Ursula K Le Guin a higher court than Michael Moorcock? Good wouldn’t be good if it didn’t contain a little dot of evil and evil wouldn’t be evil if it didn’t contain a little spot of good and the black fish and the white fish are engaged in a kind of dance and you can’t think of one without the other.

Or are we, after all, going to have to do God?

Perhaps we are not talking about good and evil, law and chaos, yin and yang or the collective and the individual. Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of the Divine Image and Original Sin. Humans aren’t good or evil but fallen; not a bad thing, but a good thing spoiled. We are neither psychotic apes nor altruistic angels: we are more like stupendous works of art on to which some bastard has daubed a great big penis.

Which still seems to me like the most plausible way forward. Humans fuck things up because they have cut themselves off from The Force; and rather than trying very, very hard to be nice they ought first to try to get back in touch with The Force whereupon they will find that the niceness comes naturally. The first part of getting back in touch with The Force is wanting to get in touch with The Force, or, in the jargon, Faith. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.

Whether this necessarily leads to Christmas and Easter and the Vicar of Dibley we can leave for another occasion.

But that doesn’t tell me how to act in my present situation. Do the Spirituals simply preach Salvation to the Non-Spirituals? Do they live us much like a Spiritual as they can even if there isn’t any Spirit? Do they retreat into caves in the desert and wait for everyone to become as Spiritual as they are? Or do they take up arms and by opposing slaughter all the Non-Spirituals?

Different groups have at different times literally taken all four positions, and none seem intrinsically illogical.

I have a Mr Dawkins on the phone. He says that a belief in original sin inexorably and necessarily leads to crusades and pogroms, and that a belief in spirituality necessarily leads to a belief in original sin, and therefore we should drop the whole idea and become materialists.

“But if materialism is right, what are our grounds for saying that crusades and pogroms are a bad thing? Might they not conceivably be precisely what the principle of Survival of the Fittest requires?”

Er…He seems to have hung up. [1]

There is a version of Catholicism that says that Catholicism is not actually true, but that the essence of being a Catholic is behaving as if it was. (You are allowed to pretend it is true while you are talking to children and the uneducated.) Plato said that he wasn’t quite sure that it was true that human souls contained all the knowledge and truth in the universe but that we’d all have a better time if we assumed it was. Terry Pratchett thought that believing in made-up things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was good practice for believing in more important made-up things like Truth and Democracy. So perhaps we should pragmatically assume that my second option is correct. Human beings are, in the natural state, psychotic apes. Hatred and self-interest are what we talk about when we talk about human nature. But it is possible, through education and culture—through religion and social action—through pride flags and equality programmes—through state funded art and free school meals—through folk music and the playing of Dungeons and Dragons—very possibly through cricket and long walks in the country—maybe even through rugby, cold showers and the cane—to artificially construct a version of humanity which believes—or acts as if it believes—that being nice is a better option. And that when a powerful person dismantles those artificial structures the flood gates open and people start openly saying that we ought to just leave those Samaritan bastards to die in a pool of their own blood.

“But Andrew: if barbarian Nazism is the normal state of the human race; and liberalism was only ever the product of liberal propaganda, whence comes your right to impose liberal propaganda on the rest of the human race?”

SLARTIBARTFAST VOICE: “I know. That’s where it all breaks down, of course.”

[1] That the only part of this essay I will get any feedback on, you mark my words.

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America [6]

We lost.

We didn’t just lose an election in America. We don’t just happen to be living at a time where the current incumbent is a little further to the Right than we would like him to be. The current incumbent is always a little further to the right than we would like him to be. As a matter of fact, as a socialist and a democrat I think the current incumbent ought to be a little further to the right than I would like them to be.

Pete Seeger said that politics was like a see-saw. On one end there was this huge heavy weight, on the other, a big old empty bucket. And every day, a few kids walked past the see-saw, and put a teaspoon full of earth in the bucket. And for months and months it didn’t make any difference. But one day, of course, there was enough earth in the bucket, and the balance shifted, and the light end went down and the heavy end went up. And everyone said “How did the see-saw move so suddenly?”

I am not quite sure I agree with him. I think maybe there are buckets at both ends, and both sides are perpetually spooning earth into them; and the see-saw stays more or less on an even keel. Sometimes more in one direction than the other. But it is always the people at the heavy end who say “But if you like balance; if you think an even keel is the best for everybody, then the best thing you can do is obviously to stop filling your bucket altogether.”

As long as politics is a matter of opinion—even of deeply held and significant opinion—then absolutely we should go for balance. I want a 100% supertax and you want to abolish tax altogether: so we compromise. Tax is lower than I would like it to be and higher than you would like it to be. When my side gets in it goes up a little bit, but when your side gets in it goes down a little bit. A compromise is by definition an arrangement which both sides are equally annoyed with. I want to abolish the armed forces and you want universal conscription, and we end up with a bigger army than I would have liked and a smaller army than you would have liked, with increased defense spending when your lot are in and military cutbacks when my lot are in.

This is even true of some hot-button issues. Not every one who thinks that some criminals ought to be killed is a bloodthirsty psychopath, although most bloodthirsty psychopaths think that some criminals should be killed. People on both ends of the see-saw agree that there should be due process and proportionality and that we definitely shouldn’t kill innocent people. Not every American who agrees with the Second Amendment is a psychotic trigger-happy cowboy. Questions around gender and sexuality are more problematic: there is no room for compromise around a marginalised group’s existence. But I would still be in favour of sitting down and saying “Well, JayKay, what specifically is your issue and how might it be addressed?”

It could even be that both sides were advancing in broadly the same direction by widely divergent routes. It could even be that the distinction was never between the Left and the Right but between the idealists and the pragmatists. We both want wars to come to an end: it’s just that I think we should get rid of nearly all our weapons tomorrow; and you think that unilateral disarmament would probably trigger Armageddon almost straight away. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that peace is for wusses and the true emancipation of the human spirit comes through conflict. We both want to abolish poverty; it’s just that I think that we could have a wealth tax and some judicious welfare spending and no child would go to bed hungry ever again; and you think that without a certain amount of competition we’d all go bankrupt and there would be nothing to eat for anyone. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that poverty and starvation are positively good things because they weed out the unproductive work units.

The trouble comes when the psychopath in the corner takes control of an entire continent.

Why did we lose?

The Left is inclined to see every victory as decisive; the Right are inclined to see every defeat as a temporary setback. Britain voted (decisively) to remain in Europe in 1975: the Right spent the next forty years spreading myths about Europe and trying to overturn the decision. Britain voted (narrowly) to leave Europe in 2016, and the Left said “that concludes the argument; we can’t ever possibly talk about rejoining because will-people.” Britain decided (gradually) that some men happened to prefer men and some women happened to prefer women and that’s no-one’s business but theirs. The Left said “Good, we’ve finally won that argument, let’s move on to something else”; the Right said “How can we insidiously and subtly undermine the public’s trust in gay people, so that in ten, twenty, or thirty years we can re-criminalise them?” In 1966 the Left said “Thank God: we have finally consigned the gallows to the dark ages, where it always belonged”. The Right continued to run “string ‘em up” headlines every time some murdering happened. [1] And so on, and so forth. Schools are chaos because of this strange and temporary blip which prevents teachers from hitting children with big sticks. [2] Mosques and curry houses are exotic and temporary incursions into a naturally mono-cultural high street. The BBC have, for some ulterior motive, banned black-face comedy, but one day soon we will get our sense of humour back.

The Left lost because once the bucket was full, they thought they could go home and go to bed, and didn’t notice that the populist authoritarian ethno-nationalists had teaspoons of their own.

Not all Americans are part of the MAGA cult. As we have seen, a bit more than half of them are not. It is alarming that one in ten Brits supported Nigel Farage’s ludicrous Dad’s Army cos-play club at the last election, but reassuring that nine out of ten of us did not. And not everyone who voted for Trump, and not everyone who might vote for Farage, is necessarily a populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist. They may merely be stupid. They may have fallen victim to clever propaganda. They may have decided to vote for the authoritarian ethno-nationalist in order to give the other side a jolly good kick up the pink knickers.

From now on, all Germans will be wise. From now on, all Germans will be good. From now on, all Germans will be Nazis. But only two out of these three will ever be true of a single person.

Anne Frank said that she believed that, despite it all, “people” were really good at heart. What did she mean? Did she charitably believe that the Nazis who wanted to kill her were good people? That there was some excuse for them because they honestly and truthfully believed that killing Jews was a good and noble thing to do? Would she have accepted the defense that the people doing the killing didn’t really mean it and were only obeying orders? Caiaphas was in his own mind a benefactor to mankind. Or did she mean that Nazism was an aberration and a corruption: that these people were not born monsters, but were coerced or misled or manipulated into becoming monstrous?

It makes a difference. I am inclined to think that if you hurt and belittle and abuse a child then that child will very likely grow up to be an adult who hurts and belittles and abuses children. And I believe that adults can be cured and educated and learn to do better. [3] I am inclined to think that all aberrant behaviour can be approached therapeutically. [4]

Frodo wanted to kill Gollum: Gandalf said that the elves were treating him with as much kindness as they could find in the noble hearts, and that an attempt to cure him should be made, even though it probably wouldn’t work. That’s your actual Tolkien, and far more “woke” than contemplating the possibility that some very short people might have dark skin.

But right here, right now, that abused and badly educated child who watched Andrew Tate videos while his granny was being turned out of her council flat is standing outside an asylum hostel with a Molotov cocktail shouting “Who the fuck is Allah?”

And I am not.

The plinth of That Statue still stands in Bristol. “The best and wisest of Bristol’s sons” it says. Either he knew what he was doing, or he didn’t. If he didn’t know, he wasn’t wise; if he did know and did it anyway, he wasn’t good.

Epicurus said the same thing about God.

I think that all Anne Frank meant was that although there are Nazis in the world, most people are not Nazis.

I am no longer completely sure if she was right.

[1]   I have no idea whether or not Lucy Letby dunnit, but if she were to be exonerated I would smile sarcastically at the “surely she of all people ought to be hung” department.

[2]   Schools are not chaos. No more than they have ever been.

[3]  It was truthfully said in my schooldays that the teachers who really did believe in hitting kids with big sticks—the ones who picked children up by their ears and made them kick balls between posts in their underwear—had been in the actual army in an actual war and in some cases in actual Japanese prisoner of war camps.

[4]  What, all?

Yes, all.

What all?

Well, nearly all.

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America [5]

I am quite sure that there are a small number of very clever Christians and a large number of very stupid ones who honestly and sincerely believe in Young Earth Creationism; who have honestly and sincerely built themselves a world in which Scripture Sola overrides the empirical world or who have just never considered the possibility that God didn’t create the universe in exactly six days in the late spring of 4004 BCE. And I am quite sure that many of them are beautiful lovely people, baking the chickens and feeding the bread and taking hot dinners to the needy or just working at the factory and having a few beers with their mates on a Saturday night and harming no-one. But I am equally sure that the prevalence of Young Earth Creationism—the use of “evolution” as an evangelical and Republican swearword—does not always represent any actual, deeply held belief. I don’t think that the person who fills my Facebook Feed with questions like “If Jesus isn’t the son of God, why are all the demons so scared of him?” thinks he is putting forward anything approaching an argument. Nor do I think that the equally infuriating atheists who endlessly talk about sky wizards have the slightest knowledge of or interest in the thing they think they are denouncing. I think that we are dealing with shibboleths.

Start out saying that God made the world in six days because it’s in the Bible. Proceed to saying that the world is flat because the round earth myth is believed by the same people who propagate the great evolution delusion. Assert that vaccines cause polio and covid was a scam because you are not prepared to take the knee to the new high priesthood of science. Connect that with the utterly discredited and debunked theory (which is only a theory) that if you went high enough you would reach something the liberals call “space” and that the moon exists and Americans walked on it. End up posting slogans saying “You can’t be a Christian and believe in the moon landings. Period.”

Either you are consciously twisting your mind into an absurdity: not just saying that 2+2 = 5 but believing it, so that reality melts away and there is no love but the love of Big Brother. Or else you are like the King who wears a green robe and insists that everyone praises it for its redness; and executes the first person who says that the green thing is green.

The world is flat. Science is a myth. Covid was a scam. If humans evolved from apes, how come there are still apes? Ukraine invaded itself. They aren’t beliefs. They are masonic handshakes. Anyone who hasn’t learned them is a radical Marxist lunatic.

Prevailing orthodoxies define an in-group, and an in-group is defined by the prevailing orthodoxies of its members. “Woke” beliefs are the beliefs of people designated “woke”; and “woke” people are the people with “woke” beliefs. And yes, equally, “fascist” beliefs are the beliefs of people we have already decided to call “fascists” on other grounds. Some of us on the Left may stay seated in the National Anthem or take the knee at football matches or pretend that we don’t know who King Charles is because of sincere and deeply held anti-monarchist convictions. But very many of us do so because it really pisses off the Tories. The overwhelming impetus behind the Brexit and MAGA cult is, in the jargon, to Own The Libs.

But these are not innocent toddlers who have not yet learned the social norms. We are not talking about an incredibly rich pop star who is trying to find out what he can get away with. We are not talking about children shouting words they don’t quite know the meaning of, or silly left wing students putting up posters of Mrs Thatcher’s head in a guillotine or silly right wing students threatening to go to Highgate and desecrate Karl Marx’s remains. We are not even talking about an all-licensed fool defecating on the stage because the snowflakes have banned humour. We are talking about a man who controls enough weapons to destroy the whole world. And another man who is rich enough to buy it. 

I remember a story about a young Christian who was experiencing serious Doubts about God and the Bible and Jesus and who Cain married and whether those kids really deserved to be eaten by that bear. And a Pastor, well meaning in the anecdote, reminded her that Jesus said that if your eye offends you, pluck it out and if your hand offends you, chop it off, so if in this case it is your mind which is offending you, stop thinking, stop questioning, and just allow the wonderful emotional love of God to overwhelm you.

I remember a book about Calvinist evangelism. Maybe someone can identify it for me. You will understand that “evangelism” is about persuading people to make a conscious choice to follow Jesus—the whole point of evangelicalism is that being in a church and following a liturgy and confessing your sins and trying to live the best life you possibly can does not make you a Christian. You have to make a positive decision to have faith. But the whole point of Calvinism is that God is so much in charge of everything that he knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell before he even created the universe, and to suggest that the choice of a human can have the slightest effect on what God has already decided would be to utterly deny his God-ness. The book said that presenting rational arguments about God, or answering sensible objections to faith meant fighting on the devil’s territory, denying divine sovereignty, and, moreover, never worked. But what you were permitted to do was to explain that human beings had turned away from God in the garden of Eden, and that therefore their whole nature, including their brains, was totally depraved, and that therefore no objection to or argument about God could possibly be either rational or irrational; and that when the sinner was in a state of not-trusting-their-depraved-mind, the evangelist could jump in and tell them to put their faith in God.

Which seems to be a lot of trouble to go to if they were already predestined to do that anyway. And might God not have predestined the evangelist to explain Aquinas’s five proofs and predestined the skeptic to agree with them? 

I think you have to believe in free will: you’ve got no choice.

As long as we are talking spiritual truths you might think that both the Pastor and the Calvinist had a point. You can’t think yourself into faith. If you want to get in touch with the Great Wossit In The Sky, then by all means, turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. Jesus may literally want you for a zombie. The first step to quitting the booze is, according to some people, putting yourself in the hands of a higher power. Even if you don’t believe that there actually is a higher power. Trust the Force.

But are you still a functioning human being when you come down from the mountain top? Once you have accepted that Human Nature Is Totally Corrupt, can you continue with your engineering degree? Or are you going to proceed on the assumption that Pi R Squared is—or may possibly be—a lie of the devil to lead you astray? Is geology possibly woke propaganda put in place by Radical Right Wing Lunatics?

Let go of your conscious self and act on instinct. Let wave after wave of non-rationality flood through you. Keep clinging to the belief which isn’t a belief. If you ever doubt just remind yourself that scientists lie about evolution, scientists lie about climate change, scientists lied about covid, scientists lied about the moon landings, scientists lie about the shape of the earth, the liberals stole the election, the earth is a few thousand years old, space does not exist, there is no sun no moon and definitely no Finland. 

[continues]

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America (4)

If you decide that it is a bad idea for children to have head-lice, then one of the things you might do is introduce a programme of checking children’s hair and giving them anti-bacterial shampoo if they need it. They used to do that when we were at school. We were always told beforehand that nits actually preferred clean hair. It is perfectly possible, governments being what they are, that the programme got a bit too complicated, with too many forms to fill in and too many quotas to hit. Everyone has heard a story of an organisation that has done something stupid to fulfill a target. There was the war story about the regiment that was instructed to reduce the vermin infestation in the barracks, and found out that the only thing they could do to comply was to introduce some mice themselves and then obtain a regimental cat. Or the one about the remote Scottish island that was reprimanded for not having a programme in place to reduce traffic fatalities and had to point out that, er, they didn’t actually have any roads. So it might perfectly well be that someone says “This whole nit nurse thing has got too silly and expensive; we’re getting rid of it.” And it might turn out that once you have fired all the nit nurses there is no outbreak of head-lice, because the programme was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. And it might turn out that there are still just the same number of head-lice, because the problem was real but the programme was doing nothing to solve it. But if it turned out that the kids were no longer learning their twice-times tables because they were too busy scratching their itchy heads, you might well conclude that the programme, despite all the form filling and box ticking, had been a pretty good idea. Some people might think that metal combs were a gross invasion of personal liberty and that if a man can’t infest his own family’s hair with parasites in his own house then whose hair is he supposed to infest; or that head-lice are an invention by Big Shampoo; or that brushing children’s hair is a form of grooming and the next move will be to check them for pubic lice; or, at the other extreme, that this light-touch nit-nurse system is pandering to the head-lice brigade and the common sense approach would be shave the heads of everyone between the age of five and eighteen but the barbers’ shop lobby won’t let you say that sort of thing. I think that if the first thing you do when you get into power is abolish all the Anti Head-Lice policies, then one of three things is probably true.

1: You are very sure indeed that the Anti Head-Lice policies aren’t doing any good.

2: You are very sure indeed that Head-Lice don’t exist

3: You are positively in favour of Head-Lice and want children’s heads to be as full of them as possible.

I can’t see into the Dear Leader’s head, obviously. But I have noticed that the International Head-Lice Fan Club; the Royal Society for the Protection of Scalp Insects and the Pediculosis Capitis Breeders Association have all welcomed his anti Nit Nurse policies with open arms.

When John Lennon exposed himself on the cover of an album, his straight laced Auntie Mimi said, oh dear, that’s what he used to do on the beach to draw attention to himself when he was five years old.

I am not sure that this is the last word on artistic nudity, the Two Virgins album, or indeed aunties. But I agree with the implication. When a little child is deliberately silly, sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore them. And sometimes it is best to treat an over-indulged adult as if they were a silly child.

Also: I don’t think Yoko broke up the Beatles.

Cults and conspiracy theories, lacking actual evidence, look for hidden symbols and patterns. This could stand as the definition of a conspiracy theorist: “One who looks for hidden symbols and patterns and believes he has found them.” Your bus is late; you get the wrong sort of coffee in the cafe; private schools lose their charitable status; a Black man appears in Captain America: and you stare and stare and a pattern forms before your eyes and you say “That proves it! The illuminati!” Or, more likely, “the Jews”. [1] So I am very reluctant to make too much of symbols.

The Boys is a superhero story written by someone who doesn’t like superheroes. If you haven’t seen it, then it basically asks “What if Superman were Donald Trump”? Or possibly vice versa. It’s very gory and moderately indecent. The fourth season goes completely overboard in satirising Far Right conspiracy theorists. Going completely overboard is very much Garth Ennis’s stock in trade. I never quite got over the massively overweight pope accidentally crushing the mentally retarded Jesus to death in Preacher and I mean that in a very caring way. The fictional super-powered Christo-fascists in The Boys are perpetually pointing to absurd hidden messaging as if it was the purest common sense. “It’s a Pizza Parlour! And they serve Pepperoni! PPP! Pedophile! How more obvious can it be?”

Folk festivals often give out wrist bands rather than tickets, and ushers often want to see your wrist band before you enter a venue, so I have taken to raising my arm and saying “Hail, Caesar!” at these events. My, how everyone laughs! But we should take care. Is a raised open-handed salute necessarily a fascist signal? And does making a fascist signal necessarily mean that you are a fascist?

There were fourteen colonies in America. Ncuti Gatwa is the fourteenth Doctor Who. The French revolution is celebrated on the fourteenth of July. The Jewish Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth day of Nisan. The belief that Easter should be celebrated on that day has an official Latin name, quatrodecimism. The number fourteen scans really well, so in dirty folk songs gentlemen are inclined to hunt the Bonny Black Hare on the fourteenth of May rather than the seventeenth or the twenty second. The Titanic sank on the fourteenth day of April, and that was also the date of the Grapes of Wrath dust-storm. There are lots of reasons why someone might use the number fourteen symbolically. And it might just be an accident. There might just happen to have been fourteen green bottles on that particular wall. But when someone who has been (possibly) making Nazi salutes (apparently) waits until 14:14 to disseminate a message consisting of nothing but fourteen American flags. Well. You do start to wonder. [2]

If I was definitely not a duck, and if people kept accusing me of being a duck, and if I was very, very offended by the suggestion that I might be a duck, then I might try very hard, in public, not to do anything which someone else could possibly misconstrue as quacking.

Auntie Mimi could be right, after all. They may just be getting their political dicks out because it amuses them to cause the grown-ups consternation. Or because they are too innocent to know that what they are doing is something that you just don’t do in public. A child shouting “fuck” or calling the Black teacher “p*ki” may honestly not know why those words are prohibited, or mean anything by them. He may just be being naughty.

I was at college in the 1980s; during the whole Clause 29 thing and the whole miners’ strike thing and a huge schism about whether the Student Union ought to have an independent nuclear deterrent. You probably think that Ultra Vires is one of the less famous Transformers, but it was a really, really big deal at the time. There was a factional struggle between the Socialist Workers, the Official Student Socialist Party and the Student Socialist Movement for control of the Students Union and yes we had heard all the Life of Brian jokes.

But there were also some Conservative Students, although it is frankly hard to know why ex-Public School boys who had failed to get into Cambridge would have opted for Sussex as a second choice. I suppose there was no such thing as Clearing in those days; maybe we just had a really good Classics department. I’d rather Keir Starmer and Tony Blair stopped using the expression “Student Politics” to refer to anyone with socialist principles, but there is no question that the politics of students could get very silly indeed. If my parents had sent me to a fee-paying school, and if my accent were three notches posher than anyone else’s, then listening to earnest young purely theoretical Marxists in berets saying that people like me ought to be sent to the salt mines would have pissed me off as well. But I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of Campus Tories were trolls. They called for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality and the re-introduction of corporal punishment for the same reason they turned up to discos in three piece suits and attempted to order champagne from the bar. It was a form of retaliatory off-pissing; they were marking out their territory. If you had pressed them, they might have claimed that they were being ironic. You can hear the exact same tone of voice every time Boris Johnson opened his mouth to talk about pickaninnies and watermelons. David Cameron denied ever wearing a Hang Nelson Mandela t-shirt, but many of the Campus Tories did. Someone was certainly doing the fly-posting. I suppose they might have claimed that it was really a false flag operation by one of the lefty groups. The Socialist Workers denied having anything to do with the “Vote Thatcher to keep Kinnock out” leaflets that went out in their name.

[1]  The Great Illuminatus Trilogy used to sit alongside the Great Dune Trilogy in Wood Green W.H Smiths. I suppose I should read it one day. I never could get my head around the card game. 

[2]  The 14 words are a pair of neo-Nazi slogans: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth”.

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