Oxford Matinée #3

This week: Trump lands in Broken Britain; The saga of the racist soap; The false promise of open relationships and more.

Mother and Child by Oskar Kokoschka (1921)

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Broken Clocks

Britons may disapprove of Trump, but they’re destined to elect Farage

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President Trump’s state visit to Great Britain has prompted the world’s most tiresome ‘satire’ collective into action.

‘Led by Donkeys,’ a constellation of craft beer wankers from London’s gentrified Stoke Newington, call themselves activists. Their targets are the safe and the acceptable—the Daily Mail, Liz Truss, Trump, Brexit. These middle-aged hipsters are about as edgy as a wooden spoon.

And what was their latest daring raid? They projected a photo of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein on to Windsor Castle. Guardian readers were guffawing into their fair-trade granola.

Of course, these daredevils have yet to lampoon the current and woeful Labour government, preferring to reverse the central tenet of true satire: comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.

Drunk on such painfully conformist activism, the rest of our benighted commentariat cannot sense the rumblings underfoot. A striking trait of the liberal intelligentsia is its knack for getting everything wrong while remaining serenely convinced of its own wisdom.

Here in Britain, the Sensibles pockmark our airwaves with grand prognostications and requisite twee affectations. Put it this way: if James O’Brien or Alastair Campbell predicted wetness in a puddle, I’d stake my entire worth on the opposite.

With the rise of Reform, they are particularly wax-eared. Spend a few hours in a half-decent London boozer—or in a Labour or Conservative stronghold—and you’ll hear the same refrain: the two-party system is over. Up and down the country, on the left and the right, Britons who’ve never voted—some well into their fifties—are itching to give their eternally bickering, neurotic parents a good kicking.

In Wales, a Labour fiefdom where they once weighed the votes to save counting the obvious result, Nigel Farage’s Reform haven’t just made inroads: they’ve dissolved Labour’s foundations.

Keir Starmer’s party currently holds 29 of 60 seats in the Welsh parliament. A recent poll suggests that could shrink to a third-placed eleven seats at next year’s election. Reform are slugging it out with Plaid, the Welsh nationalists, for first place.

To put that in perspective, imagine Trumpian Republicans winning California.

And yet, our self-drunk friends on the radio insist all is well.
Mass immigration? Wonderful—my nanny is a sweet little thing from Eritrea. Diversity? Splendid—my gardener is from the Ivory Coast.

Perhaps their blindness boils down to what they’ll lose. Not much — but they may have to pay their hired help a decent wage if Farage turns off the immigration tap.

I never thought I’d see the day when progressives would openly admit to exploiting the world’s poorer people as wage slaves. But that’s essentially the argument one hears whenever someone—a vanishing few these days—defends our thirty-year ‘come on in!’ exercise in national delusion.

For decades, progressives have performed PR for their one time bête noir—big business. According to them, an infinite supply of labour didn’t harm wages. This patent poppycock contravenes the most elementary rule of economics.

Now we learn—as Uber admitted last week—that entire industries exploit cheap labour to fatten their profits. Remarkable, isn’t it?

Call me a softy, but I don’t think importing the world’s poorest people to grind through thankless jobs on the cheap is remotely humane, let alone progressive.

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