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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Dropping the Soap

The saga of the racist soap

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Sydney Sweeney’s ample bosom has forever changed the advertising industry, with agency creatives now fully embracing the Blut und Ehre model.

Ad men and women across Britain routinely splice subliminal messages of white supremacy into their campaigns, keen to hoover up the lucrative Reluctant Eugenicist market.

Mercifully, the brave sentries at the Advertising Standards Authority recently intercepted one particularly Goebbelsian advert before it could poison our screens.

The offending ad for Sanex soap depicted a black woman scoured with red scratch marks and another encased in cracked clay. To the unschooled eye, this symbolised dry skin.

A soothed voiceover then lilted: “To those who might scratch all day and night. To those whose skin will feel dried out even by water: relief could be as simple as a shower.”

But here’s where the advertisers couldn’t restrain themselves. The narrator’s tone suddenly curdled into a vaguely Teutonic thunder: Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!

No, perspicacious reader, not quite. That Germanic volley exploded from my own addled mind. Yet I am not alone in my hallucination.

Two British viewers—a full 0.000003 percent of the population—presumably time-rich and humour-poor, also detected the clearly racist undertones oozing from their televisions. These dutiful heroes complained to the ASA, which promptly banned the ad on the grounds it “perpetuated negative stereotypes about people with darker skin,” implying that white skin was superior to “problematic” dark skin.

Again, to unschooled eyes, the Sanex ad may have appeared as a simple ‘before and after’ in which Sanex advertised its skin-soothing soaps and moisturisers. The premise: Does your skin itch? Buy our products. Your skin won’t itch.

Reader, it sounds simple enough. A soap company prioritising the sale of soap. Whatever it thinks of white supremacy is, one assumes, a distant second.

But that is Occam’s Razor. And Occam’s Razor is a product of European thought. Europeans are largely white. Being white is racist. Hence, logic is racist.

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Up in Smoke

The kids are all right…

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According to anti-smoking commissars, teenaged vapists threaten to dissolve decades of “progress.”

A long-term study, published in The Guardian, found that just 1.5% of non-vaping teens would start smoking — but 33% of those who suck on a cheesecake-flavoured USB stick eventually graduate to the decadent pleasure of Marlboro Reds.

Academics now call vaping a “gateway drug” to the politest act one can do with one’s hands. Today’s teens are now as likely to smoke as their free-loving 1970s parents.

Anti-smoking campaigners at Action on Smoking and Health claim that, in the last two years, the number of youths taking up the evil weed has surged from one in six to almost one in four.

Despite relentless propaganda from the zealots at Against Smoking and Happiness, it appears that dopamine-addled youths have discovered a pastime even more addictive than the dopamine crack pipe on which they spend nine hours a day.

To riot in conspiracy: tech titans are terrified. Every cigarette a young person holds between their fingers is five minutes during which they cannot scroll through their uncle’s lunatic musings or their aunt’s pyramid schemes.

Here at Oxford Sour, any measure which prises a smartphone from a teenaged paw is to be commended.

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Marginalia

W.H. Auden, the last great poet, describes taking acid.

“LSD? Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.”

Professional drunkard and poet Brendan Behan, on critics:

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”

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The Lead Paint Prize

The third Lead Paint Prize—awarded to groups and individuals who tirelessly advance humbug and folly—goes to the many who filmed themselves gloating about Charlie Kirk’s murder. Many of these bright sparks have also filmed themselves crying after getting the sack from work.

Whatever one thought of Charlie Kirk is irrelevant. Claims of ‘but it’s free speech!’ are wrongheaded. You’re free to express your opinion. You’re not free from the consequences of expressing your opinion.

I’m not one for cancellations or mob justice. Saying dumb things shouldn’t ruin one’s life. But publicly celebrating a gruesome murder doesn’t exactly scream ‘I’m psychologically well-adjusted.’ To ordinary people—from across the political spectrum—it suggests you’re a sandwich short of a picnic.

In the wise words of Jeff Spicoli:

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The Therapist’s Chair with Dr Sour

Dear Dr Sour,
My girlfriend says she wants an 'open relationship.' At first, I was excited. I mean, what young man hasn’t considered such bacchanal? The reality, however, is rather grim. In the last fortnight, Freya, my girlfriend, has... enjoyed seven lovers. I’ve lagged behind somewhat. I’m currently at... zero lovers. Although, an older bar lady down the Dog & Duck called me 'darling' last night.

My question is: What gives?

—Desolate at the Dog & Duck

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Dear Desolate,
Ah yes—the fabled open relationship. The utopian ideal of the romantically ambitious: all the pleasures of debauchery, none of the pesky admin. Like communism or pinot noir, it appears glorious in theory, yet reality has a habit of biting you in the arse.

Open relationships are not, despite the marketing, egalitarian pleasure communes. Usually, one partner feasts at the open buffet whilst the other sobs in the bathroom, chewing the complimentary mint. You can guess to which of those fates you are tethered.

Let’s put this into economic terms. Freya is guaranteed a buyer for her product. This applies to practically all beings who possess that particular product. If they were so inclined, they could trade as much of that product as they so wished. Twenty-four hours a day. Three-hundred and sixty-five days a year. Demand is virtually limitless.

Meanwhile, you—and half the nation—are merely buyers of that product. You may have a product to sell. But demand is not on your side, old chap. Every now and then, you’ll find a willing buyer for your product. Feel free to jump for joy in privacy. But don’t expect to catch up with Freya any time soon.

With pity,
Dr Sour

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Any Other Business

Thank you for reading Oxford Sour. I’ll have a fresh essay for you within a few days.

If you missed this week’s essay, read it here:

Soap Opera

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Letters to the Editor

Feel free to ask me anything but my mother’s maiden name. Do send letters and nominations for the Lead Paint Prize.

Anyone requiring therapy from Dr Sour can email their woes to me in full confidence.

Cheers,

— Christopher Gage

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