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I begin this blog post with a quote from the previous one.
"When I have been a tourist in other lands, I am the tightest, meanest bastard on God's earth, looking for the cheapest deals and the cheapest food. My bum bag is welded to my torso and if you want to know where the local population of moths have gone, they have congregated around my wallet. I cannot be the only one. The people carrier loaded up at home. Everything you could possibly carry on your wagon as you head off to Bermo or Borth like the Beverly Hillbillies. How can I blame you?"
Today the Spoons have gone back and the judgmental liberal "I'm better than you brigade" of whom I am a fully paid up member have been battering social media with posts about cesspit Britain going back to its pre-lockdown hellhole of the pubs being open.
I come at this from a slightly different angle to the rest who are angry with Tim Martin for laying off his workforce and telling them to go and work in Tescos. I come at it as somebody who believes the alcohol culture is destroying us as a civilisation.
I am going to try and unpick this as an amateur sociologist and even more amateur psychologist. When you have been unemployed for sixteen years, you can't afford to be professional anything.
Referring to the above quote, I have frequented Wetherspoons pre lockdown, between Christmas and New Year and this for the food. The food is cheap and you can have as many refills of tea and coffee as you like. I wouldn't go in there to drink alcohol. I went to three different spoons in this period, Cambridge, King's Lynn and Norwich. A breakfast in the first two and a ham, egg and chips in the latter. On my unemployed man's budget I can't afford to eat in more salubrious places nor can many of the drinkers afford to drink in real ale establishments or free houses. It is easy to judge and pour scorn on the Primark pogrom but who is to say that those who were queuing at 6.00am this morning were not queuing for company.
As a society we have been traduced, reduced and atomised by what we have in our purses and wallets. The comfortable and complacent can afford to stretch back their arms and yawn and throw acerbic comments about on social media.
I am a lower middle class snob. I will admit it and when the ire is upon me I will turn my fury at anything I feel is eulogising the lowest common denominator.
What separates us in cesspit Britain is our level of education. The gammony racist, prejudiced drinkers in the Spoons have not had the benefit of our liberal artistic education. They have been brutalised. Often leaving school at a young age to try and make their way in avenues of little opportunity. Certainly not the boulevards of Paris.
If Black Lives Matter and the Save our Statues protestors were able to sit down and have civil discourse rather than using the police as whipping posts for their chagrin and anger perhaps some progress would be made. The people protesting on both sides are not your Jacob Rees Moggs's.
There is a huge class divide in the United Kingdom and it will become larger and more evident post lockdown as we observe the disparate parties retreating to their respective corners while Stanley Johnson flaunts his position to fly off to Greece.
We have been pitted against eachother. If you are a liberal arty farty, loony lefty, green lives matter kind of person think for a moment how a gammony, brexit right winger might have come to their political views and narrow outlook on life. They haven't had the wider opportunity to engage and debate with the wider world because the world in which they live has become narrower and narrower. The so called 'white flight' from London to Essex.
It suits yer Jacob Rees-Moggs and yer Nigel Farage's that the common 'white' man is anti refugee and prejudiced against others from the same social class as them because their pile of gold accumulated at Westminster and the European Parliament is safe. They had a kick arse education and like many of their class are using it to ferment discord amongst the lower classes.
Racism is a class issue. You don't get many upper class racists. At least not openly. Exit David Starkey. There are probably Cecil Rhodes types who believe in white superiority but they wouldn't be out in their football lads alliance colours pissing on memorial stones.
If yer common and garden, brexity gammony, right wing spoons drinker could turn his ire against the Russian oligarchs who have bought up large swathes of West London or the Saudian Arabian princes with penthouse suites in Mayfair and Park Lane then maybe their prejudice would be directed in a more fruitful direction but to hate on others of the same social class as you but of a different colour is about as useful as queuing up at Wetherspoons at 6.00am. Oh I'm sorry, I forgot that you were lonely.
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