Understood To Be Confronted

Although she is wrong to see UKIP as a threat to the socially conservative parts of Labour's base (where is that happening?), Suzanne Moore writes:

What a relief that an overwhelmingly white institution – the BBC – has decided that Jeremy Clarkon isn't racist, and that he mustn't be again.

Now at long last we can all go around insulting women, disabled people, gay people, greens, as is our birthright.

That's a lesson learned.

Political correctness gone mad. That old conker. Except conkers have been banned by lesbians. Or something.

Clarkson once again flaunts his crusade – the poor silenced lamb – with columns in the the Sun and the Sunday Times, making his usual jokes about how he must now eat lentils and not goose Mary Beard in the lift.

Laugh? I almost spat in the face of the pathetic BBC who won't let go of a cash cow, so will tolerate language that no state school in the land does.

The Clarkson row is about something much bigger than his right to offend, which is why we need our public institutions to get with the programme.

The inane discussion about whether Clarkson is personally racist is a side-show. He works within an institution that will clearly permit racist crap as laddish banter. Never mind the N-word; "slope" was vile.

Oh, he didn't know that it was nasty? Look, he's my age. I wager he has seen as many Vietnam war movies as I have.

Or even that little-known film called Pulp Fiction, in which Christopher Walken gives a virtuoso performance as Captain Koons, with a deranged rant about hiding his watch from evil "yellow slopes". This is what the Americans called unarmed Vietnamese as they killed them.

I am referring to a movie, to pop culture, because this is the place where things change, where language morphs long before policy reflects it.

This is part of the context in which a Clarkson tells it like it is; as is the rise of Ukip, a party of people mostly without the charm or brains of a Top Gear presenter.

Yes I do mean that. Clarkson is not stupid. Nor is he a maverick or outlier. He is a central part of the establishment. He parties with Cameron.

Just as Ukip is not a maverick party, but made up of disgruntled Tories; just as Boris Johnson is not a maverick but a born-to-rule chancer; just as bloggers such as Guido Fawkes pretend to be anti-politics mavericks but are hard-rightwingers – this section of the right deludes itself that it is somehow "outside" the establishment rather than its pumping heart.

Saying the unsayable is actually dully conformist.

Pick on anyone different and mock them. Endeavour to take away not just their rights but the concept that they ever had rights in the first place

All this is done preeningly, while a white middle-aged man pretends he is downtrodden and now some kind of freedom fighter.

It works.

But let's look at the targets for the combined venom of these "mavericks". Lesbians, gay men, immigrants, disabled people, vegetarians, people who are concerned about climate change, women generally, women who work in particular.

Is it any wonder that a Conservative government should bring with it this culture that is recoiling from social gains made over the past 20 years?

The refusal to embrace modernity is seen most clearly in the resistance to equal marriage. It is there in the refusal to accept that structural racism exists.

It is emboldened enough now for some Ukip members to be vocal about turning back women's rights.

This part of the establishment seeks not only to put a brake on social progress, but to go backwards. This backlash has to be understood to be confronted.

This is about race and a whole lot more. It is about a set of attitudes that never went away but are now sold as "what people really think".

Sure, some people do really think this. They feel let down and confused by rapid social change. Others, though, can see how change has happened (how attitudes, for instance, to homosexuality have changed) and feel this to be positive.

Signs of the new world are a beacon for some, a warning for others. This is not simply left versus right, but progressives versus conservatives. Labour voters can often be socially conservative, which is what Ukip is playing to.

What is asked of Clarkson and his posse is no more than we ask of primary-school pupils. Don't name-call. Respect difference.

I don't pretend all sorts of stuff doesn't happen outside the classroom, but it is not a bad ideal. Even small children know which discourses are legitimised by the grownups.

Clarkson and the grownup schoolboys know also that every shocking remark is shrapnel. It scatters and wounds multiple targets.

If you can say nasty stuff about gay people, then why not about black people?

Once you voice the idea that women ask for rape and can't have careers, the next stage is to get rid of naggy old human rights because women don't count as human anyway.

We have not been conned by Europe, feminism, political correctness or even bloody wind farms.

The biggest con of all is that this coalition of "mavericks" is not seen for what it is. The establishment: in bullying, red-faced self-pitying mode.

This is the rich and powerful deriding the powerless while pretending to be heroic victims. It is a revolting, sweaty lie.

Let them slap each other's back into oblivion.

Decent blokes do not monetise their ability to pick on those weaker than them, never mind make entire careers out if it.