Who
is really poisoning public debate?
Who is it that has turned what ought to have
been a smart and deep discussion about Britain and the EU into a
prejudice-fest? I know we’re meant to think it’s the Leave campaign, with its
cries of ‘The Albanians are coming!’ and ‘Oh my God, Turkey!’.
Leave stands
accused of fomenting xenophobia, of tapping into a ‘brainless
paranoia’ among certain sections of the public, of ‘unleashing
furies’.
But what about Remain? The Remain
side, to my mind, has proven itself just as adept at spreading prejudice.
Scratch that: over the past few days Remain has proven itself better than
Leave, a world-beater in fact, at fostering disdain for certain sections of
society.
Now I will admit that, as a Leaver who is also very
pro-freedom of movement, I’ve bristled at Leave’s leaflets and its peddling of
the politics of fear.
I wish it had invited us to offer solidarity with our
European brothers and sisters who have also had a gutful of the EU’s petty,
undemocratic interventions, rather than asking us to fear these foreigners.
But Leave’s prejudices are being
outdone by those of the Remain side.
Yes, Leave has generated concern about
border-crossing foreigners, but Remain has stoked up an ugly distrust of the
old, the working class and the uneducated, who are right now being talked about
and depicted in as foul a way as I can remember.
The
language being used by Remainers risks becoming unhinged.
Polly Toynbee, in one
of her many recent columns slamming white working-class voters for being
‘impervious’ to cool, rational information about the EU, says the Leave side
has ‘lifted
several stones’ and
let out a ‘rude, crude’ extremism.
We all know what lives under stones, right?
Nick Cohen, sounding like one of those early 20th-century people-phobic writers
documented by John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, says it
is almost as if ‘the
sewers have burst’ and
out has pumped the effluence of stupid opinion.
Running
with this theme, a Guardian cartoon depicted the resumption of the
referendum campaign at the weekend as the opening of a sluice gate, with
prominent Leavers being washed away by a river of puke. It featured rats
vomiting their bile into the river.
You know something has gone awry when
cartoonists start depicting certain political constituencies as rats.
Another Guardian cartoon shows anti-EU internet trolls as dogs,
salivating at their computers, spreading hate on the internet.
The
message is that Leave is tapping into horrible, ill-informed, animalistic
sections of society.
These anti-EU people — who, let’s not forget, include a
majority of the working class and high numbers of the non-university-educated —
are always depicted as irrational.
Their position on the EU is not a considered
one, apparently: it’s just rage.
They are making a ‘howl
of frustration’, says JK Rowling (howling is better
than vomiting, I guess). They are ‘confused’, says Cameron.
This
is now the key Remain outlook: where We, being clever, have considered all the
facts, They, being dim, are howling and emoting rather than thinking things
through.
I wouldn’t mind so much if this was an original prejudice, but it
isn’t.
It’s the view that has informed every elite feeling of agitation with
the expansion of democracy, from the claim that women were too emotional to
have the vote to Arianna
Huffington’s screed against
the American electorate’s ‘inner baby’ and the ‘millions of voters’ who now
make political decisions with their ‘more emotional right brain’.
This snobbery
now finds expression in the Remain camp, in its fury with howling voters, in
its conviction that the issue of the EU is ‘much too difficult and detailed to
be left to voters who know no economics’, in the words of Richard
Dawkins.
As
part of this sneering at the emotional public and their sewer-like minds,
certain constituencies are being singled out for special ridicule.
The old, for
example. The ageism of the Remain side has been astonishing.
They have depicted
older people, who are far more likely than the young to be anti-EU, as selfish
and uncaring, as ‘stubborn’,
that classic ageist prejudice.
A pro-EU columnist for GQ even suggests that they should be banned from voting, because this ‘grey army’ is obsessed with
returning to ‘an idealised Britain that never was’.
Hipster bible Vice, predictably pro-EU, rages
against anti-social old voters ‘who took all the cream and now want
to put a cap on the thin milk they left behind’.
And
then there’s the white working classes, such a terrible disappointment to the
well-to-do leftists of the Remain side.
Surveys consistently show that around
60 percent of those in the two lower social classes want to leave the EU.
Barely a day passes without an anthropological-style article in the Guardian trying
to work out why these voters are so fearful and angry and emotional (they can’t
possibly be rationally anti-EU).
Toynbee slammed
these people, with their ‘crap jobs’ and their
tendency to say ‘Fuck off Europe’, and their temerity to reject the ‘facts’ of
Polly and her band of ‘eager young London graduates’.
Seriously, can these
people hear themselves?
This is the terrible irony of
Remainers’ handwringing over the poisoning of public debate: they have played a
major part in said poisoning, in stirring up prejudice against the allegedly
dim, the overemotional, the confused, the old, the plebs, the howling,
brainless throng.
How can they pontificate about hatred while communicating
some pretty hateful views of their own?
Simple: because their kind of hatred is
so longstanding, so entrenched in certain political and media circles, that
they don’t even think of it as hatred.
It’s just reality, right, this situation
where we clever people must endure the howls of those politically uninformed
people?
The chutzpah of it: under the guise of taking a stand against
prejudice, Remainers are resuscitating one of the oldest prejudices.
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