Decency Draws a Line

Righteously infuriated at the economic and social damage which has resulted from our cutting off the Continent, the great British public now seems happy to consider for the nation's highest office the loudest and most prominent campaigner for that brilliant piece of statecraft. Thus the great British establishment, fearful of a second Trussonomic seizure enlivened with a touch of Idi Amin's unprofitable purge of Ugandan Asians, has lumbered into action. Apparently there was a time, albeit quite a while ago, when the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange might have come over as a bit of a racist. The echoes of the anti-Corbyn witch-hunt are deafening in their subtlety, and the fact that the accusations were ridiculously false in the case of the social democrat and are crushingly plausible in the case of the Question Time stalwart is, of course, irrelevant in polite company. Connoisseurs of Britishness (or "double standards and hypocrisy" as the Caudillo himself hath it) will also be entertained by the uncompromising focus on the schoolboy racism of forty years ago: too much attention to the schoolboy racism of today would risk awkward comparisons with the moderate, sensible and electorally successful migrant-bashing practised by the casual racist Cameron, the hysterical racist May, the blithering racist Johnson, and the opportunistic racists of Team Starmer.