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Oh I have truly had enough of it, this endless fecking nonsense.
There's nothing new about the hateful rubbish being spewed, it's just that this time's favourite flavour bad guy is Muslim, where once it was black, or Irish, or gypsy, or communist or anybody, anybody different enough to be a target. I remember being that kind of target when I was a kid for being part Scottish part Spanish.
This morning an old colleague from the studio put a horrendous piece of trash up on his feed about sharia law overtaking our secular laws. I am just fed the feck up with this, if you ask any of these 'British patriots' exactly where this is happening, they have no answer.I believe people have the right to their own opinions but not their own facts; that's not how reality works. I told him I was unfollowing him and giving myself time to work out whether it was worth staying friends. He responded by unfriending, a relief, I suspect, to both of us.
But I cannot believe that this cr*p is everywhere, that everything learned is forgotten. This stuff is simply the same piss poor rubbish it always was, and in a country that seems obsessed with reliving its past every twenty minutes, I just can't get how this wretched 1930s style tosh has gained any traction here.
Not quite true. I have some clues. A hideous combination of entitlement, resentment, poverty and lack of education, all of them mingling with deliberately fed misinformation for decades. A good friend and man of sensitivity told me about how he had no problems with immigrants (I believe him, a genuine most excellent chum) but he couldn't forgive the EU for the dumping of cheap Chinese steel and its consequences for the Welsh steel industry. He looked genuinely aghast when I told him that the EU had tried to bring in regulations that would have stopped the dumping but some other member countries, led by the UK, resisted successfully. He didn't know.
Why didn't you know? I wanted to bellow. I'm not expecting people to check everything but, dear god, this mattered to you and your family, why didn't you find out?
Answer: he heard somewhere. From someone he trusted. Of course he did. They all heard something somewhere from someone they trusted, whether it's the implementation of sharia law in some borough no-one can ever quite name, or the iniquities of a trading bloc for not over-riding a member government determined to beggar its citizens in the name of laissez faire.
There will always be arguments to be had over trade, but we were all supposed to be past this fatuous crap about how the Other is Bad precisely because they are Other. I swear to god, there are people in this country who won't be happy until three miles up the road is a far away place, and the only person worth marrying is a blood relative.
Time to breathe. To remember that I spent today in good company, relatives who smile and are kind, whom some of my countrymen would like to deport, as once they would have liked to deport my family and me. Doesn't matter. Today I was in the company of a happy baby, an aunt who insisted on feeding me too well, a cousin-in-law full of spark and ideas. Today we are happy.
But also today, I can't take any more nonsense, and will not humour it.
*Funny in the way that nobody's laughing.
There's nothing new about the hateful rubbish being spewed, it's just that this time's favourite flavour bad guy is Muslim, where once it was black, or Irish, or gypsy, or communist or anybody, anybody different enough to be a target. I remember being that kind of target when I was a kid for being part Scottish part Spanish.
This morning an old colleague from the studio put a horrendous piece of trash up on his feed about sharia law overtaking our secular laws. I am just fed the feck up with this, if you ask any of these 'British patriots' exactly where this is happening, they have no answer.I believe people have the right to their own opinions but not their own facts; that's not how reality works. I told him I was unfollowing him and giving myself time to work out whether it was worth staying friends. He responded by unfriending, a relief, I suspect, to both of us.
But I cannot believe that this cr*p is everywhere, that everything learned is forgotten. This stuff is simply the same piss poor rubbish it always was, and in a country that seems obsessed with reliving its past every twenty minutes, I just can't get how this wretched 1930s style tosh has gained any traction here.
Not quite true. I have some clues. A hideous combination of entitlement, resentment, poverty and lack of education, all of them mingling with deliberately fed misinformation for decades. A good friend and man of sensitivity told me about how he had no problems with immigrants (I believe him, a genuine most excellent chum) but he couldn't forgive the EU for the dumping of cheap Chinese steel and its consequences for the Welsh steel industry. He looked genuinely aghast when I told him that the EU had tried to bring in regulations that would have stopped the dumping but some other member countries, led by the UK, resisted successfully. He didn't know.
Why didn't you know? I wanted to bellow. I'm not expecting people to check everything but, dear god, this mattered to you and your family, why didn't you find out?
Answer: he heard somewhere. From someone he trusted. Of course he did. They all heard something somewhere from someone they trusted, whether it's the implementation of sharia law in some borough no-one can ever quite name, or the iniquities of a trading bloc for not over-riding a member government determined to beggar its citizens in the name of laissez faire.
There will always be arguments to be had over trade, but we were all supposed to be past this fatuous crap about how the Other is Bad precisely because they are Other. I swear to god, there are people in this country who won't be happy until three miles up the road is a far away place, and the only person worth marrying is a blood relative.
Time to breathe. To remember that I spent today in good company, relatives who smile and are kind, whom some of my countrymen would like to deport, as once they would have liked to deport my family and me. Doesn't matter. Today I was in the company of a happy baby, an aunt who insisted on feeding me too well, a cousin-in-law full of spark and ideas. Today we are happy.
But also today, I can't take any more nonsense, and will not humour it.
*Funny in the way that nobody's laughing.
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