“Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one’s own past failings.”
Cary Grant
I didn’t want to write this, I didn’t want to write something with any tinge of Brexit about it.
But no, my hand has been forced. For just over two years now, I have witnessed people posting images on Instagram that are a stream of unprovoked, mildly concerning, knee-jerk, low-effort, lowest common denominator pieces of pictorial snobbery.
These images are posted by who appear to be educated, middle-classes who, whenever they see a St George’s flag or Union Jack, take a photo and, like some kind of Pavlovian experiment, add to them supercilious, smug and hateful comments mocking Brexit voters.
There are so many examples to choose from it’s hard to narrow it down, but here’s a few to illustrate the behaviour.
One posted an image of a London council estate which was covered in St George’s flags during the World Cup. It looked utterly spectacular: symmetrical in its construction, and clearly something the whole estate had bought into.
Underneath the image though were a cavalcade of vile comments laughing at how common these people must be. “Ing-er-land” one said, then another said something about Morrissey living there and then he said that their curtains were probably swastikas (in case you don’t speak Unfunny W*nker, what this means is all the people that put up those flags and all the people that live there are horrible racist Brexit voting bastards).
It goes on and on. All from people who appear to be asking us to be more about inclusivity and love, while spreading hateful bile that serves to simply create further division. The oft-uttered tropes bemoaning the intellect of people who voted Leave, the fat cats who duped them, and worst of all, I see this in some of the people I know.
They’re hardly unique though. With the tiniest amount of research you can see that this, as they say, is a thing. The net of social media has trapped the weaker sprats in society and is forcing them to gasp for air by screaming their shrill little screams in the hope that their brand gets a like.
The other conclusion I’ve reached is that, no matter how disappointing and dull I find this activity, I don’t buy it for one minute. Virtue signalling, aside from being overused, doesn’t quite cut it here. Maybe this is something else.
When they’re not calling everyone with dirty nails and the wrong kind of skincare regimen a racist, they live a heaven-sent existence — full of second homes, zero financial concerns, endless skiing holidays, and brand new things that aren’t needed every week.
But again, that’s not unusual is it, and one doesn’t want to play identity politics here and say you can’t have views on X if you are X and don’t have the lived experience of an X (whatever the holy balls ‘lived experience’ means), but I’ve known these people for years. In the years before June 2016, not only were they silent about their love for the EU but they appeared to not have had one single political opinion.
But something new happened around the time of the referendum, all of a sudden people started getting traction if they used #Brexit in a post. A toe was dipped in, a tickle felt in the testes, like a dog getting its back rubbed, and as cracks appeared people went all in.
I remember the odd conversation in June 2016, when asked by some friends as to which way I’d vote in the referendum, I said that I wasn’t sure yet. This was greeted with raised eyebrows. I said I was still looking into it because I wanted to get as good an understanding from as many sources and views as I could and was suspicious of some of the agendas on show.
But when I returned the question to my friends I heard that they’d vote Remain, “Because I quite like how things are”, and “Because everything seems ok”. Sometimes they’d just look blankly and change the subject.
And that’s ok of course, most of us must deep down know we are voting in any election or referendum for what we personally feel is best for us.
The world’s not perfect and opportunists will spring up whenever there’s an… opportunity. Apparently some Leavers were happy to pretend Nigel Farage was one of them because he drank pints, and Remainers were willing to trust in the people they had quite recently referred to as war criminals.
But social currency too tempting to ignore, people bend like a weed in the wind and wrap their fingers round this particular flagpole.
These are the character traits of the kids that clung to the thick right arm of the school bully, “Yeah, I think Kevin’s new bag is crap too, hit him in the face!”
They’re the type who might creep up on you, and from behind slip their nasty little knife in your back, whispering, ‘It’s for your own good’.
And not to minimise their impact, but I feel the same way about people like Milo Yiannopoulos and ‘TV funny man’ Frankie Boyle, I don’t believe them. I just don’t think they believe what they’re saying. Milo seems addicted to a certain type of attention from a particular type of audience. Boyle has gone from a comic willing to write for the Sun, ridicule disabled people and laugh at rape to some kind of SJW superhero who ‘loves hip hop’. Yeah, sure he does.
The tell tale signs of these people are easy to spot — out come the terms they’ve appropriated from other commentators and all of a sudden my white, wealthy, middle aged, middle class friends with two homes and a leafy, safe and secluded life are lamenting the terrible impact of white middle class men and the idiots who doff their cloth caps at them.
There is real irony here though.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see a lot of this as envy. True or not, people like this will view the underclass, the white van driver and such as having an energy and life in them that makes their look drab and soulless by comparison.
Since the slum journalists in the 19th century, liberals have enjoyed being able to patronise and pity the underclass until, cor lumme, wouldn’t you know it, they’ve only gawn an ‘ad an opinion about sumfin’.
