A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout (Ed: a sign the rest is bullshit. Who has time for small talk with the speed demons on German supermarket checkouts?). When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once “she takes all our money” (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through).
Stick with me, Reader, it gets even more unbelievable....
Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now.
To whom is it 'shocking'? Not to me, and probably not to anyone reading this. Secure in her 'Guardian' bubble, Gaby probably only hears support for the shower of shite in the HoC, but out on the streets and in pubs and offices and bus queues all over the UK, it's quite normal.
I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming “socially acceptable to be racist” again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them.
Streeting mentions a patient saying he only wanted to be treated by white staff, which he cites as racism, despite the fact I don't recall him having such qualms over Diane Abbot's whinge about 'blonde, blue eyed Scandinavian nurses.
You can feel it at bus stops, where polite inquiries about why the 44 doesn’t stop here any more end up wheeling off at sudden wild tangents about chemtrails or the government spying on you; or in casual school-gate chats, where otherwise perfectly ordinary-seeming parents turn out to have some very odd ideas about vaccines.
After the Covid fiasco. it'd be surprising if they didn't!
A friend calls it “sauna politics”, after the surreally conspiracy-laden conversations she overhears in her local leisure centre sauna. But whatever you want to call it, it’s as if people are suddenly voicing their interior monologues – things that until recently they’d have been embarrassed to say in public, or sometimes even to admit to themselves that they thought – out loud. After all, they can say this stuff online and nobody bats an eyelid. Why not in a hospital waiting room?
A hospital waiting room is the most likely place you'll hear it, as the parlous state of the NHS becomes fully apparent, even to those who fondly believd in 'the wonder of the world'.
Middle-aged radicalisation sounds almost like a contradiction in terms, a reaction to all the stereotypes about settling comfortably into your rut. Besides, in our own heads, if nowhere else, gen X were always the mild-mannered peacekeepers of the culture wars: not old enough to be deemed reactionary or young enough to be woke, and instead occupying a kind of cheerfully moderate Goldilocks zone in-between. But something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years.
The Royal 'Us', Gaby? I thought you were above such things?
It’s gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now.
Well, Gaby, sometimes it's grumpy pensioners too...
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