A 62 year old woman, who went to a dodgy boarding school and spent her life surrounded by like-minded middle England folk, before taking up a role as a Tory MP, says "nigger in the woodpile" which I promise you was a completely acceptable phrase in England, until at least 1985.
Twitter explodes. Ignores that some other old posh twat used exactly the same phrase on RacingUk not much earlier and escaped with the sheepish (and I don't doubt sincere) apology that "I had no idea it was offensive." To be honest, I felt sorry for the daft bugger.
(For any youngsters tuning in, when I was growing up nigger was the name of the cute labrador in the Dambusters, and in the title of my favourite Agatha Christie book, and in the woodpile, and that was all. It did not actually chime otherwise. It actually wasn't a black man. Not in my head, anyway. As we grew up, most of us learned differently and adjusted our mindset and language accordingly.)
In the metropolitan rush to righteous indignation what we appear to be missing is that there's a not insignificant area of middle England that has a lot of power, but where it's still Midsomer Blighty Agatha Christie and multiculturalism (and progress and enlightenment and stuff) has literally never happened. Sometimes also known as Shropshire.
I actually covered this as humourously as I could in One Dog and His Man. That book was supposed to be a gentle comedy about the differences between London and the countryside. Post-Brexit, it reads like a dystopian warning of impending civil war...
Twitter explodes. Ignores that some other old posh twat used exactly the same phrase on RacingUk not much earlier and escaped with the sheepish (and I don't doubt sincere) apology that "I had no idea it was offensive." To be honest, I felt sorry for the daft bugger.
(For any youngsters tuning in, when I was growing up nigger was the name of the cute labrador in the Dambusters, and in the title of my favourite Agatha Christie book, and in the woodpile, and that was all. It did not actually chime otherwise. It actually wasn't a black man. Not in my head, anyway. As we grew up, most of us learned differently and adjusted our mindset and language accordingly.)
In the metropolitan rush to righteous indignation what we appear to be missing is that there's a not insignificant area of middle England that has a lot of power, but where it's still Midsomer Blighty Agatha Christie and multiculturalism (and progress and enlightenment and stuff) has literally never happened. Sometimes also known as Shropshire.
I actually covered this as humourously as I could in One Dog and His Man. That book was supposed to be a gentle comedy about the differences between London and the countryside. Post-Brexit, it reads like a dystopian warning of impending civil war...
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