FOOD FEATURES HIGHLY on the list of things social justice warriors get incensed about. Telling you what you should put in your brain is not enough for them – now they want to tell you what to put in your stomach. Political purity is everything.
They’re always going on about how big corporations are stuffing our food with too much salt and sugar, of course. Then there’s the cupcakes that make you fascist, the brown sauce that reveals you as an imperialist lackey, and the tea that indicates your complicity in the past crimes of the British Empire. Barbecues are bad because they’re sexist, and meat increasingly taboo, even if George Monbiot wants us to try a bit of organically massacred roadkill squirrel now and then rather than factory-farmed chicken.
I’m afraid even he may fall foul of Corbyn’s new shadow farming minister, Kerry McCarthy, the vegan who has said all meat-eaters should be treated like smokers, ie, as pariahs. Ms McCarthy, you may recall, is the anti-capitalist MP for the Bristol constituency which hosted the Stokes Croft/Tesco riot a couple of years back. A group of anarchists there decided they didn’t like the idea of having a new Tesco opening up in their area and indulged in the usual shenanigans involving setting fire to things, attacking police cars and chucking bottles and stones. Shortly afterwards the locals attempted to set up a People’s Supermarket – with predictable results.
Now a similar bunch of addle-brained revolutionaries has taken to the streets in Shoreditch to protest against a new shop that sells cereals at non-People’s-Supermarket-Shop rates.The shop, they say, is a sign of gentrification, of the inequality and social cleansing that is taking place in working class areas of London. Their response is to arrange a protest, terrorise the customers and chuck paint at the windows.
According to one of the participants having a pop at a chic caff run by a pair of hipster brothers is justified because of “the violence of poverty, hunger and homelessness many thousands of Londoners are being subjected to.” Poverty and hunger? Oh yes, because we’re back in Dickensian London, comrade, hadn’t you heard?. Homelessness? That’s all the fault of multinationals, Russian oligarchs, and “Israeli scumbag property developers” (aha! the Jew is always underneath the lot). Nothing to do with mass immigration over the last decade.
This is the left splitting from top to bottom and from left to right. It’s fracturing, fissuring and turning in upon itself, from Corbyn and his clapped-out revolutionaries to the phoney class warriors with their intimidatory street “parties” and bloody bongos. Between them they have turned the comedy knob up to 11, going into a frenzy over cupcakes, brown sauce and Coco Pops with almond original milk at £3.40 a bowl. They’re a joke, but they’re so self-obsessed they don’t even know it.
