Hit by a Hate-Quake: Brexit, Saint Jo and the Liberal Elite

One of the most memorable stories in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) is about Johnson “passing by a fishmonger who was skinning an eel alive.” Johnson heard the fishmonger “curse it, because it would not lie still.” Boswell said the story was a “striking instance of human insensibility and inconsideration.” Those traits are still flourishing. If you think of the eel as ordinary White Britons and the fishmonger as Britain’s liberal elite, the elite are horrified and indignant that the lower orders won’t “lie still” as their country is invaded, their incomes slashed and their futures destroyed. The victory for Brexit in the EU referendum has been greeted by a howl of liberal rage. The lower orders did not vote as their ethical and intellectual superiors wanted them to.
“What nobler vision?”
Worse still, the lower orders refused to be swayed by the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, despite being clearly told that she was one of the saintliest women ever to draw breath. A Guardian editorial described the murder as both an “exceptionally heinous villainy” and, “in a very real sense, an attack on democracy.” The editorial went on:
Jo Cox, however, was not just any MP doing her duty. She was also an MP who was driven by an ideal. The former charity worker explained what that ideal was as eloquently as anyone could in her maiden speech last year. “Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration,” she insisted, “be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
What nobler vision can there be than that of a society where people can be comfortable in their difference? And what more fundamental tenet of decency is there than to put first and to cherish all that makes us human, as opposed to what divides one group from another? These are ideals that are often maligned when they are described as multiculturalism, but they are precious nonetheless. They are the ideals which led Ms Cox to campaign tirelessly for the brutalised and displaced people of Syria, and — the most painful thought — ideals for which she may now have died. (The Guardian view on Jo Cox: an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy, The Guardian, 16th June 2016)
Pass a sickbag, please. Elsewhere, Jo Cox’s family said that “she was a human being and she was perfect.” She was described by her local vicar as “a 21st-century Good Samaritan” and as “someone with whom Jesus would have been so pleased.” There was a schmaltzy memorial service at Parliament led by Rose Hudson Wilson, the Black female chaplain of the House of Commons. The Labour MP Emily Thornberry, notorious for her contempt for White working-class men, recited from “a poem by Kurdish writer Zeki Majid called Mother’s Day.” Read more

“Britain’s anti-EU ‘Leave’ campaign has helped create a public discourse of prejudice and fear, couched in a parochial nationalism, that Jews in Britain must challenge.”





