Pay your money and pick your prejudice

BACK at the beginning of the pandemic, with more time on my hands to observe the joy and the doolallyness of the passing parade, most mornings, along with the Western Mail, I would pick one additional newspaper at random:

from the Daily Star and The Sun to The Telegraph and The Observer, and everything in between.

What an education. I never realised how furiously divided Britain is, politically speaking. Talk about tribes going to war. This was so distracting I stopped reading anything to do with politics, including political columnists, and instead perused the letters pages. I retained faith that editors were fairly reflecting that political divide even within their own readership.

With the sky falling on Angela Rayner’s head following her “Tory scum” outpourings, here are two letters which perfectly reflect this divide.

First, in The Guardian, from Guy Ellis of London: “Angela Rayner describes the Tories as ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolutely vile ... banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian ... piece of scum’. It’s telling that ‘scum’ is the only word being questioned.”

And then this, in The Times, from Professor Yorick Wilks (great name) of Oxford: “Angela Rayner called the Tories ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic’. They have created the most diverse British government ever, given us two female prime ministers and brought in gay marriage.”

As they say down the pub, you pays your money and takes your choice. Be that as it may, perusing all our newspapers from the relative calm of the grassy knoll proves that however hard nurture attempts to lift us above our natural-born prejudices, nature, or more accurately the brain, finds it impossible to overwrite what is hard-wired into our DNA, however

convinced clever people are that they can.