33:64 presents “Danny Dyer.”
With an inevitability that made it almost a certainty, the post that I had started to write and had every good intention of finishing, has fallen prey to another topic. A topic which ostensibly has nothing to do with the one I’d planned, but which in my mind are at least are related. Not in a sibling or even second cousin kind of way, but more of the Danny Dyer being related to King Edward III kind of way.
I had started to write about how Andy Capp may not have lied in the strict dictionary definition of the word or even in the many weasel ways most politicians find to deny it. But lied he certainly did, in the way most normal people mean it when they call someone a liar anyway For example, how some of the voters in Makerfield who elected him as their MP might call him now.
Specifically, the ones who’d voted for Brexit. The ones he needed to convince that he accepted the result of the referendum and wasn’t going to do anything to undermine it. Because if they didn’t vote for him, he wasn’t going anywhere, not to Westminster and certainly not to Downing Street. But they did and just as I was getting properly energised by all of it, I saw this headline on the BBC website; ‘Glastonbury 2027 tickets sell out in 42 minutes’.
My first thought was that Glastonbury had sold out years ago. Then I saw the price of a ticket. £408, plus a £5 booking fee. Which seemed only fair. I mean if you’re only too happy to shell that out then whats another £5? About 210,000 people agreed. But then it struck me. The kind of people who convince themselves that a weekend in Somerset is worth that kind of money are exactly the kind of people who think Brexit was a disaster. Who had long waited for the day when the version of democracy that had has always worked for them was restored. When the bigots, the racists and all those manipulated by the ‘far right’, the Russians and the Illuminati, were finally put back in their place.
I know its a bit of stretch, to link the two, but to me they share the same mindset. The sort of mindset of a person thinks nothing of buying a toothbrush for over £400. Who thinks it ‘progressive’ to believe a man can become a woman simply by saying so. Who thinks that a genocide happened in Gaza. Who thinks a racist is someone that disagrees them. That feelings are more important than fact, that lived experience has greater value than expertise and that by simply born white, one needs to constantly atone for it. Them.
The sort of people who pay over £400 a ticket for a music festival without knowing who’ll be playing at it. The sort of people who think it fine that we have yet another unelected PM just as long as he makes their dream of rejoining the EU a reality.
