"Proper milk" how Nigel Farage gets us lapping it up
A ridiculous online rant about (checks notes) milk, reminds me of a classic Harry Enfield sketch.
Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse were not thought of as political comedians, but one sketch they wrote in the 1980s / 90s constantly boomerangs back to me for the way it anticipated today’s political zeitgeist.
The Self Righteous Brothers were two oldish white men (trigger warning, some of the comedy is not PC). They'd sit in a pub and dream up ever more ridiculous fictional scenarios the better to express their anger and dissatisfaction with the world.
Racing driver Damon Hill speeding in their street, Whitney Houston noisily tapping a lollipop stick against a suburban garden fence. The Spice Girls making an incompetent mess of a building refurbishment.
The sketches were often funny. They poked fun at a certain puce faced male type we all knew (even if only ironically). Men who seemed to live in a permanent state of anger at the most ridiculous things. Such people are sometimes known colloquially as "Gammons." In the 80s and 90s they were a figure of fun.
Today the political scientists have a more respectful name for them: Loyal Nationals.
I was reminded of the Self Righteous Brothers this week, as I watched Nigel Farage do a Twitter rant about how semi-skimmed milk is "woke."
Like Enfield’s sketch it was obvious that Farage's rant was partly tongue in cheek. No-one is really that bothered about milk.
Yet it's the sort of political am-dram that whips up liberals and lefties (people like me) into an over-earnest fuss of condemnation while allowing Farage to gesture ironically to his audience about how we just "don't gedddit."
Maybe Farage is on to something.
A low level sense of "frustration" with the way things are feels quite pervasive right now. I know lots of boomer aged men who rant and rave - often half-jokingly - about the most ridiculously inconsequential things: from road works, to the size of chocolate in advent calendars, to the very existence of chocolate in advent calendars!
In his rant about “proper milk” Farage manifests that fury and frustration. He is an astute, shameless and confident political actor and he communicates an ethos they relate to.
In the absence of a politics able - with similar skill - to offer a place for people's better values, Farage gets to live rent free in the minds of those people, where he’s able to relentlessly fashion a cynical politics of "us and them".