When I was a younger man, if someone had come up to me in the old Wheatsheaf pub in Camden on a Friday night and said they wanted to tax my meat, I would have embraced the experience with humble gratitude. But how things have changed! Now the last thing anyone wants is to see their meat being taxed. Stand up and fight!
While the Tories have been in Manchester all week lying about everything to the applause of half-empty rooms full of soul-dead ragdolls from haunted toy shops in 1960s British portmanteau horror films, I in turn have spent the past seven days deliberately eating far too much meat. Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!!
Since Christmas, I have been trying to be vegan, but fear of Keir Starmer’s incoming Meat Tax ™ ® sent me into a frenzied Meat Panic ™ ®. I didn’t mind not eating meat for moral considerations, but not being able to eat meat because of a remainer’s Meat Tax ™ ® enraged me, as it was intended to, and I danced to Rishi Sunak’s pipe like a meat-crazed marionette. Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!! Stand up and fight!!!
I stopped off at the butcher on the way to the cemetery where I exercise and ran out of the doorway trailing a string of fat bangers, as I stuffed my face with uncooked sausage meat to declare my opposition to the Meat Tax ™ ®, like a naughty dog in a 1950s newspaper cartoon. I stumbled, meat-mouthed, along the next stage of my Sanjeev Kohli-narrated Couch to 5K odyssey and the uncooked sausage tasted horrible. But the tang of Meat Freedom ™ ® it represented tasted good, like pushing a woke trans woman into a sewage-filled culvert. Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!! Stand up and fight!!! Stand up and fight!!!!
But hang on! There was no Meat Tax ™ ®!! The Conservatives fabricated a policy that didn’t exist so they could oppose it and appear to come to the aid of Ordinary Hard-working People ™ ® whose necessary meat had suddenly become too expensive. It was easier to appear to be on the side of Ordinary Hard-working People ™ ® by taking a stand against a nonexistent Meat Tax ™ ® that they never really faced than it was to do anything to actually help them, like pushing forward environmentally friendly policies that would slow our progress towards the now inevitable extinction of all life on Earth. As the floods engulf them and their eyeballs fry in their heads, at least those Ordinary Hard-working People ™ ® will be glad Sunak and his lying gnomes stopped the Meat Tax ™ ®, which never existed anyway.
Even Sophy Ridge of Sky News, hardly a fellow traveller of pioneering investigative outfits such as Byline Times or Led By Donkeys, could not contain her frustration on Tuesday with the Tory MP Claire Coutinho as she doubled down on the imaginary Meat Tax ™ ®. In her speech to conference, Coutinho had made a joke – “It’s no wonder Labour seem so relaxed about taxing meat. Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t eat it and Ed Miliband is clearly scarred by his encounter with a bacon sandwich” – that was received with the usual approving automated Tory goose honks. Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!! Stand up and fight!!! Stand up and fight!!!! Stand up and fight!!!!!
But to me the problem with this joke, in my capacity as Britain’s most consistently critically acclaimed standup comedian, is that the punchline is invalid because it comes off the back of a setup that is factually inaccurate. There simply is no proposed Labour Meat Tax ™ ®. When I do my triannual standup on the BBC and when I submit my regular tranches of liberal satire to the Observer, my jokes are meticulously checked for fairness and accuracy. Why, only last week I was engaged in a six-hour back and forth as to whether I could describe Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley’s output in this column as “shit”, which I favoured, or as the less derogatory “effluent”. Liberal comedians are held accountable to standards. Tory politicians have none and Ofcom doesn’t enforce any at GB News. We fight with our arms tied behind our backs while they kick our nads off with winklepickers.
Perhaps, if we ever see the end of the sewage-stained tsunami of weaponised bullshit unleashed by the Brexit campaign, and sustained by unregulated social media and broadcasting rule-breaking that Ofcom seems unwilling to counter, we will look back at the past decade as a Second Dark Age of Falsehood, most of it emanating from the Conservative party or the Tufton Street gang of thinktanks that set its agenda.
There was no £350m for the NHS. There were no Brexit benefits. There were no 40 new hospitals. There were no 50,000 new nurses. Grooming gangs are not “almost all” British-Pakistani in origin. The damning report on the costs of net zero that the Tufton Steet thinktank Civitas gave the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express last month was so inaccurate Civitas itself eventually took it down from its website. And stories floated by the Tufton Street-linked anti-woke pressure group Restore Trust about National Trust malpractice regularly prove to be false.
What can we do? Give up? Or try to win our own little victories? You could register online to vote for the National Trust’s preferred candidates for the board by the 3 November registration deadline, for example, if you are a member, to counter Restore Trust’s landgrab. Or find some other tiny sliver of hope. Stand up. And fight.
Basic Lee tour dates are here
