Stop me if I’ve told you this one before, but 20 years ago, a BNP-supporting aunt of mine forwarded me a document, purporting to be a scholarly explanation of why Muslims were inhuman, by a particular academic from a particular university. Even back in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days, I still did a quick fact check, before calling my aunt to say: “You have to be a bit careful with these sort of things, Auntie. Neither the professor that wrote that article, nor the university it says he’s from, actually exist.” “That’s as may be,” she said, “but I still think he makes a lot of valid points.”
The fact that my aunt knew the anti-Islamic man was not real did not stop her using his work to reinforce her prejudices. If I had realised the extent to which her adoption of the research of a man she knew did not exist was a prophecy of the way the whole country was soon to think, I would have joined my friend Roger in emigrating to the Pyrenees before Brexit to set up a pinball machine renovation business.
It was during the Brexit era that feelings trumped facts, and now not being able to prove anything is no barrier to policy and public pronouncement. But Tuesday’s Sky News appearance by the Ipswich Tory MP Tom Hunt, when he doubled down on his belief that “it’s not xenophobic to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country”, marked a new fact-free high-water mark. Hunt’s translucent interview with Sophy Ridge pivoted on words such as “feel” and “think”, while details and statistics remained conspicuously absent. “Well, I think it’s, you know,” Hunt explained, “I think if you walk into your town centre, I think if you’re, you know, you’re hearing almost people speaking English is almost a rarity.” Perhaps Hunt is confused. What he is actually hearing is a Suffolk accent, where a man talking about a “waddledickie” is a describing a donkey and not simply suggesting another Tory MP has done something unspeakable to a duck. Allegedly.
The fact that 88% of people in Ipswich speak English as a first language did not deter Hunt from his opinion-based opinion. “Well, I think that lots of people do find that,” he continued, “lots of, lots of people, lots of people when they walk into their town centres and city centres across the country often feel that way.” Oh well. If we feel it, it must be true. Facts? So pre-Brexit!
Hunt went on to conflate failure to integrate with a rise in shop theft. “In the town that I represent we’ve got shop theft on the rise and there is one community that is disproportionately behind the shop theft.” Presumably the “community in question” was an ethic minority of the type that spoke their own language in a town centre, a city centre, otherwise there would be no link between shop theft and integration, but Hunt felt obliged to whistle his dog discreetly. Presumably, the “community in question” responsible for shop theft wasn’t, for example, simply the Shop Theft Community. But, Ridge asked, did Hunt have any data to back this opaque assertion up?
“I’ve been to 12…” Hunt began, “…only a few months ago I went to 12 different shops in the town centre.” It is good, at least, that the shops were different shops, and that Hunt didn’t just question the same shopkeeper over and over again, as that would have invalidated his research. “They all said exactly the same thing,” he asserted. “It’s something which nobody disputes that locally. Nobody disputes that locally. There is analysis done, and there’s lots of… and every single shop we went to said that… And I think that actually that view I have expressed is actually a mainstream view shared by the majority of people in the country.”
It may well be that “the community in question” are responsible for Ipswich shop theft. But if your geography GCSE coursework was based on talking to 12 shopkeepers and didn’t take into account a comparative study of how low income affects shop theft in other communities, it would be invalid. Statistics are tricky like that. But Hunt isn’t really that interested in the truth. He just wants a common enemy to consolidate his Conservative customer base. His own party has filtered millions of pounds of public money to donors and supporters via questionable Covid equipment provision schemes, but ignore the Industrial Scale Fraud Community, and let’s go after the bloke from the “community in question” stealing a Twix.
This is who Hunt, Conservative MP for Ipswich, is. Before entering politics he picked radishes. He picked leeks for a week, but his employer soon returned him to radish work, leeks presumably being too complex for him; he wants to make flying the union flag compulsory in all schools; he does not believe Boris Johnson should have been fined for his Covid parties; and, predictably, he believes the National Trust is “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’”. (He is another reminder to National Trust members to make sure they vote online by 3 November in the AGM to prevent the board being stuffed with culture war candidates who share Hunt’s views, from the Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust.)
I love Ipswich – for its historic clock, for its innovative and resolutely regional Eastern Angles theatre company and because it was the home of Alan Davey of Hawkwind and Hawklords – but if the people of Ipswich return Hunt at the next election, then when their town centre, or city centre, is finally claimed by the rising seas, I shall not mourn its passing, nor the fen-drowning of its waddledickies. The functions of citizenship are the glory of the citizens.
Basic Lee tour dates are here; a six-week London run begins 9 December at Leicester Square theatre
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