Sausage Roll Politics

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Passing through Manchester city centre yesterday, what seemed to be the tail end, but which turned out to be the heart, of a particularly embarrassing British parody of the "yellow vest" protests that have sprung up on the continent some like to pretend we're about to sever all ties with forever, made its way across Piccadilly Gardens, extolling the virtues of a "no deal Brexit" and expressing a totally incoherent demand to be given "our country" "back".  I grabbed a few seconds of footage as the tram took me away, thankfully, in the opposite direction.


Although things do seem to have kicked ever so slightly more off down in London, the whole affair was as pathetic as could be predicted.  Various attempts have been made to mobilise the anti-establishment sentiment of the giltes jaunes protestors since November by the usual motely bunch of hard Brexiters, hooligans, conspiracy fans and racists, and none of them have gained any real momentum.  This may have something to do with the fact that such people shares very little common ground politically with the altogether more impressive French "giltes jaunes" movement, whose demands align with a broadly leftist agenda - workers' rights, economic equality, social and environmental justice, and anti-fascism/capitalism and so on.  But try telling them that.





Anyway, around the same time, the rumour began to circulate that the mob had turned its anger onto the nation's favourite pasty provider, Greggs, who have enjoyed a week of mostly free, positive publicity since releasing a "sausage roll" suitable for those loony left soyboys like me who prefer not to eat food that was made only at the expense of the pointless suffering and murder of defenceless animals.






Such is the nature of the reality we now find ourselves in, at no point was it ever possible to tell whether this was, as a matter of you know, traditional "fact", true.  Were the protesters actually targeting Greggs for making one more option available to its customers, or had they just stopped for a fag?  By tea time, the Manchester Evening News had it all worked out.  "The protest appeared to be organised by a YouTube account called Tommy Robinson news", they explained.  Imagine my shock.  And then, there's this:

This, it turned out, wasn't real either.  (Nothing is real anymore, is it?).  But it worked because it looked like could be real, and that's what really interests me: a world in which something so preposterous can seem so plausible.  That's the world we actually live in, my friends.  I think this is worth thinking about.

There's a connecting line you can draw between fascism, Brexit, gender politics, and food.  It goes something like this.  Brexit, while its origins are essentially centre-right, succeed by pandering, intentionally or not, to the far right.  Fears about immigration and multiculturalism and of a loss of national pride and identity can be gateways to full blown violent nationalism, as seen in the EDL and its various splinter groups, the rise and fall of UKIP, For Britain, and the like, and their intersection with some elements of more mainstream conservatism.  Fear is something that the reactionaries are particularly good at weaponising; and to that fear the somewhat nebulous, but certainly real "toxic male" is drawn like a magnet.  With this cartoonish picture of "manliness", all muscle and hair and sweat and...meat comes a fetishisation of the ideal man, sometimes personified in an actual political figure but sometimes not, existing more abstractly as "the alpha".  The alpha male is animal - the bear, the lion, the wolf - and these animals eat meat.  Big, bloody, red, meaty meat.  They conquer, they kill and they devour.  The slightest hint of "weakness" is preyed upon, and when it cannot be destroyed altogether (it never can) it is belittled and mocked as feminine, homosexual, "beta" and "cucked".

And so it came to pass was that regular contender for most unpleasant male human imaginable, one Piers Morgan, threw his hat into the ring of shit that was the week's social media media circus of reaction to Greggs' (apparently quite nice) vegan sausage roll.



 Although it quickly transpired that Mr Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm (imagine my shock, a second time) which raised the question as to whether the whole insane affair might have been well-executed viral marketing campaign for a tasty new snack (the answer is yes) the cultural conditions under which such a bizarre state of affairs could have manifested itself are worth serious attention.  Can real men be vegans?  Why are fascists so insecure?  What if we run out of meat and potato pies in a no-deal Brexit?  How can we blame this all on cultural Marxists?  Should Jeremy Corbyn resign over this?  Welcome to 2019.











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