There’s a tendency among commentators to point the finger at Donald Trump and claim his example has created a coarsening of political speech and has encouraged people to accept patent lies as truth.
You’d be hard put to deny some truth to this. His boasts about how he grabs women, his claims about his father being born in Germany (he wasn’t), his claims about Obama being born in Kenya (he wasn’t), his lies about caravans of immigrants producing a national state of emergency – the list goes on and on.
And certainly it appears infectious. The abuse that British politicians are now throwing at each other has provoked talk of the need for greater security for MPs and the need for more policemen – thousands more policemen – to deal with potential violence post- Brexit.
It really is odd to hear this kind of talk from the British, who have always prided themselves on their ability to have unarmed bobbies on the beat and who have always believed that jaw-jaw was better than war-war, sit down and have nice cuppa tea and a chat, can’t you. No more, it would seem.
But is the Trump bug something new? The virus that raged through the blood-stream of our tormented little stateen ever since its inception was always available for inspection at any time. But instead the British for fifty years averted their gaze and let stony-faced discrimination and gerrymander prevail here. And when in 1998 a historic compromise was reached, and nationalists/republicans made the hugely–generous gesture of allowing the will of the people in the northern state to decide what the political future of Ireland would be, the reaction of unionist politicians matched the coarseness of anything Trump has since come up with.
No open sexual bragging, of course, but lots of pot-shots at the out-moded, leprechaun-embracing nationalists and republicans. Your culture? Diddle-dee music and old gummy guys wailing banshee balderdash. Your language? Here, give me my yoghurt so I can curry it, and pass me that can of Coca-cola.
All that at a point when Donald Trump was just another multi-millionaire with a funny hairstyle.
To say that someone is before their time is usually a compliment to their far-sightedness. In this case it’s a sad judgement on people who have been doing the Donald-swagger every summer for longer than any of us care to remember.
So don’t blame it all on Donald. He’s helped, of course; but it’s been baton-swirling, drum-thudding Orangeism that has shown the way for the coarseness and condescension now being paraded on the other side of the Atlantic by the man with the orange hair.
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