Jeremy Clarkson
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The news last week that olive oil, Marmite and porridge cannot now be advertised during television programmes aimed at children confirms something I’ve suspected for a few months. There’s a revolution going on in Britain and no one seems to have noticed.
When the French and Russian proletariat rose up against the middle and upper classes, they made a lot of noise and used pitchforks. Whereas here the revolutionaries are using stealth and a drip-drip-drip policy of never-ending legislation.
It started when they let ramblers trample all over your flowerbeds and then, of course, there was hunting. We know that the antis couldn’t really have cared less about the wellbeing of foxy woxy, but they hated, with a passion, the well-heeled country folk who charged about on their horses shouting tally ho.
Then came the attack on four-wheel-drive cars. “It’s the environment,” they smiled, but it’s no such thing. Otherwise they’d be up north taxing people with clapped out Ford Orions and telling fat people in council houses to get out of the chip shop and lag their bloody lofts.
No, they go after Chelsea Tractors because these are symbols of middle-class success. You have to remember that trade unionists and antinuclear campaigners didn’t go away. They just morphed into eco-mentalists because they realised that global warming was a better weapon than striking, or doing lesbionics for mother Russia in Berkshire.
Think about it. They tell you not to go to Tuscany this summer, and they throw withering looks at the Ryanair flights to Gascony. But when Kentucky Fried Chicken starts advertising a bucket of supper with disposable plates and nonbiodegradable plastic cutlery so you don’t have to get your fat arse out of your DFS sofa and wash up, do we hear a murmur? You can cup your ears as much as you like but the answer is no.
Instead we get Ofcom listing what it considers to be junk food and therefore unsuitable for children. Chicken nuggets? Plain white bread? Oven chips? Diet drinks? Nope, along with a lot of oven ready “meals”, these are all fine apparently.
But Marmite, porridge, raisins, cheese and manuka honey? ’Fraid not. This is what middle-class kids eat so it’s all wrong, and now it can’t be advertised on television in the afternoon.
Meanwhile you have John Prescott insisting that each new housing development can only get a planning green light if it “spoils some Tory bastard’s view”.
It gets worse. Ken Livingstone has not extended the congestion charge into Tower Hamlets or Newham. Nope. He’s gone for Kensington and Chelsea. And we learnt last week of plans to turn Sloane Square, the epicentre of middle-class shopping and conviviality, into a tree-free crossroads.
I’ve checked and strangely there are no plans to build a new road through the statue of Harold Wilson in the north’s equivalent of Sloane Square — George Square in Huddersfield.
There are, however, plans afoot to give Janet Street-Porter and others of a Gore-Tex disposition access to a 10-yard-wide corridor around all of Britain’s 2,500mile coastline. So you worked hard all your life and saved up enough to buy a bit of seclusion by the sea? Well sorry, but Natural England, a sinister sounding bunch, has advised Defra, which sounds like something the Nazis might have dreamt up, that your garden should be confiscated and that there should be a “presumption against” giving you any compensation.
You see what I mean. On its own, that’s no big deal. But lob everything else into the mix and it becomes clear that traditional Britain is under attack. It’s porridge and Jonathan Ross’s back garden today, but tomorrow Mrs Queen will be transported to Scotland and summarily shot. You mark my words.
I bet the chief executive of Barclays agrees. He announced last week that the bank had made record profits, and was probably feeling pretty chuffed, right up to the moment he was summoned to a television studio and presented as the unacceptable face of capitalism who goes round the countryside at weekends stamping on puppies.
I felt it too on Thursday, because for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain I was in London with a Rolls-Royce and no one ever let me out of a side turning.
Why? As I’ve said before, Simon Cowell, who is a rich man, gives the exchequer more each year than is generated by all the speed cameras put together. If you combined the tax contributions of all those who have Rollers, I bet you’d have enough to pay for Britain’s air traffic control system.
And that’s before you start on how much Britain’s rich do for charity. Last year a bunch a hedge fund managers raised £18m in a single night to help Romanian orphans. At one party Lady Bamford’s mates stumped up £3m for the NSPCC. And I had lunch on Thursday with a chap who, so far as I could tell, single-handedly looks after every disadvantaged child in the land.
And yet, when he climbs into his Bentley to go home at night, a bunch of communists and hippies, egged on by faceless former Greenham lesbos in government think tanks, makes sure he can never pull into the traffic flow.
Not that he’s going anywhere anyway, because Ken Livingstone has taken £8 a day from middle-class Londoners and given it to a crackpot South American lunatic in exchange for cheap oil, which means the capital is choked with buses full of Bulgarian pickpockets fleeing from the police.
I notice this morning that the blossom is out on my trees. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel like summer’s coming.
Jeremy Clarkson's career as car reviewer and BBC Top Gear presenter has made motoring into show business, but he has earned himself the description of an "equal opportunities loudmouth" for his opinionated commentary on all aspects of life, appearing weekly in The Sunday Times.
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