Proposed cuts to English lit courses are symptomatic of the Conservatives’ ignorance of culture and disregard for ordinary people’s access to it
On Wednesday, Dominic Raab, the Minister for Paddleboarding While Kabul Burns, mocked the Labour deputy leader for attending Glyndebourne while railway workers picketed. Who did Angela Rayner think she was? Pick up your stepladder, get back in your slum and eat your fried offal, peasant. “No opera for you!” Raab even winked at Rayner before he delivered the standard “champagne socialist” slapdown, the James Bond assassin-playboy of his own wet dreams, the corridors of power still spaffed with wine-time spatterings. Wasn’t there a dogfight somewhere that Rayner should be betting on? Or a cockroach race in a Victorian pub backroom? Shouldn’t her sort be roaming the streets gathering excrement with her bare hands to tan leather? At least this time the Tories weren’t speculating about the colour of her pubic hair. Progress.
Tories don’t get the arts. In 2015, when Sajid Javid was culture secretary, he resisted attempts to prevent touts from reselling publicly subsidised tickets, designed to ease access to productions, privately at higher rates. Javid said the only people bothered by criminally inflated ticket costs were “the chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”.
