The government are considering a U-turn on their pledge to ban the import of fur and foie gras, thanks to opposition from their own MPs. Is there nothing that can’t be turned into a culture war?
When I was young – this was, of course, many scores of years ago – we spent a lot of time arguing about fur. On one level, it was a pretty crude political awakening (animal cruelty, for or against?); on another, an early introduction to meaningless position-taking, and how enjoyable it can be (if you could never afford a mink coat, does it matter whether or not you agree with buying one? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it does!). Philosophically, the knottiest bit was whether you were allowed to buy fur secondhand, considering the fox had already died, most likely in the 1940s. Then someone looked up how astrakhan was made and it was so brutally disgusting that it killed all conversation stone dead and we moved on to arguing about vivisection.
I hope I speak for my entire generation, then, when I say how delighted I am to find the controversy reawakened by Jacob Rees-Mogg, along with a similarly familiar one about the sale of foie gras. Ah, the smell of ethics-napalm in the morning. It’s like being 14 all over again. This must be how boomers feel when they trawl through Facebook and find posts about the good old days, when men could be men, and women understood that when a stranger squeezed their arse they meant that in a nice way. Thrilling rage and exhilarating disbelief; these, plus maybe snakebite and black, are what lost youth smells like.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
