The recent furore about the men only Garrick Club (I’m not going to call it a gentlemen’s club, because I prefer using ‘men only’ with all the sleaze that entails) didn’t surprise me in the least. What surprised me was that it wasn’t occupied, burnt to the ground or pulled down the next day. Every single one of their members should have been named and shamed and forced to admit what exactly they had done to promote their toff agenda (a toff agenda based on silver-spoon privilege and designed to slip into every aspect of society). We are a supine lot, aren’t we? Based on the last fourteen years, swing voters and their lickspittles seemed to completely believe in the whole levelling up project whose mantra may as well have been: ‘we’re all in this together’. Meanwhile members of the Tory Party, high society and the Garrick Club stared at those believers in ruling class egalitarianism and said, you utter idiots, you naive arseholes, you stupid fuckers. Their attitude so obviously along the lines of this: “We do what we want. We’ll continue to produce an army of nepo babies to stick to our agenda of making everyone in the arts as money focussed and apolitical as possible. We’ll influence our members in banking, the judiciary, the press, and make sure the kind of society we want remains racist, sexist and as patriarchal as possible. Sure, we’ll make the right liberal noises when we have to, but be assured our fingers will be crossed, smirks fixed in place and cocks firmly pocketed. We do what want. With our friends in all the other clubs in London, our friends in government, our friends in every stratum of society. Democracy operates on our say so, in the way we want. We don’t let anything happen that casts too much doubt on the status quo that we spent years developing and honing. Eton, Harrow, Oxbridge et al, all operate to produce the people who will mind the tiller. The English tiller that’s been set in place for hundreds of years, while the enemy within and those not like us are employed below decks to do the graft. Never mind minimum wage. Never mind going on strike. And never mind all the benefits our members have enjoyed on the sweat of your labour, hard-work and sacrifice. Never forget: we do what we want”. And yet the swinging portion of our vastly stupid electorate continue to believe we’re all in this together as schools fall to bits, the NHS exercises its new catchphrase: no room at the inn, credit continues to crunch and Brexitania floats away on a tide of shit. The Garrick and all their mates have got it sewn up. They’ve had it sewn up for years. I don’t know why it’s taken so long for some people to understand this.