23 May 2019
Yobbo-Flavoured
‘Ludic’ milkshakes.
By Lynda Goetz
“You’ve let yourselves down badly; you’ve behaved like animals!” No, not the words of someone recently addressing the crowds shouting down a Brexit Party or UKIP campaigner, but someone addressing the pro-hunt campaigners in Rhyl in 2001, one of whom threw an egg at John Prescott – who in turn threw a punch; an incident which seems to have gone down in the collective public memory.
The concept of throwing food at politicians is not a modern phenomenon. According to Suetonius, Roman Emperor Vespasian was apparently pelted with turnips on one occasion. Throwing eggs, tomatoes or rotten fruit has long been a way to signal disapproval or anger, whether that be with bad actors, useless politicians or petty criminals in the stocks. In many parts of the world, particularly in Arab countries, throwing shoes as an insult dates back at least as far as the Old Testament, where it is mentioned in Psalm 108:9. In more recent times, President Bush had shoes thrown at him at a press conference in 2008 in Baghdad. The more recent choice of flavoured milkshake seems to be reserved for politicians perceived, by the throwers at least, to be Right-wing. Is this behaviour just ‘playful’ in the tradition of custard-pie throwing, as The Guardian columnist Zoe Williams suggested on the Radio 4 PM Programme on Monday afternoon or is it unacceptable?
I would suggest that using an action which is essentially violent, even if the net result is only damage to clothing and the ego, indicates the inability to debate, discuss or reason, rather like answering an argument with some sort of expletive. This was also the view of MP Anna Soubry, in the PM studio on Monday afternoon discussing the subject with Ms Williams, following the ‘milkshaking’ of Nigel Farage in Newcastle earlier in the day. Ms Soubry is not someone whose opinions I usually share; I also find her way of expressing them frequently more than a little overbearing. On this occasion, I have to say, I was firmly on her side.
Throwing milkshakes at people of whom you don’t approve is infantile and not the joke which Zoe Williams claimed it was. Having accused Anna Soubry of pompous language for applying the word ‘twaddle’ to her arguments, the journalist then went on to posit that there was a space in politics for “ludic, ironic, sensibility in which people who are kind of poisoning discourse are kind of laughed at.” ‘Ludic, ironic sensibility’; what on earth does that mean? Yes, yes, I understand that ludic means playful, but those three words together when applied to chucking ‘dairy products’ (as Ms Williams kept insisting on calling them) at politicians, make no sense at all and sound far more pompous than anything Ms Soubry said on that occasion. The intimation that since discourse is being ‘poisoned’ by those who take a Right-wing – as opposed to a Left-wing – view it is therefore fine to humiliate them seems odd, given the reaction to the egging of Jeremy Corbyn earlier this year.*
The word ‘ludic’ is defined, in the online Oxford dictionary, as ‘showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness’. Since the milkshake in Newcastle was clearly directed at Nigel Farage, this would appear to make the word Ms Williams seemed to so enjoy repeating not particularly appropriate. Nor, I suspect, on this occasion was the gesture spontaneous; unlike the first chucker of liquid dairy product** who is said to have done it ‘because it was what he had to hand’. It has apparently since come to be the weapon of choice for those who oppose the ‘far-Right’. There are suggestions that it has turned a symbol used by the ‘alt-right’ (namely milk – symbolizing whiteness) on its head, by using that same substance to humiliate politicians perceived as Right-wing. Once again however, the liberal left, represented in Monday’s discussion by The Guardian journalist, seems to regard such behaviour as acceptable when applied to those whom they regard as unacceptable. This is in many ways in the same vein as no-platforming and other ‘non-violent’ ways of silencing opponents.
What all this does quite simply is to debase politics and democracy and reduce it to the lowest common denominator. At the end of the PM interview, Evan Davies, having thanked his guests, said it was interesting how these incidents divided people, ‘mainstream people think it’s absolutely fine and some think it’s absolutely atrocious’. So just what does he mean by ‘mainstream people’, and is he right? Many used to think it was fine as an afternoon’s entertainment to go and watch a hanging. Fortunately as ‘civilisation’ has progressed, we no longer find this acceptable. Surely as we are all now so much more educated, enlightened and ‘woke’ than we were even a few years ago, we should not find an unpleasant and infantile act like throwing milkshakes over people because we disagree with their point of view in any way defensible? The milkshake, as Nigel Farage said, was distinctly ‘yobbo-flavoured’.
*Mr Corbyn was seriously unamused and the perpetrator was imprisoned for a month.
**Danyaal Mahmud who threw it at Tommy Robinson (who by most people’s standards is definitely Right-wing).
