I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them.
My classic “You can prove anything with facts” line, now much beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was in fact uttered by a driver near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on a summer Sunday morning in 1999, while the interminable “If you say you’re English these days you get arrested and thrown in jail” riff was gifted to me by a cross cabman somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green in the winter of 2013. The routines were already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen.
But the past few years have seen slimmer pickings for monetisable reactionary remarks. The average angry person has become more guarded, but the lack of censure of commonsense avatars such as Lee Anderson may, hopefully, embolden unfettered foolishness again. Last month, as we passed the concealed site of the Finsbury town hall nuclear bunker on Rosebery Avenue, a very nice, white, elderly black-cab driver took care not to assume I was heterosexual, asking me if I had a partner of either sex, and then laughing about how you have to do that these days because everything’s gone woke.
It was easy to sympathise with his perception that he wasn’t free to say anything any more, and with his feelings of being blamed for historical attitudes he felt he merely inherited, rather than created. You get old. The world moves on and you’re standing at the side of the road covered in dust and dead leaves and dog shit, agreeing with Nick Ferrari about migrants and enjoying Ricky Gervais’s After Life, while great soggy circles of leaking piss radiate out in incriminating ellipses from the fly of the cream trousers you probably shouldn’t wear any more.
My kids think that I’m reactionary because I sometimes stumble with modern gender terminology. But at their age, I was marching against the homophobic clause 28 – supported by Theresa May – and later had a theatre show picketed by the Christian far right, where tiny children handed out American evangelical comic books saying gay people were going to hell. Today’s LGBTQ+ community owe me their freedoms, but I am yet to receive any formal note of thanks or even a gift voucher.
The driver continued explaining himself as we passed the Halifax bank that I remember as the Pied Bull pub, where my derivative 80s band played its third and final gig. Things change. “I speak as I find,” he found himself saying. “If a black bloke cuts me up I shout: ‘You black bastard!’ at him. I’m not racist. If he was blue I’d shout: ‘You blue bastard!’ It’s the same.” It was at this point our views diverged.
“Yes,” I said, “but there aren’t any blue people, are there? Unless you’ve been overtaken by a Smurf on a moped. And even if you were shouting at a Smurf, calling him a ‘blue bastard’ wouldn’t be the same, because it doesn’t carry the same cultural weight. There’s no history of discrimination against blue people on the basis of their skin colour. Largely because they don’t exist.”
I liked the bloke. I found myself giving him a big tip, I think because he reminded me of my late father who, as I handed the money over in the rain, I suddenly missed dreadfully. Significantly less linguistically cautious than the cab driver, my father had once, and without even breaking a sweat, innocently conjured forth an eight-word sentence that impressively managed to be simultaneously blasphemous, sexist and racist. In fact, it was so relentlessly offensive that the woman it was shouted at probably assumed my father was not entirely well. Today, of course, she might simply assume he was just a rich and untouchable Tory donor, the grateful recipient of millions of pounds worth of NHS contracts.
Another week, and another racism scandal farts out from the dying body politic of this rotting, gaseous corpse of a Conservative government. Seeing Diane Abbott on TV makes the party’s biggest donor “want to hate all black women” and he thinks she “should be shot”. Frank Hester’s remarks were made three years after Jo Cox was actually shot by a white supremacist. But though Hester’s comments have, as usual, been described as “wrong” by any Tory MP self-abasing enough to publicly parrot the party line, they are still chasing the valuable racist vote and dare not give wealthy donors the impression their money will be unwelcome simply because their factory setting is 70s golf-club bar. The party thinks it’s time to “move on”. Be quiet now, black people, and do your work.
At Wednesday’s hotel, I encountered the Daily Telegraph at breakfast, the newspaper equivalent of finding a turd in your Frosties. Opening it, I saw it contained a column by Allison Pearson, the newspaper equivalent of discovering a horrible intestinal parasite still wriggling inside the turd that is the Daily Telegraph.
“Of course Britain is unhappy – it has been taken over by the diversity mob,” says Pearson’s headline. In a presumably deliberately disgusting sidebar the presumably deliberately disgusting columnist, who has said “compassion is the last thing these [Syrian] refugees need”, celebrates adopting a Turkish street cat, which has “a passport she hadn’t chewed up so she could pretend she had been fleeing a war zone”. Looking at Allison Pearson makes me want to hate all white women. I can say that, can’t I? Because you can certainly say it about a black woman. And when that black woman tries to speak in parliament, she will be silenced, disgracefully, while old white men assess her grievance. So in what sense, exactly, has Britain been taken over by the diversity mob?
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is at Portsmouth Kings theatre on 21 March, Cambridge Arts theatre 15-16 April, then touring until 25 April
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