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.
It was the British government’s pledge to ban the import of fur and foie gras, part of a drive to make the UK the least cruel nation in the world. This was intended as an element of our sweet sovereignty, the bliss of being emancipated from the EU. Naturally, we had the freedom to outlaw these products at any time, but let’s not get bogged down in things that are real. We wasted the past five years doing that. And now the government is thinking of ditching the pledge after opposition from within the cabinet.
The next five years are going to play out roughly like this: every day will throw up a technical hitch or a broken promise. Perhaps the promise was made with no heed to the technicalities behind it, or maybe its fulfilment was never part of the plan in the first place. It might be a huge promise, such as frictionless trade and boosted prosperity, or it might be a vague one, such as “your oranges will stay exactly the same (probably)”, or “genetically engineered food is nothing to worry your pretty head about”. Sooner or later it will be derailed, and then the Rees-Moggs and Trevelyans and Trusses of this world have two options. They can hope that we all get bored of the details and wander off. Deep down, they know that won’t happen. Even if the vast majority of us are already bored, there will always be one disgruntled remainer, looking up the side-effects of imazalil, or doing a deep dive on why the EU bans ractopamine in pigs.
Luckily, there’s an alternative: to drag every issue, from the collapsing food and drink export industry to the made-up market demand for mink, into a culture war, pitting the woke army of generation X against the boomers who’ve been radicalised by the Daily Express. All that’s required of ministers thereafter is to sit back and watch the fireworks – the explosions, hopefully, being a lot livelier and more dangerous, now we’re free of the EU and all their boring safety and whatnot. It’s so predictable, and so basic. The problem for all of us in the woke army will be staying awake.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
