If you’re stupid enough to let all these people in, at least treat them decently

We were on our way to a party in south-east London when my friend, Rob, saw the graffiti. Sprayed with painful neatness on a wall: ‘Support Jeremy’. It suited the area so well — a small quadrant of our capital city that the inhabitants I dare say still think is ‘edgy’, even now after they’ve got rid of all the blacks and the white working class by pricing them out of the market. Artisan bread shops and ‘community’ pubs and vegetarian cafés.

Whereas once the occupants of this enclave were engaged in actual work — plumbers, electricians, drug dealers etc. — now I would wager almost all of them get their wages from you via grants and the NHS and what have you. They are the relentlessly politically aware middle-class white people who have swarmed into the Labour party and are forever demanding something called ‘change’. The graffiti could have been better only if the writer had possessed the balls and the time to write what he or she really felt, to wit: ‘Oh do please support Jeremy.’ You have to say, that as furious political injunctions go, ‘Support Jeremy’ is a little less than compelling. Can you imagine them howling it from the burning barricades?

But as I say, that’s the area for you. A few years back I was at a non-league football match nearby, in an even more gentrified neighbourhood. The graffiti on the toilet wall read: ‘Palace run from Millwall who, in turn, run from Hamlet.’ It’s that ‘in turn’ that gives the game away, isn’t it? Well-spoken graffiti, with punctuation, written by people who have nothing whatsoever to moan about.