I was disappointed by the reaction of my fellow conservatives to gammon-gate. For those who haven’t been following this mini-scandal, it concerns the use of the word ‘gammons’ by those on the Corbyn-ite left to describe middle-aged, red-faced, pro-Brexit white men who vote Tory. According to the snowflakes of the right, this is a deeply offensive epithet that manages to be both racist and ageist.
‘This is a term based on skin colour and age — stereotyping by colour or age is wrong no matter what race, age or community,’ tweeted the DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly. Hard to disagree with that — and she could have thrown in snobbery for good measure. Gammons tend to be working-class or lower middle-class, whereas the Corbynistas who’ve embraced the term are university-educated and have a habit of dismissing ex-Labour voters as ignorant bigots. It’s also difficult to resist the mischievous glee of calling out left-wing puritans for being racist, ageist and classist when they’re so quick to accuse others of those thought crimes.
But ‘deeply offensive’? Come now. That feels like an attempt by the right to copy the left’s ploy of pretending they’re morally outraged by their opponents’ use of language to score political points. No doubt if there was some prominent left-wing journalist who’d come up with the term ‘gammon’, he or she would have been forced to issue a grovelling public apology by now and resign from their position as, say, head of diversity and inclusion at the Guardian branch of the NUJ. As someone who’s fallen foul of the left-wing thought police — and had to resign from several charities as a result — I hoped those on my side of the political divide would eschew this particular tactic.
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