"Convey the complexity"

It has been a very odd 48 hours here in Northern Ireland, with the London-centric media in a frenzied state of simultaneous amnesia and horror at the possibility of the weakened Conservative Party striking an arrangement with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. (I have to declare an interest here for those who are unaware, they've been a regular client of mine for 20 years). The DUP have just won 10 seats in Westminster, their highest-ever total, and the Conservatives now need them onside.

Amnesia because numerous previous Labour administrations have approached the DUP with similar overtures, horror because Northern Ireland is meant to be kept in the back room like the crazy elderly relative that nobody wants to admit is part of the family but who they’re forced to put up with at occasional awkward gatherings. To the GB population, Northern Ireland is thought to be ‘fixed’ and so has therefore ‘gone away’. Yet here the DUP are, thrust centre stage, in an unprecedented position and with significant influence. Cue outrage from the self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ media talking heads.

The reaction by some mainstream journalists has been pretty appalling. A glance through Twitter will show that. Some whose views I don’t always agree with, but whose professionalism up until now I have admired, have gone far beyond acceptable limits to smear and blacken not only the DUP but by implication the DUP electorate. It is a hairsbreadth from Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ remarks of last year. And even plenty of non-DUP, and even anti-DUP, folk I know have been taken aback by the barrage. Meanwhile my GB relatives are swallowing all of this up and are messaging my wife with well-meaning expressions of concern!

My mother worked in a factory, my father has worked two jobs his whole life, their parents lived off the land and from their grandparents back all of their ancestors had been tenant farmers for as many centuries as we know about. So I have a fair streak of working class in my bones and my sense of identity. Yes I am now 'white collar' and ‘creative industry’, but I can handle a clawhammer, a handsaw, a shovel and a cement mixer. But this new metropolitan authoritarian Left is a vicious beast - as shown by Emily Thornberry in 2014 and prior to that by Gordon Brown in 2010. Owen Jones, once the defender of England’s underclass in his 2012 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, and who was in 2015 pro-Brexit, has now turned against both.

Nobody is perfect. Everybody's history will throw up something which today seems at best distasteful. As I type some header on the BBC NI Talkback phone-in programme has alleged the DUP to be anti-Black racists. The madness is contagious.

Ulster is not the only place to suffer from convenient stereotyping. Appalachia is very much the same. Here is an excellent article, by Tom Porter of Bowdoin College in Maine, outlining the endless challenge for Appalachians to present themselves and their region in an authentic manner, and in so doing debunking the metropolitan stereotypes.

… The most important consideration though, said McCarroll, is not whether a film portrays the region she’s from in a positive light, but whether it’s able to convey the complexity of Appalachia and offer a true context...

• PS the excellent Brendan O’Neill, the self-described ‘Libertarian Marxist’ editor of Spiked Online, has just posted this excellent article on the subject. The image above is from that article.