Don’t you just hate it when in the middle of rebutting an off-the-wrist statement, someone inadvertently duplicates the same logic fart? On Twitter, home of measured debate, Ash Sarkar, Novara Media’s strange mix of intellectual muscle and self-obsessed juvenile, was busy socking it to some half-wit who suggested London – Sarkar’s manor, was replete with “no go” areas (a euphemism for minority hotspots), when she made a wild swing to knock out her opponent – a swing so clumsy it missed the mark and landed in Cornwall’s groin.
Cornwall, the Jewel of the South West and tolerant neighbour to Devon, was, she said, a no go area for her because once, while on a tour of St Just, a chocolate box village where change is measured in artistic movements not years, some imbecile drove past her and shouted, “P***, go home”. Rightly affronted, Sarkar, based on this damning piece of anecdotal evidence, instantly badged the county as a racist backwater; a boorish white monoculture she wouldn’t be revisiting any time soon.
That’s not the kind of blanket judgement she’d apply to London of course, home to psychotic acts of racial violence, self-segregated communities, and the occasional terrorist outrage, but then Cornwall is neat shorthand for everything the metropolitan Sarkar pities – an outcrop of England that’s seemingly impervious to the right kind of social change.
As a Londoner who’s sandwiched his long city life between two slices of Cornish residency, formative years and middle age, I instinctively felt aggrieved by Sarkar’s use of the county as an example of an inferior community, a degenerate place. This, in contrast to her perception of London – a metropolis she regards as relatively enlightened, cosmopolitan and welcoming of those from diverse backgrounds. The people of St Just, unlike the good folks of say, Tottenham, Stoke Newington, or Greenwich – were, in Sarkar’s eyes, Morlocks, who reacted to sightings of non-white people the way pets greet fireworks. Some uncultured, impertinent arsehole subjected Sarkar to an ugly piece of xenophobic racism, which is just what you’d expect in a place like Cornwall, a community of troglodytes.
I could understand this knee-jerk reaction in the moment, but the thought appeared to have settled in Sarkar’s usually analytical brain unchallenged. This surprised me, because I regard the self-styled luxury communist (and champion fucker, but let’s not get into that) as a thoughtful commentator who’s usually highly alert to issues like intersectional disadvantage, poverty, deindustrialisation, history, post-war social policy and demography. This, after all, is what Novara Media was constituted to talk about; it’s the lens through which they analyse the world and seek to expose intellectual vacuity and hypocrisy in political discourse. Why then, had Sarkar not considered these factors when pronouncing final judgement on Cornwall?
Perhaps she couldn’t see past the racial slur. Sure, she had no way of knowing where the people in the car that abused her were from (racism is mobile when on four wheels and can be imported from anywhere), but why not assume they were local residents who got off on abusing tourists? Isn’t that what you’d expect from a bunch of inbred fish folk?
But wait – what if the culprits were a family from Eltham, South East London on their summer holiday – a suburb of the great metropolis, that unlike Cornwall, has clocked up one infamous hate-based murder (Stephen Lawrence) and about a thousand and one incidents of race-based violence and tension? What if they were visiting family members before returning to Dartford? I’ve lived in Cornwall for a total of 6 years, and I’ve never seen a person of colour or an immigrant (we have both in Cornwall, you know) chased down the street by thugs, or mugged 20 yards from the local police station. But I’ve seen exactly that on the streets of the cutting-edge South East.
I’ve always found the Cornish to be a friendly, welcoming people, who are about as successful as any community in integrating enterprising families from abroad and other parts of the UK. I don’t live far from St Just. The surrounding area, though only populous in the nearby towns, is home to Lithuanians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Ukrainian people. No go areas for locals are defined by poor bus services not the demographic makeup of villages.
Cornwall doesn’t boast many families of colour (the total population is only 565,000 – about the same as Croydon and Camden combined), but those I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, have settled here and continue to live here, without fear or tension. The paradox, for those who imagine rural outposts of England to be backward places, in contrast to their own bustling, diverse population centres, is that a place like Cornwall integrates new arrivals without fuss or incident. London, for all its cultural magnificence, cannot say the same.
Ash Sarkar will know that Cornwall is the most impoverished part of the UK. She will also be aware that it is a neglected county – deindustrialised and reliant on tourism to survive, thanks to the indifference of successive governments.
She will know that it suits Westminster to keep Cornwall as it is – an unspoilt theme park for those looking to temporarily escape City life, because the world’s largest holiday village is a wonderful place for the cosmopolitan family and rich second homeowner. She will know, as a vocal commentator on the housing crisis, that it’s said second home ownership, coupled with depressed wages and service-driven seasonal work only available in lockstep with the tourist influx, that subjects a significant proportion of Cornish people to the exploitation of the rental market, and borderline penury.
This, one would imagine, would make Ash Sarkar a friend of Cornwall – it’s a victim of all the social injustices and metropolitan condescension that she professes to despise. As long as places like Cornwall exist, Sarkar and her colleagues at Novara will have something to talk about (though curiously, when it comes to the South West, they never do). But Ash was racially abused in Cornwall, so she won’t be going there again. She wouldn’t dignify the place with her presence. She wouldn’t touch it with yours.
People of St Just, you simple, primitive degenerates – on the assumption you harbour that racist you’ve alienated your opposite – a protean, educated, enlightened advocate for change, who otherwise might have been your champion. Now you’ll have to claw your way back to prosperity and social justice without the help of her YouTube channel.
Cornwall, though it has a small immigrant population, retains a traditional sense of identity. This does not quite equate to a monoculture; like any place insulated from change, it represents a prevailing attitude and turn of phrase, rather than a generic resident. Its social problems are not those of the city. The problem is poverty. The problem is neglect. The problem is the contempt of a commentariat that equates the place with parochial wank.
Cornwall needs modern infrastructure, investment, industry, and a new economy tailored to its unique geography, not judgement and generalisation. Of course, such changes would impact on demography. It would make Cornwall, for so long a paradise for children and retirement home for grandparents (those in-between tend to move elsewhere) an attractive location for enterprising families of colour – a place much more to Ash Sarkar’s liking.
Her approval is all a neglected people crave, after all. Well, that and good all-year-round jobs, affordable housing, integrated transport, world-class local services, 5G reception, entertainment venues, a decent Italian restaurant, a parliament, a new airport, the deportation of Rick Stein, a return to wrecking…
Opinionoid 
A Half-Cocked Defence of Phillip Schofield
I confess, he got me. Phillip Schofield was a man whose company I enjoyed in childhood. Every Saturday morning, on BBC1 from 9am to midday, Going Live set me up for the weekend. There was no kinder presence, no greater friend to children throughout the land, than the reassuring, nurturing, Phil, who affected to take an interest in the things you were interested in, and delighted with his easy charm and promise of great things to come. Double Dare. Growing Pains. It was all innocent fun as our parents dozed in the other room.
I see now that I was being groomed for Phil’s future forays into live television – This Morning being a sort of middle-aged sequel to Going Live. Despite this, I was shocked to learn that Phil had to resign because of the new civil offence of implicit nympholepsy. Schofield, we’re told, covetously plucked a teenage boy who dreamed of working in TV and fattened him to industrial maturity with the man milk of human kindness.
There’s nought wrong with mentoring an innocent lad, whose virginal purity must have marked him as unsullied in the icky world of television, moulding him to become a new Phil – a clean-cut media professional untrammelled by sexual complications. Yet Schofield, the older friend of every ’80s child, has been vilified for just this. Couldn’t Phil have just seen himself in the boy? Might he not have taken pleasure in giving him a helping hand?
Phil’s a unique pariah. In addition to the aforementioned implicit nympholepsy, he’s coined a second new offence – namely familial predisposition to minors. His brother, Timothy, was recently convicted of child rape and grooming, and the sanitised world of daytime TV shifted uneasily, wondering if Phil’s rumoured liaison with a boy on the periphery of manhood’s outer rim, sat within the same wheelhouse.
Did Timothy Schofield simply go further than his brother, a public figure, dared, or is this thematic coupling a heinous category error? Are we cynical to disbelieve Phil’s protestations that his forbidden fruit relationship with a hairless intern only took on a sexual character when the boy was old enough to drive? If the law reflects our morality, we’ve already decided that a man is not guilty of having a malfunctioning libido if he waits until his ward is old enough to be strongarmed into consenting. Sure, you say, what about the power dynamic, the cynical exploitation of the boy’s burgeoning sexuality and ambition, the squalor of the middle-aged man’s lasciviousness? It’s grubby, certainly, but relationships are complicated. Is Phil better or worse than a violent coercive controller, or a partner who’s selfishly laid waste to their betrothed hopes and dreams? I don’t know, but maybe you do.
At the time of writing, there’s no real scandal for us to salivate over. Phillip Schofield’s flesh was weak but he’s no serial rapist or necrophile. He can’t claim the mantle of ITV’s Jimmy Savile. The evidence we have suggests Phil’s crimes are of the heart. Power, it seems, went to his glans. If it remains that way, he’ll be a minnow in light entertainment’s hall of shame – an also-ran, a pretender. Rolf Harris, who thankfully died recently, molested more before breakfast. Now the nation holds its breath, waiting for Going Live’s audience members to either give up their secrets or confirm all was good when the cameras were off, and the nation ogled The Racoons.
Finally, the question of Phil’s enemies. If, by them, we shall know him, there’s a prima facie case he may not be the monster mooted. GB News’s vile, toothy, odious bitch, Dan Wootton, bloviating bore Eamonn Holmes, little Englander parody Christine Hamilton, quite possibly should have been nicked nicked a long time ago, Jim Davidson, Kim Woodburn (so why don’t we have a go?), insufferable cokehead Julie Burchill. If these are Phil’s detractors, the majority motivated to twist the knife because Schofield, in his pomp, treated them with disdain or indifference, then we can say that whatever his sexual proclivities, he’s a reasonable judge of character.
The more the reactionary mob gleefully round on Gordon the Gopher’s former assistant, the more we’re left to wonder, is the empty vessel that leant Holly Willoughby gravitas, so threadbare was she, just a dirty lying sod? How seriously can we take his guilty erections when his real offence, as far as his former TV associates are concerned, is that he found them odious?
I’m sorry, I must end there. Some breaking news just flashed up on my phone.
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on May 27, 2023 at 16:02 Leave a CommentTags: ITV, Phillip Schofield, Television, This Morning