Get your hankies ready, for I am here to share a story of woe and oppression. The nation’s truly subjugated minority, affluent middle-aged white men in the shires who turn pink with rage at the thought of immigrants or taxes, are under siege. Golf clubs across the land abound with dark mutterings: you can’t even racially abuse Diane Abbott on Twitter, or call for Muslims to be deported, without the fascist left crushing your rights and freedoms by disapproving of things you’ve said. But the cruellest oppression since Jim Davidson left his prime-time Big Break slot has come to pass: the left are now calling socially reactionary, affluent England “gammon”.

Twitter abounds with rightwing accounts spewing abuse, coupled with threats of violence and death, towards lefties

“Gammon” is a slur and an outrage. But the gammonery have a champion: the DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly says that “this is a term based on skin colour & age – stereotyping by colour or age is wrong no matter what race, age or community. It’s just wrong.” I, for one, welcome the DUP as our nation’s guardians against bigotry. Some would say that a party whose leading figures call homosexuality “disgusting, loathsome, nauseating, wicked and vile”, an “abomination” to be “cured”, or that it is “pretty repulsed by gay and lesbianism”, might be on shaky grounds on the whole bigotry topic, but not I! What else can affluent white men depend on to champion their rights, other than centuries of accumulated privilege and a society systematically rigged in their favour?

The Times has already kickstarted a genre of article which, I regret to inform you, you will be thoroughly acquainted with over the coming weeks: why using the term “gammon” is indicative of hateful leftwing bigotry. The term might tickle Corbynistas but it will help condemn Labour to defeat, we are solemnly warned, as we seamlessly move from a media narrative of “Twitter is an echo chamber” to “a Twitter in-joke will doom the Labour party”. Ironically, the term was actually popularised by staunchly anti-Brexit centrist types. They seemed to have got irritated by repeatedly being called enemies of the people, saboteurs and remoaners on the front pages of several newspapers, and decided to mock their most hardened detractors. Since then, leftist Twitter accounts have taken it on with joyous abandon.

Gammon is a racist slur, we are told. Let me put this gently: affluent white men with reactionary opinions are not a race. White people mocking other white people over their skin colour is not racism. Inherent in the term is how a certain type of golf-club bore can go somewhere between a shade of pink and crimson red as they froth about gays having more rights than them these days, and only Jacob Rees-Mogg can be trusted to deal with the remoaners and leftie terrorist supporters. It is a term about political views and how they are expressed.

Reactionary affluent white men are not being harassed by police officers, disproportionately driven into poverty and precarious work, systematically underrepresented in political and public life, or threatened with deportation. “Gammon” is punching up in a way that, say, “chavs” is punching down. That rightwingers are now pushing the use of the word “gammon” as racism is age-old example of how the privileged crave a sense of persecution, that they can target genuinely oppressed minorities while claiming they are the real victims.

Is it offensive to call ruddy-faced middle-aged Tories 'gammons'? Read more

And there is another point, too. The mainstream media can systematically label its opponents as traitors, enemies of the people, Trots and terrorist sympathisers. It can whip up bigotry against Muslims, immigrants and refugees based on myths, distortions and outright lies, all with a consequent rise in hate crimes on the street. A Tory cabinet minister can brand Momentum “neo-fascists” in the House of Commons. A Tory MP, Nicholas Soames, can label me “an appalling little shit weasel”. A leading respectable Financial Times columnist can call Corbyn supporters “thick as pigshit”. Twitter can abound with rightwing accounts spewing homophobic, misogynistic and racist abuse, coupled with threats of violence and death, towards lefties. But as soon as lefties invent a jokey term of mockery about their most reactionary antagonists, the commentariat have to usher a lofty pronouncement that the ghastly left are being abusive again. The left can be derided as easily offended “snowflakes”, but also condemned for hurting the feelings of gay-hating, immigrant-bashing, left-reviling affluent white men by calling them “gammon”. It’s also worth noting that the media demands that we treat rightwing views, including bigotry, as “legitimate grievances”: while the left can be treated as a delusional, cultist rabble.

Perhaps the game is to bog the left down in never-ending arguments about completely pointless subjects and if so then boy have I been played. The right is certainly waging a culture war, and our best bet is to change the conversation. But it needs to be said: it is the crybullies of the right who have poisoned our nation’s political discourse, and no howls over meat product-based terms of mockery on Twitter are going to alter that basic fact.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist