You can hear, even from a great distance, that some arguments have a hot, intractable core that won’t be easily cooled, in the same way that you can tell by watching a pub fight whether it is about a fraternal betrayal or somebody spilling something. The fracas over the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s punchy jerk rice – which led the Labour MP Dawn Butler to tweet: “Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop” – is just such a row.

Oliver fans forced themselves awake. Which bit of his rice is wrong, again? That he would use seasoning that originated in another culture; that he would get the seasoning wrong; or that he would misapply it to the wrong ingredient, “jerk” being intended for meat, not rice? What do the liberals want? Where was Butler when he started using mostarda di frutta on pasta? Won’t someone think of the Italians? “And what about tea?”, added the contrarians. “Is that cultural appropriation? Now we’ve appropriated it, is anyone else drinking it appropriating it back off us?” The untrained observer, arriving from space, would assume we were a nation that furiously and irrationally loved, or hated, Oliver, whereupon discussing him at all itself becomes an act of cultural appropriation. But that’s not really what’s going on.

If you never borrow anything, that is a creed of insularity and parochialism. Because this is an easy point to score, a lot of people are coming in to bat for Oliver who wouldn’t go near his jerk rice with a 10-ft spoon, and never tasted his jollof rice either, with which he doubly insulted an entire continent in 2014, making it nothing like it was supposed to taste, and clumsily attributing it to Ghana when its origins are contested. It was like going in to a Greek restaurant and ordering a Turkish coffee, except multiplied by 17 and offering to make it yourself, with cloves.

But what people are angry about isn’t the homely cross-pollination of one tasty thing with another, but that a person who is already minted is making a load of money out of a bastardised version of something, while the people who eat the authentic dish make diddly-squat from it. It is just another inequality story, bursting through the social skin like a pimple. We’ll squeeze it for a bit, it will hurt, some gunk will come out. The underlying conditions will remain unchanged, until a fresh boil erupts, maybe when Jeremy Paxman launches his own street-style label.

What is illuminating is that all this illustrates the point made a decade ago in the book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better that inequality is bad for everyone; it makes everyone angrier, rich and poor; everyone’s mental health declines, whatever their class. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the book’s authors, were never great speculators on why this should be, preferring not to muddy their clear epidemiological evidence with conjecture. But you can understand on a gut level why it might adversely affect all of us. Oliver probably does not wake up thinking of himself as emblematic of a rigged system. If all debate about equality is refracted through individuals, then nobody is culpable enough to stand for the injustice of privilege, and if you want to represent the underdog, you have to be so oppressed yourself that you are almost dead. Personal credentials become the beginning and end of a battle that cannot be won on that territory. A tranche of opinion will conclude that the debate is too tedious to bother with, or, as Peter York once archly said: “I’m just waiting for Gardeners’ Question Time to start talking about the inequality between my wisteria and my hydrangeas.”

I don’t have the answer, by the way: but I know it won’t be resolved by rice, and it would help if the super-rich tried superhumanly hard not to be jerks.

Is Michael Gove barking up the right tree?



Michael Gove is not the go-to politician if your main issue is puppies – shortly after his stand against dog “punishment collars” (remote-controlled collars that allow you to blast your dog with an electric shock or, more commonly, cold air when it misbehaves), he went back on the idea of a ban. Now, though, he has come out against puppy farms. He will find few people who won’t support him in this: however much you distrust him and despair of his Singapore-in-the-channel vision for Britain, you must despise more anyone who would malnourish a puppy for cash. If there is one thing besides Bake Off we could all sign up to, surely this would be it?

Gove, like Boris Johnson, has seemingly turned to Facebook for intel on how to make himself seem leaderly, except his dog whistle is not Islamophobia but real dogs. There is a peculiar quality to the animal-rights activism on Facebook. You would think it would be fluffy because animals are, but it often ends up in a peculiar place, calling for the death penalty for unscrupulous puppy-farm owners or old testament revival justice, where people who leave dogs in hot cars are, themselves, locked in hot cars.

The great boon of pup-rights is that they can’t easily be aligned politically, so people who wouldn’t be happy with far-right overtones, or those of the left, can settle snugly into some righteous wrath that doesn’t involve smashing their neighbours’ windows. This is the happy place of the modern Tory moderate: all the energy and zeal of communal rage, but none of the unfortunate and ugly ethno-nationalism.

The only problem is that anger is not politically constructive: some spleen is inevitable, but only as a side-dish. For generative social vision, you may have to look somewhere other than social media.

No deal: how the euro has become the talk of British holidaymakers



“Imagine how cheap that would have been, before June 2016 …” This is the staple holiday conversation, replicated by every Brit in the eurozone, every seven minutes, sometimes modified by the odd: “Well, that would still have been expensive, even when you got €1.39 to the £1”, and culminating in the regular explosion: “One to bloody one! We might as well have gone to Sweden and spent five quid on an apple.” Many things could change the weather, when autumn comes: the publication of the no-deal Armageddon scenarios may bring MPs to their senses. But these adventures in Carrefour, getting pointlessly mugged to no one’s benefit, will supply an interesting background dirge.