There was much to enjoy about Jess Phillips’s speech on the new immigration bill defining a skilled worker as someone earning more than £30,000. As the MP for Birmingham Yardley pointed out, many people, including nurses and care workers, earn considerably less. However, while Phillips’s derision for overpaid thickos got most of the attention (“I’ve met lots of people who earn way more than £30,000 who have absolutely no discernible skills… not even one”), I was also struck by how warmly she talked about immigration.

“It sticks slightly in the craw of a person who grew up in Birmingham,” she said, “to listen to people who don’t live among migrants… talk about how difficult it is for communities to have to live in places of high migration. Well, it’s not difficult at all – it’s a total pleasure.”

This point isn’t made enough. In fact, it’s actively avoided by the kind of politicos who like to bang on about migration. The focus is nearly always on communities, especially working-class ones, hating and resenting immigrants, the bottom-of-the-food-chain blame-game that working-class people are supposed to be ceaselessly engaged in. Which of course does go on, as do many essential debates about the effects of migration.

What sticks in my craw, as someone who grew up in such a community, is how automatically it’s accepted that the working classes are inherently racist. It’s not only a presumed racism, but almost a tolerated one (“Oh those poor uneducated people!”). After Brexit, this “racist working-class” narrative was doomed to become even more entrenched, not as an opinion, or a hunch, but as fact. Damn cheek!

Isn’t it possible, by contrast, that working-class people are probably the least likely to be racist? Whose communities are more likely to have received large numbers of migrants? Who is more likely to have grown up among migrants, gone to school with them? Conversely, even in big cities, who’s more likely to live in areas so expensive and exclusive that they serve as unofficial gated communities – or to think that integration is their child mixing with others at cello practice?

While there are many complex layers to migration, let’s focus on this one: the working classes tend to live much more closely with immigrants. So, of course there will be more fighting, more resentment, even more racism, but there will also be more love, friendships, relationships, marriages, children. There will just be more of everything – the good stuff and the bad.

We like to tell ourselves comforting stories about who we are; perhaps some middle-class people tell themselves that the working classes are more likely (than, say, they are) to be racist. However, in this arena, the middle classes have rarely been tested as the working classes have been. In many places, populations have changed hugely. And, despite the horror stories, many have liked the change. And, as well as liking it, they have truly lived it.

It’s time to scrap Clarkson’s clapped-out rust bucket

Not so funny: The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime Photograph: Ellis O’Brien/Amazon

Time to tell Jeremy Clarkson and his giggling Mean Girls, Richard Hammond and James May, that they’ve had a good run with their non-PC/petrolhead routine, but the game is up.

Singer Will Young has complained about the casual homophobia expressed during Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour. One “joke” was about the term LGBT. “Lesbian, bacon, transgender?” mused Clarkson (ho and, indeed, ho).

If it’s not constant bizarre fretting about gay people – one wonders, not for the first time, what psychoanalysts might make of this? – it’s snickering xenophobia.

Sure, it’s offensive, but it’s also lame. Political correctness is supposed to be tiring, but really tiring is stuff such as this – painful, anachronistic drivel that’s about as edifying as watching middle-aged men caper around a multistorey car park making their armpits fart.

As has been pointed out, The Grand Tour was promoted as the uncensored Top Gear – a brave new (BBC-unfettered) world of man-talk and vroom-vrooms. Yet here we find ourselves, in the rarefied bants-realms of “lesbian, bacon, transgender”.

If people big themselves up as non-PC freedom warriors, they’d better deliver more than the cultural equivalent of a 1970s stag do double-booked with a Freemasons’ ball. Time to pull over, chaps – you’re running on empty.

You need more than a kazoo to defeat a culture of smoking

Don Draper kazooed by Cignature Films. Photograph: Cignature Films

A production company has replaced screen characters’ cigarettes with kazoos on its website. Don Draper from Mad Men has been kazooed and there are plans to kazoo other characters from The Godfather and Fight Club (“The first rule of Kazoo Club is that nobody talks about Kazoo Club”?). Those behind the drolly titled Cignature Films (which comes courtesy of MSCHF Internet Studios) were shocked that the number of “tobacco incidents” on screen had increased from 2010 to 2016 (after years of decline) and by how this continues to inspire young smokers.

It seems commonplace now for new dramas to be set at a time when people would not only have smoked but chain-smoked. Characters can be seen blithely “chaining fags” indoors, at home, in restaurants or at work in a way that ensures that smoking continues to be covertly popularised and glamorised, even to the point of stealth advertising.

After writing all that, I’m gasping for a fag. In fact, reactions like mine are part of the problem. Former smokers are divided into those who hate cigarettes with an evangelical zeal and those, like me, who gave up because they had acquired The Fear, after starting to cough, wheeze and creak like a broken concertina every morning.

The latter category would have an irrational, nostalgic fondness for smoking and smokers (my people!) without needing any prompting from Don Draper.

The kazoos are a cute idea, though in my puffing heyday I was usually so drunk I might not have noticed my fag had been replaced by a kazoo. The point is that Cignature Films is right to highlight this health threat. However, as it probably already realises, this isn’t just about smoking. It’s also about a smoking culture – on screen yes, but also in everything from songs to literature. You can’t fight all that with a kazoo.

• Barbara Allen is an Observer columnist