Working Class Zeroes 16 - The Tame Gammons

Picture David Attenborough concealed in dense shrubbery, peeking through fronds at the camera.

‘The tame gammon is a small but hardy species. Largely displaced from its former habitats, the great prairies of the trade union movement and the Labour Party, by the healthier and better-adapted lanyardus semiposhus, and rejected by its fellow gammon, it now exists as a sub-group, indulged by its stronger successors for reasons of kinship and resource sharing. In the new progressive enclosures, stronger individuals tolerate such subordinates, for group hunting and defence benefits. The tame gammon lives by mimicking the signals of the dominant species, puffing out its chest and bellowing in a crude approximation of the original. But though this loud noise can sound alarming, it is its death cry, for it survives now only on the internet.’

Today’s entry is a slightly unusual one, as I’m focussing my lens not on to an individual, but a type. I did consider isolating just one of them out from their small but significant breed, but realised I’d have to bring in the others, like a collie rounding up sheep. Okay, that’s enough animal metaphors.

I’m talking about the white working class old ‘lads’ that it’s permitted for progressives to like. I’m going to take you on a whistle-stop tour with four examples, and hopefully build up a picture that will make a wider, unifying point.

Amusingly, progressives are always banging on about the working class, ‘lifting’ people ‘out of poverty’, etc. But there are evidently far fewer actual working class people in politics today than before, and the numbers in progressive politics are laughably rare. We can see this from the fact that it took quite a lot of time and thought on my part to compile just 25 Working Class Zeroes, whereas the list of Middle Class Holes was a struggle to cut down to 50, and just keeps getting longer and longer. (In fact, there is now such an accretion of extra candidates that the planned round-up/‘overflow room’ of Middle Class Holes is going to have to become a whole, fully-fledged second series.)

The tame gammons can only survive through the patronage of their betters. While many of the Zeroes have gravitated towards progressivism because mouthing its pieties is the done thing to advance their status, these lads - and it is all lads - express them in the crude and direct style of their ‘authentic’ street-level gammonicity. They are the Sleaford Mods in social media form, flapping their flippers together on cue - oh damn, another animal metaphor - to be rewarded with the fresh fish of enthusiastic ‘jolly well done salty old you, gosh what rustic vigour!’ retweets.

Whereas characters like Banksy and Jess Phillips have to muddy up their public images, the tame gammons are the real deal. Every town had one of these people when I was growing up; the big lairy old unit in a footie shirt aligned with the silliest of semi-posh causes. Tellingly, none of the current contenders are under fifty. This may well be a disappearing strain.

First on the list? Let’s meet The Artist Taxi Driver aka ‘Chunky’ Mark McGowan, born 1964, who combines the careers of taxi driver and ‘anti-establishment’ painter and performance artist, to the delight of his 112,000 Twitter followers. As we have seen, progressives (think Stewart Lee) have a horror of taxi drivers, or at least the old-fashioned white ones. So McGowan provides an extra thrill for them, delivering time-worn Marxist boilerplate in the thrilling vernacular of a gammon. He is what your average Cardiff Uni communist society convenor fantasises the working class to be.