The Social Acceptability List 2015

As Christmas approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT'S IN!  - Voting out the Box!

Across the UK, US and Europe, the left/right divisions are falling apart and small, sometimes esoteric, parties are finding their support base shoot up. What’s the reason for this? Well, rolling news informs us immediately of any tragic event which occurs anywhere, painting a picture of a world in the throes of disintegration; social media gives us the opportunity to react in soundbites and little more, which makes simple solutions seem reasonable; the political establishment’s acceptance of neoliberal capitalism has led to resentment over a lack of choice and growing inequality. At to that the fact that they’re all boring – those politicians –  really not what we’ve come to expect from people on TV.

Hence the rise of the charismatic, fumblingly entertaining dingbat. Boris Johnson was an early version of this new political lifeform, amusing enough to be on Have I Got News For You. Nigel Farage struck a chord by drinking pints when journalists were there. Those watching the evening news were able to look at that pint, then look down at the pint in their hands, then look back at the pint on the TV, and slowly, like a rusty cog finally slipping in to place, conclude: My God! He’s a bloke! All sorts of phantasmagorical deductions could thus be inferred about the righteousness of his policies.

Boris won the mayor prize and Farage has had some good election results here and there, but the Out of the Box Politician Version 2.0 is a more recent phenomenon, and it’s been catapulted right into the mainstream, partly as the dramatic, fairy tale ascendency of Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour gave people the opportunity to join the party on the cheap, and when they joined they brought their democratic voice. It was a voice for Corbyn, the conscientious backbencher more at home on the picket or in the protest than at the dispatch box. There’s been a severe media backlash, and the polling suggests support for Corbyn is low, but if people want a “New Type of Politics” – and these cynical bastards who hate politicians should! – it’s out there.

The next box-circulating politician to have recent gains is the Front Nationale’s Marine Le Pen, who has even wheeled out her brainwashed daughter to put a fresher face on the brand. Indeed, the Pens get prettier with every generation, and the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is so ugly that he’s been in Le penalty box since earlier this year. The Front Nationale capitalised on the recent bombings in France and did well in the 1^st round of regional elections, but the French saw more sense in round 2.

Elsewhere in Europe, fear and austerity has produced a Christmas hamper of political choice. Greece voted in the anti-austerity Syriza, and the Spanish election showcased to new parties, including Syriza’s political brethren Podemos, who did well enough to share power. On the British left you have pro-independence and anti-austerity parties of Scotland and Wales, and the ever-present-but-going nowhere voice of the Greens. At the other end of the spectrum we’ve seen the expansion of the English Defence League and Germany’s Pegida. These groups shroud themselves in the colours of patriotism in a lazy attempt to come across as something less than racist, but fail.

Whatever their political lean, a common trend is the loss of political slickness that goes with ‘centrists’ trying to appeal to the mainstream. The recent traditions of highly funded political campaigns, of spin and double-speak, are losing ground to a new bluntness, a man-in-the-pub vocabulary, and the use of social media to get the message across. The mainstream is splintered, and entropy is setting in.

Of course, the crowning achievement of the out-of-the-box mentality which has become socially acceptable in our wretched age is, of course, the Buffoon himself. He’s half man, half ape, and half asleep. He’s got the body of a man, but the mind of a foetus. True, he isn’t really socially acceptable in the UK, and perhaps not in the USA, but he is a Republican candidate, and the leading candidate at that. In many ways he is the True Republican, the spirit of the Republican Party melted down, purified and chiselled into a rich, male, blond ogre. He has, in the UK, his female accomplice – TV personality Katie Hopkins – who gets wheeled out on morning TV because audiences love to watch people they hate. Recently, a petition has sought to ban him from the UK for fear that he and Hopkins might spawn.