The staggering ignorance of the know-it-all Remainers

It takes a particular form of pomposity to make Jacob Rees-Mogg look down-to-earth, however Remainer commentator Marina Purkiss managed to do exactly that final night time, throughout a car-crash interview with Rees-Mogg on his GB Information present.

I am now ten minutes late for work
pic.twitter.com/v0vjDyFS98

— Jeremy Vine (@theJeremyVine) April 26, 2023

For these unfamiliar with Purkiss, she has develop into one thing of an #FBPE influencer in recent times, racking up a whole bunch of 1000’s of followers. She seems often on daytime-TV panel reveals and is a bunch on Byline TV (the audio-visual spin-off of the conspiratorial Byline Instances). She is the form of one who thinks she is ‘holding the federal government to account’ by sharing hysterical threads on Twitter.

In her interview with Rees-Mogg, which has since gone viral, Purkiss sounded off about the whole lot from the tradition conflict to Brexit to the cost-of-living disaster. She clearly thinks she’s figured all of it out. Every part unhealthy, she proclaimed, is the fault of the Tories and / or Brexit. The world may simply be a greater place, she appears to suppose, if solely the federal government stopped ‘distracting us’ with the tradition conflict and stopped telling us so many lies. To name this a sixth-formerish understanding of politics could be ungenerous in direction of the nation’s sixth-formers.

Predictably, she has no time for freedom of speech or for debate. Every time Rees-Mogg urged that the best to talk and be heard is perhaps vital, and never some culture-war distraction, she responded with a flat ‘No’. ‘Freedom of speech… received’t put meals on the desk’, she insisted. ‘You inform me how freedom of speech goes to make individuals’s lives higher on this nation, after it’s been decimated by issues like your Brexit’, she proclaimed indignantly. She is seemingly unaware of the polls displaying the large numbers of strange people who find themselves terrified of the creep of censorship.

On the tradition conflict, Purkiss desires to have her cake and eat it. The likes of Roald Dahl shouldn’t be rewritten, she conceded final night time. However she additionally appears to suppose we shouldn’t communicate out about these acts of censorship after they occur. Why? As a result of doing so would assist the Tories of their nefarious marketing campaign to distract us from all of the ‘actual’ points.

In a single astonishing second, she raised the latest renaming of Black Boy Lane in Haringey, north London. Believing she had discovered a profitable line, she insisted that ‘When you had a road named White Trash you would possibly wish to rename it’. Why Purkiss considers ‘black boy’ to be a slur on a par with ‘white trash’ was by no means made clear.

Each time Rees-Mogg tried to catch his breath, she accused him of mendacity. He’s a ‘con man’, who ‘makes use of [his] platform to mislead individuals’, she mentioned. ‘Do you imagine your lies?’, she requested him, incredulously. ‘What you lot are doing in authorities is disgusting. You lie and also you lie, and also you’ve acquired no contrition for what you’ve finished to individuals.’ For Purkiss, politics is straightforward. It’s a contest between good individuals who inform the reality, and unhealthy individuals who inform lies. ‘I simply realised I used to be an honest individual’, she mentioned of her personal political awakening.

Though Purkiss little doubt sees herself as a valiant truth-teller, a slayer of Brexiteer lies, she is herself susceptible to spreading misinformation. A few of her claims within the interview had been downright outlandish – akin to her factoid that the UK has the ‘highest vitality prices on the planet’. Anybody following the vitality disaster will know that Germany’s costs are far larger than Britain’s (and have been for a while). Then she accused Rees-Mogg of cherry-picking inflation information to downplay the prices of Brexit. However as Rees-Mogg appropriately identified, UK inflation is presently no worse than within the EU. Purkiss apparently confuses the silliest and most simply debunked Remoaner speaking factors for cast-iron info.

Strangest of all is that Purkiss appears to be proud of her performance final night time. Actually, the #FBPE set has been cheering her to the rafters because the interview. LBC’s James O’Brien appears to suppose she dismantled Rees-Mogg with ‘consummate ease’. Stay marketing campaign group Greatest for Britain has lauded her ‘full, joyous destruction’ of the Tory MP. Clearly, within the minds of the midwitted Remainers, Purkiss’s shrill, uninformed pronouncements are what passes for smart political critique.

As for the remainder of us, this car-crash interview revealed the staggering ignorance, and vanity, of know-it-all Remainers. It’s time all of us stopped taking these individuals so severely.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Observe him on Twitter: @FraserMyers