I feel sorry for Theresa May. And that Rudd one, who looks like she is wearing a rubber Halloween mask based on her own face. What if, because you were all going on about how great Ukip were, and how Nigel Farage was only saying what people had been thinking all along, and all these people coming over here, May and Rudd thought you wanted them to be racist too, like you are? And so back in 2013, to please you, they did some racism, and wrote racist stuff on racist vans and drove them around laughing.
And in so doing, May furthered the creation of The Hostile Environment, which sounds like an irradiated wasteland where teenage amazons get sent to die in The Hunger Games. May probably wasn’t really all that racist herself, and only did the racism because she thought you wanted it, you racists.
And now look what’s happened. Last week Mrs May spilt a massive silver tureen of hot sticky racism right into the laps of diners at the Commonwealth Heads of Government slap-up supper, leaving the poor old Queen to get down on her knees between Andrew Holness’s Jamaican knees and sponge up all the racist mess herself: “Never mind Theresa, it’s probably best if I do it. You’ve done enough.”
When the royal family, their 1930s Nazi sympathies now walled up in a sealed room at Windsor Castle, are your secret weapon for papering over the racist cracks, you know you’re in trouble. But Prince Philip’s embarrassing colonialist gaffes of old seem now like the charming handmade racist woodcuts of a delightful artisanal bigot, compared with the mechanised Model T Ford production line racism of the current government. May’s industrialised prejudice, a vast Amazon.com of nastiness, aimed to put the corner shop snug-bar Ukip supporter out of business. And suddenly, small-time racists everywhere are nostalgic for the days before racism went mainstream.
Franz Kafka’s novels of bureaucracy gone mad have given us the adjective Kafkaesque, without which it would be impossible to describe the experience of being billed twice as two slightly different addressees by British Gas; and then, when threatened with the bailiffs for not paying the bill of an address that didn’t exist, finding the best way out of the situation was to pretend on the phone to be an old confused pensioner who had forgotten his own name, while your wife pretends to be his carer, who doesn’t speak English as a first language. There was no 12b Shanley Road. It was “basement flat, 12 Shanley Road”. And I am not 84 and senile. My wife is not Latvian.
But this was not my most Kafkaesque situation. In Prague last summer, having booked four tickets online to visit the Kafka museum, and then finding they had been issued with the name Kafka on them instead of Lee, the guide advised us to pretend to be the Kafka family named on the ticket, to save time, and to satirise administrative incompetence as a celebration of dead Kafka himself. How we laughed. The children, three and six, could not have enjoyed their tour of the dimly lit literary tomb, with its morbidly fading handwritten letters and projected images of death, more.
An American family called Kafka arrived soon after us, visiting their distant relatives’ home town, and were denied entry, as their tickets bore our name, until the guide came out and advised them to pretend to be us. This was undoubtedly the most Kafkaesque situation any of us had ever been in, and we all had a good laugh about it in the cafe afterwards, before becoming fixated on the absurdity of existence and crawling away on our bellies to die. To die like dogs.
In Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque novel The Trial, which no one has ever read, the protagonist Danny K makes a complaint about two arresting officers, whose treatment of him, eating his breakfast and trying to steal his clothes, he felt was unfair. The next day Danny opens a store cupboard at work to find the officers being flogged for his benefit, but far more violently than he would have hoped. Danny protests, but the flogger explains that K had set wheels in motion.
Likewise, it now appears you didn’t want May and Rudd to be too racist after all, and now there’s all this unpleasantness, old guys homeless and living in storage units, and old ladies told to pack their bags, and no medical treatment for pensioners who paid in for decades. But that wasn’t what you wanted at all, was it, you racists?
Deporting and depriving those nice old black people who have been here for ever was wrong. And when they came for that Canadian dinner lady in Wolverhampton, who was actually white, and told her to go home as life in Britain was about to become “increasingly difficult” for her, that was definitely too much.
How could someone who had lived in Wolverhampton for 47 years, breathing toxic smog, dancing to Slade, and eating only faggots and peas, be expected to readjust to the land of clean mountain air, the thoughtful roots rock of the Tragically Hip, and light and fluffy blueberry muffins? It is inhumane.
No, it wasn’t the dinner lady and the nice black family from the electrical shop who had to go. It was the other foreigners. The bad ones, who scrounge and steal and are lazy. Not the ones that were like people you knew, harmless tropical fish caught in a dragnet sweeping for sharks. It’s the anonymous parade of frightening brown faces on that Vote Leave poster. They’re the bad ones.
Tough British cheddar. You stoked this hate volcano, racists. And now it has exploded all over your front garden and melted your Ford Focus. Is this what you wanted?
Stewart Lee appears in benefit shows for Action On Hearing Loss, at London’s Museum of Happiness on 18 May, and for South London Cares, at the Leicester Square theatre on 13 June, the latter with Carl Donnelly, Athena Kugblenu, Arnold Brown and Bridget Christie