The froth about milkshakes…

Milkshakes. Hands up if you guessed they’d become the pressing issue of the day.

I confess that, until earlier this week, I thought I knew where I stood on the subject. Didn’t like to drink them. Wouldn’t think of throwing one. And then Nigel Farage got dosed with lactose… Just how should I feel about that?

Well, I soon learned that the offending item was a banana and salted caramel milkshake that cost £5.25 at Five Guys. The only bit which made any sense to me was the word “banana”. Meanwhile, social media was waking up to Farage’s humiliation. Many celebrated the news. Others, including myself, lamented that this was the stuff of banana (and salted caramel) republics. We debated the issue long into our coffee breaks. Was I wrong to be appalled? Was it really “just a milkshake”?

Milkshakes seem so innocent. They’re the stuff of childhood and holidays. How could anything challenging be said about a milkshake? On the other hand, there’s Farage… Mix one banana and salted caramel milkshake with one Arron and Banks-flavoured Nigel and what do we get? A dry-cleaning bill or a political crisis?

I was naïve, I admit, to enter a debate with such a pitiful sense of the issue. I thought it obvious that throwing something, however harmless, at a politician was a step too far. I feared it would pave the way to worse transgressions. Isn’t it also an admission that you’ve lost the argument, as well as making the wronged politician the sympathetic party? It certainly does nothing to elevate the cause of the person doing the throwing. It makes them look radical, even if the cause they are supporting is itself moderate.

Or so I thought…

Others challenged my reasoning and tried to convince me that I was tacitly legitimising the Far Right (leaving aside the issue of whether it is fair to consider Farage “Far Right”). According to this other and perhaps prevailing argument, egging (and by extension “milkshaking”) is an old tradition, especially in British politics where we nurture a healthy disdain for extremists of any kind. To argue that it’s tantamount to violence is simply wrong. In law, it’s vandalism rather than violence and it is certainly a false equivalency to compare it with the murder of Jo Cox. It is a way for members of the public to humiliate politicians who have themselves debased politics and it is naïve to believe that, in the case of the much-milked Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator arriving in a northern town to stir racial anger is a totally innocent party.

That’s as well as I can formulate an argument that wasn’t my own. Yet in formulating it, I also had to admit that, taken point by point, none of these statements seemed demonstrably false. This kind of protest is, as Alastair Benn rightly noted in yesterday’s Reaction newsletter, extremely old, dating back at least to the Romans. It is also true that it is considered vandalism not assault under the law. In the current context, milkshake protests have become an expression of defiance against the upsurge of the far and populist right, whose presence across the north has certainly been something other than benign.

But it is true that these acts of vandalism do escalate tensions. When Tommy Robinson had a milkshake thrown into his face in Warrington, his immediate response was to throw a series of uppercuts at the protestor. It was followed by a general melee. Milkshakes are part of the phoney war that’s currently being played out by both sides. The Far Right has long since learned that violence is counterproductive to their messaging. They goad their opponents into violence and the opponents seem only happy to oblige.

But at this point, “right” and “wrong” became hazy. We run into the argument made by Woody Allen in Manhattan when discussing the role of satire to oppose extremists. “Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.” And that, ultimately, is where these milkshake protests reach Godwin’s Law, where nothing more can be said. We are ultimately left with our own convictions. Some feel that Farage was humiliated but others say he was vindicated. The reality is that both look like victories in the eyes of their respective caucuses.

I’m now utterly fed up with thinking about milkshakes. Don’t drink them and, now, never will. The best way to defeat extremism of any kind is still through the ballot box and, more importantly, by winning the vital arguments. Yet I am willing to concede that political discourse is no longer rooted in debate. This might well be a point of inflection, but politics is already being assaulted on all fronts by ever greater acts of financial, epistemological, and psychological aggression. Our challenge is to restore order and the only way to do that is to begin where we end which is with facts and the law.

Milkshakes inflict criminal damage on a person’s property and the punishment for doing that is commensurate with the damage caused. So how “wrong” is it really to throw a milkshake at a politician? The law can answer that in terms of pounds and pence, sometimes days or weeks.

The rest, really, is froth.

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