Land of dopes and culture warring: Is Dan Wootton the world's biggest Land of Hope & Glory fan?
Land of dopes and culture warring: Is Dan Wootton the world's biggest Land of Hope & Glory fan?
...with his Edward Elgar arse tattoo. Or is he just a deeply unpleasant gob on a stick?
There is no one in the British media who I have more contempt for than TalkRadio’s Dan Wootton, a guided missile filled with pork-pie jelly, who is pointed at whatever culture war ‘outrage’ has been ginned up by the right, before exploding with coinfected outrage and a lukewarm patriotism that he reads out from his own articles with all the articulacy of a five-year-old required to speak at a school assembly.
Wootton, who was personally-named alongside The Sun in Johnny Depp’s recent libel case, began as a showbiz hack for the News of the World but was rewarded for being a good soldier both there and at The Sun by becoming a not-even-remotely-a-shock jock at TalkRadio, Britain’s most racist radio station.
The latest story which Wooton has latched onto in order to have content for his daily parade of complaining, racist rhetoric, and dewy-eyed harking back to a 1950s Britain that he seems to think that he, a 37-year-old man (one year older than me despite his premature ageing due to close proximity to Rupert Murdoch’s necromancy), seems to think he grew up in, is the coinfected outrage that Land of Hope & Glory and Rule Britannia may not be played at this year’s Proms.
A further wrinkle is that, despite constantly being racist and xenophobic towards others, Dan is… from New Zealand. The ‘wot ‘bout our British values’ schtick is entirely coinfected to appeal to his audience of permanently beetroot faced blokes and hard-faced housewives twitching their curtains whenever a black couple comes to view Number 52 with that estate agent they’re sure is “up to no good”.
Wootton has a familiar method: Identify something — however minor — that will enrage his readers and listeners, write the most bad faith take on it for his Sun column, then read that Sun column on his TalkRadio show, before interviewing guests about said column over the next hours and days to keep propelling the outrage onwards.
It’s a procedure he follows week-in-week out. There is never a day when Dan Wootton does not have a culture war story at his fingertips and he’s always ready to put forward his hollow thesis that the ‘wokeists’ are trying to destroy everything and that he is here to save us from that horror:
Here’s the black heart of Wootton’s argument:
“With depressing predictability, the woke mob destroying the BBC bit by bit is coming for yet another great British tradition; Rule Britannia and Land of Hope & Glory… are under threat of being dropped altogether from the Last Night of the Proms — according to the Sunday Times. This is because a 35-year-old Dane, called Dalia Stasevska, backed by some idiotic BBC executives want to ‘decolonise’ the event in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, by reducing, quote, ‘patriotic elements’. In fact, one insider told the newspaper, the season is being described internally at the BBC as the ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’.”
But, as PraxisCast — which I’m recording an episode with tonight — has explained in an informative thread, the original Sunday Times story is hyperbolic in the extreme and makes claims that remain unsupported:
So it seems the reason the BBC might not include those songs this time is that they’d simply sound rubbish without the singalong from the audience and the number of performers who usually blast the tunes out. No mention of Black Live Matter and nothing to do with the fact that one of the people involved in the planning is Danish or 35-years-old. Remember, Dan Wootton is just two years older than her anyway.
All of that, however, did not stop TalkRadio getting Lawrence Fox, the ageing hipster cadaver and former husband of the infinitely more talented Billy Piper, to shamble onto Wootton’s show and attack the BBC. Having got almost all of his TV work from ITV and Netflix, it’s extremely shocking and definitely not completely transparent that Fox is quite happy to demand the BBC be ‘defunded’. It’s also seemingly irrelevant to Wootton that Fox says he “[doesn’t] actually like either song” and calls them “trite”. How dare he be so dismissive of our extremely not-racist heritage, I would have thought Dan Wootton would have raged since he is the world’s biggest Land of Hope & Glory fan and has a tattoo of Edward Elgar on his arse, the mouth positioned to make use of his anus so that every shit he takes is as patriotic as possible.
The brilliant Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University, was given a tiny amount of time to respond to the culture war idiocy but Wootton, of course, threw pointed questions at him having let Lawrence Fox go off without any challenge:
Wootton also had Emma Webb, Spiked-alumni and now director of yet another think-tank project with opaque funding and a mission to push far-right talking points into the mainstream, on his show to further attack the BBC — which it may just be relevant to the discussion to know both Spiked and TalkRadio’s parent company News UK would dearly like to see dismantled — and do her usual schtick:
Of course, Wootton and his pals are entitled to be patriotic — or jingoistic as it seems to me — but he couldn’t give one solitary Edward Elgar’s mouth-enabled shit about Land of Hope & Glory or Rule Brittania. He doesn’t blast those songs in his expensive car that racism paid for or in his nice house that racism paid for or on the smartphone he uses to look up new ways to be racist. Wootton is not a journalist, he’s a grubby fingered, shit raking propagandist who is never happier than when accusing others of hating Britain.
But Wootton and his gang, so determined to attack any view that strays from their spit-flecked-British bulldog-let’s-have-another-war-to-toughen-up-the- youths-hang-pedophiles-unless-they-are-members-of-the-Conservative-Party-green-and-unpleasant-land rhetoric, actually despises Britain. Because Britain is complex and modern Britain actually allows people from different backgrounds and heritages to have a place and a say. Dan Wootton hates that and he’s employed to attack it.