The Real Taboo

I went to the dentist. Wendy the dentist, aside from helping me maintain my choppers, is proud to be training junior dentists in north-west England. There are four dental training practice centres in the north-west, as I understand it, in Blackpool, Accrington, Morecambe and Carlisle. Of these Morecambe is particularly significant owing to the number of people there who have full sets of dentures – seems that that is becoming increasingly less common and so is increasingly difficult to find people for the students to study. Except in Morecambe.

Wendy told me of a nine-year-old boy in Morecambe who is about to go into hospital for all his teeth to be removed under general anaesthetic, so bad are they there there is nothing that can be done to save them. For the rest of his life he will wear a full set of dentures. The reason is that he drinks fizzy drinks every day and never cleans his teeth. His mother, who as Wendy says comes into the surgery suited and booted and made up without a painted line out of place, says she cannot understand it, it was the same with his brother.

While the nation is being diverted by whether their chicken is being breadcrumb-coated by a Pole or a Romanian, there are some real problems out there, some areas of serious social deprivation, of which Morecambe is but one example. That would be a much more worthwhile issue to be getting steamed up about: Britain’s pervasive and destructive class system. I have a little suspicion that all this focus by the press on immigration is in reality a smokescreen, a means of diverting public attention from that which might challenge the comfortable status quo of those in positions of power and influence.

But even if you find that a little extreme, there can be no dispute, especially given the Emily Thornberry case, that the real thing that is taboo to talk about is not immigration (and in my view never has been – that is just a diversion propagated by the popular press) it is the British class system.