If we send the migrants back, who will cook my late-night steak?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/05/stewart-lee-general-election-tour-hotels

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In 1944 the London Evening Standard sent Betty Knox, of the popular music hall trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, to cover the Normandy landings. Knox’s impromptu one-woman performance of their famous Sand Dance, a rip-roaring montage of ancient Egyptian imagery and racially insensitive soft-shoeing, was delivered under heavy bombardment on Gold Beach, and so bored the humourless Germans watching from the cliffs that they eventually abandoned their final operational 75mm gun out of sheer Weltschmerz. Knox had been employed to report on the costly liberation of Europe from a comic perspective, but her very presence on the beach may have altered the outcome of the war itself.

Likewise, the Observer has asked me, a standup comedian, to pen a weekly column on my experiences of Britain in the runup to the election. I agreed to this knowing that I would be on tour at the time. I imagined I would use my zingers to take the nation’s temperature from stages all around the land, and then report back from the frontline with news of how laughter told me how real people felt about the real issues in the real regions, far from north London where we all live, obviously.

But whether I am in Inverness or Reading, my audiences are comprised exclusively of left-leaning middle-class Guardian readers, often in same-sex, mixed-race and interfaith relationships, and I quickly became aware that I have learned little I wouldn’t already have known from merely talking to myself. My crowd, painstakingly carved over nearly three decades into the exact image of me, reveals little new.

And so I learn more from casual conversations with people I encounter along the way. Every single member of staff in every single hotel I have stayed in since January has been an efficient eastern European immigrant, apart from in Perth, where, tellingly, the indigenous Scottish staff were unable to locate the room key for two hours, when it finally turned up having been coated in batter and served up as a delicacy to an American tourist in search of her roots.

I fear a Ukip victory will turn every hotel in Britain into an enormous one star on Trip Advisor catastrophe, run by useless British people, failed by the state, who can neither add up nor speak, offering me breadsticks instead of keys, squashing sausages into the toaster at breakfast, and putting the complimentary bottle of mineral water into the en suite toilet to chill. And then doing a big wee on it.

A young Polish night-porter in Guildford enthused about what a fantastic place Guildford was, as if he has discovered some mythical Shangri-la, but as he was unable to cook me a late-night steak I punched him in the face for 30 seconds to teach him a lesson and remind him whose country he was in. But if we send these people back, who will make our food in the night on minimum wage?

I arrived in Truro on the day of St Piran, Cornwall’s patron saint, and riffed on our perceptions of good and bad nationalism. Crossing the Tamar I saw black-and-white national flags were waving, but in opposition to very real financial oppression by English incomers, as opposed to those St George flags that unfurl against the often imagined monetary drain of EU migrants. That said, the tradition that every English visitor present on St Piran’s Day must spend the night naked and sealed inside a giant pasty full of hot spiced meat seems harsh, and St Piran has pockmarked my perineum permanently.

In Oxford the lady on the stage door talked about her son going to college in Coventry, and I said how few of the people I knew would have studied if it had cost what it costs today, and how the circumstances, and attitudes to education as an end in itself, that saw generations of people from different backgrounds into and through university no longer exist. And she countered my abstract worthy meditation on social privilege by telling me she had grown up on Oxford’s Cutteslowe estate.

In 1934, after clearances had moved former slum-dwellers into new council housing appended to a prosperous suburb, the prestigious Urban Housing Company unilaterally erected a succession of two-metre-high spiked walls across the public roads to keep the working classes out of their betters’ sights. And these stayed in place until 1959. The Beatles were coming, and punk rock, and contraception, and the Open University, and student grants. Those walls wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway.

But I rather admired the Cutteslowe Walls. There had been no pretence in Cutteslowe. Today politicians make grand statements. But things are perhaps even less porous.

Stewart Lee is on tour and will be at Leicester Square Theatre, London, from 21 September.