Calculating the Exact Amount of Banter in That Yung Tory Group Chat

Banterwatch is a new series where we take a temperature check on the exact state of British banter in the country right now. Is banter good? Is it bad? Is it vile? Is it flowing? These are all questions that need to be asked.

Is banter dead? I feel like the high watermark of banter was around autumn, 2014; that was the tipping point, when the three high sceptres of banter – a university rugby club getting told off for distributing a banter leaflet that essentially boiled campus women down to a points-scoring game, Dapper Laughs at his absolute peak and the last final hurrah of The Lad Bible before it was forced to get woke – were in their ascent. Then their various wings were clipped (disciplinary hearings, turtlenecked Newsnight appearances, a move towards advertiser-pleasing everymanness) and banter moved suddenly out of the spotlight, moved underground. We built banter up, we dragged banter down. Yes, we have our terrorist selfies. Yes, we have our pre-Putin group shots. And yes, we all have our 200+ messages WhatsApp groups. But ask yourself: is banter, truly, what it once was? Look deep inside yourself and know it to be true. The lifecycle of banter has seen it peak and then decay. The moon of banter is waning, not waxing.

Anyway, Yung Tories want to gas the poor:

For those not "in the know", this is a leaked screenshot from a WhatsApp group of Yung Tories that acted as a round-up gang for the new "Tory Momentum" group Activate, which so far has been a Twitter account that tags all its memes "#meme" and is trying desperately to make Jacob Rees-Mogg look like he is "cool" rather than "a disgracefully arrested headteacher". As Guido Fawkes, who published the conversation, so aptly puts it: "Unfortunately it descended into stupid college students joking about gassing chavs." V. v. unfortunate when that happens, strong agree.

Let's peer and poke around this banter and give it an overall score:

The short answer is yes. The long answer is: on reflection, deep reflection, I think it is possible this is the Toriest joke ever written:

Consider: still using the word "chav", in this, the year of our lord 2017, is an extremely Tory thing to do; actually going to the trouble of italicising something – on WhatsApp, to fit with accepted style manuals – is an extremely Tory thing to do; half-parsing the punchline of a joke into Latin is an extremely Tory thing to do; getting too excited about using a slur that you fuck up spelling the word "species" and instead somehow end up on "spice" is an extremely Tory way of prematurely ejaculating. "A fine opportunity" is a three-word phrase that literally only Tory voters use. Of the nine words in this sentence, I'm pretty sure only the word "to" isn't explicitly Tory, and some of the words are double-Tory. This is the Toriest joke ever written. The only thing you can say that is Torier than this is the phrase, "You know, I just don't get Nando's?"

BANTER RATING: –70% BANTER

The bit that's kicked all this off is the line "and gas them all", which obviously has some deeply uncomfortable parallels with history, and I dunno about you but with the right-wing slowly morphing into full actual Nazis now it just seems good sense to keep on top of threats to gas people to death, I dunno, so yes anyway in my mind it's a good thing this chat got leaked. However: we are talking about banter, here, and this is a particularly poor example of it.

I think hair-trigger hatred of the poor is hard-wired into all Tories – it is, if you think about it, what most of their policy is built on – but normally, when full-grown Tories do it they are at least sophisticated about it. Slowly undercut already strangled social services, that sort of thing. Stuff a pillow over the face of the NHS and slowly push until it stops breathing, cutting off health support for those who can't afford it. Make the benefits system so obtuse and complex that claiming via it is a series of ever more impossible loophole leaps, with minor perceived infractions punished with violent seizing of income. Take the poor's health, money and support network and… hope… they… go… away? I don't really know what the long game is. But fundamentally: actual Tories are very good at hating poor people. It's nuanced hatred.

These are Yung Tories, though, and still suckling on mater's teat, so they don't really know that yet. That's what makes this banter so eye-rollingly basic. Ah, chavs, yes, good one. They all have big TVs, don't they, poor people. And chainlike necklaces. Ah, aren't they good at having babies with each other. Aren't they fertile, on their diet of McCain's oven chips and lager. Yes, wouldn't it be good if they were all dead, and everyone in the country was called "Lottie" instead, and every Sunday they all did a big bottomless mimosa brunch in Battersea – a 30,000 Lottie brunch, a 40,000-strong brunch, a hundred thousand Addy Lees idling outside, waiting – before talking about how inheritance tax is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in the world, ever.

BANTER RATING: –25% BANTER

Mate, is it the year two thousand and actual three? Mate, is the show Little Britain in its prime? Mate, mate: is it still acceptable to go to a costume party dressed in head-to-toe knock off Burberry while yelling "MICHAEL CARROLL'S BARMY ARMY"? It is not. It is none of those things. Hearing the word "chav" used it like if someone rocked up and sincerely described something as "radical", or "groovy baby", or cited flower power or World War II. A relic from the past, dredged thru the generations into a Yung Tory group chat. Of course. Of course Tories still say "chav".

BANTER RATING: 0% BANTER

I've always been very firm on the idea that banter is an ethereal thing, an invisible balloon, that can be gassed up and gassed up and stretched and inflated, and then as soon as someone acknowledges it – as soon as someone says, "good banter", for instance, breaking the magic and the fourth wall at once – the banter explodes and pops, deflating instantly to nothing. Tories don't work like that though, so self-checking like this:

Seems to go unnoticed. Because, guys, seriously. Really got to be careful not to turn into Nazis, guys. Really got to keep an eye on the whole "being Nazis" thing. Not a good look, fellas. Laugh about gas chambers all you like, guys but… come on, guys. No Nazi stuff.

BANTER RATING: HAVING TO CHEERFULLY WARN PEOPLE NOT TO BE NAZIS IS -100% BANTER

For me, the most horrifying sentence in the whole sorry affair is the sign off: "But seriously, chavs are an actual problem." Are they? A problem how? How are Yung Tories impacted by "chavs", day-to-day? Maybe some members of the working class are a "problem" because years of oppression from the system means they are shunned to unsafe tower blocks and decaying estates and robbed of any industry and lambasted for not having jobs while living in cities devoid of jobs, and hover within a benefits system that works at once as a bear trap and a one-thread-fraying-at-a-time support rope, and that maybe neglect in terms of education and housing and funding over years and years and decades and decades has meant that people live and die wavering around the poverty line with no real life float out of it, and that, as they hang just about onto power, that these Yung Tories can vote to change things from the top to the bottom to make sure further generations of our nation's poor don't get trapped in the quicksand of poverty? Or maybe this person means chavs are a problem because one time a teenage boy in a tracksuit looked at him meanly when he went to Kilburn to pick up an eighth? Hard to know isn't it.

BANTER RATING: (ME TAKING A LINE FROM A YUNG TORY GROUP CHAT TOO SERIOUSLY AND GETTING REALLY WORKED UP ABOUT IT): NEGATIVE ONE THOUSAND PERCENT TO MY OWN PERSONAL BANTER RATING

BANTER RATING: (THE GROUP CHAT AS A WHOLE) -5% BANTER

OVERALL BANTER RATING: A RECORD-SHATTERING -200% BANTER, OR MINUS TWENTY BANTONS. THIS IS THE DRIEST BANTER IN KNOWN HISTORY. THIS IS THE BANTER EQUIVALENT OF JUMPING IN A FREEZING SWIMMING POOL AND YOUR DICK GOING INSIDE YOU AND DOCTORS HAVE TO TEASE IT DOWN WITH TWEEZERS. THIS IS THAT, IN BANTER FORM.

@joelgolby