By Katy Rico

THE gammon community is pink-faced with annoyance. Those middle-aged conservative men labelled “gammons” by the chattering classes are still reeling from their previous moniker “pale, male and stale” and now they’ve gone up another 50 shades of pink to hit the rosy hue of a well-cooked porky steak.

They can’t win, these outraged middle-aged men who dare to express their opinion. Because the only opinion that qualifies them as gammon is being pro-Brexit.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that they are assumed to be racist by being pro-Brexit yet the gammon-callers feel comfortable labelling certain members of society by their colour.

On one level, isn’t it fun, calling people names? It’s just like being back in the playground. You and your pals picking on the kid with the weird hair or the sad face and giving them a “funny” nickname that sticks to them like glue for the rest of their schooldays.

Yeah, it’s great. And yet, unlike the playground kids, who are too young to understand that the nickname isolates and humiliates their target to the point where it haunts them way beyond their school days, the gammon-callers are deliberately ensuring that their targets become isolated and humiliated by turning them into a laughing stock.

On a deeper level, the net effect is to render their views irrelevant and irrational, thus making them voiceless. They are laughed off, shouted down, dismissed. It’s the latest incarnation of a push to silence those with certain unfashionable views, a very disturbing trend that we should all be worried about, whether we agree with those views or not. The silencing, or attempted silencing, of any section of society undermines democracy.

But it’s OK because it’s only men who belong to the gammon community, isn’t it? And it’s only men who are older, well-heeled and well-padded and have had it good, so who cares what they think?

There’s a debate currently raging about whether the term gammon is actually racist because it’s white people calling other white people a name. One person accused of racism in this way is Matt Zarb-Cousin, a former spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party.

He denies racism, saying: “It isn’t racist to say someone looks like gammon, as while there are striking aesthetic resemblances across the gammon constituency, gammon isn’t a race, it’s a lifestyle choice driven by warm ale. It’s a state of mind, driven in no small part by a regular spoon feeding from the trashy tabloids.”

He describes the “spectre of gammon” hanging over Britain, “older men who, despite having all the opportunities that baby boomers enjoyed, are confused and angry at the modern world.

It’s a condition that once manifested itself as an affinity to Ukip, but now more so to high blood pressure and a red meat complexion.

Baldness is optional, as are dodgy tattoos, and the uniform of the gammon is boot-cut jeans, loafers and an open-collared white polyester shirt.”

He continues: “Most of them are found in safe Conservative seats in the home counties. They’re homeowners, small business owners, the beneficiaries of the system.”

Yet the homeowners and the small business owners he despises are the backbone of this country. We are, and have long been, “a nation of shopkeepers”, as Napoleon, or it may have been Adam Smith, said. Millions of us are homeowners and small business owners, including Labour voters and even Communists.

They are the kind of people whose taxes have helped pay for the system of which they, and many other people, are beneficiaries.

Current gammons are not the only targets, either. Historic gammons such as Cecil Rhodes are now despised for their non-PC crimes, judged by today’s standards despite the fact that their actions and views were of their day and time.

Despising them is ridiculously pointless. Railing against history cannot change it.

Similarly, railing against today’s gammons cannot change them or their views or their value to society.

Like everybody else, there are certain people in public life whose views I don’t like and don’t agree with but I don’t despise them for holding their views.

Everybody’s experience of growing up, when your views are formed, and their subsequent lives is different, and it’s part of our society, which was created in part by historic gammons, to respect everybody’s right to them and to express them.

Just as historic gammons denied certain sections of their society a voice – women, the poor and others – now today’s gammons are being denied their right to have a voice.

While we cannot change history, we can certainly learn from it and one lesson we have learnt is equality.