The Doughnut Boy: A New Type of Guy

Theres a lot of ways to make an easy living in the British media circuit. There’s no shortage of surrogates, grifters and rent a gobs of various ideological stripes.

But there is a particular media character that has annoyed me today, a character I will call the Doughnut boy. Doughnut is a popular disarming insult in the UK grime scene, meaning someone of low intelligence, which the doughnut boy definitely is. But ‘doughnut' is also appropriate because this person searches for holes, or downsides, without considering that all policies are about tradeoffs, that is, that every policy has downsides, and the question for discussion is not if a downside exists, but how big it is and how many people it affects.

The 'debate' over Meghan and Harry’s decision to distance themselves from the Royal Family has now moved onto a brief, absolutely threadbare discussion of alternatives to.monarchy — the kind of stuff that you’d scrape a 2:2 for in a comparative western european politics module. Notably this involves pointing out the following:

• You still have to pay Presidents a salary, and some Presidents can earn a lot of money
• We don’t want to be like America!
• Or, the marginally more sophisticated, we don’t want to end up like France!
• The President would still have to get a nice house which would be paid for with some public money

What annoys me about these arguments is not that they are completely without merit, but the sheer laziness of relying on them. The Doughnut boy who makes them only ever shouts 'look I found a hole!’ never bothering to consider that perhaps the new hole is smaller or a different shape to the current doughnut situation, or that the hole isn’t really relevant (I’m not sure any republican seriously argues for an all powerful executive presidency like that of France or America) What about seriously examining a former monarchical state like Ireland? It certainly has downsides and I think most British people would still prefer sticking with the Queen, but at least it would be an honest representation of the republican argument and your audience might learn something about different constitutions.

The doughnut boy can be found at all levels of media commentary, from Times columns to Darren Grimes tweets. I wish I could say its an invention of social media grift, but it far pre dates twitter and facebook. What it really smacks of is a media who have gotten plain lazy over the years because of a lack of serious challenges to the status quo. (Of course not every challenge is merited and some proposals are terribly flawed). But at least do better than just finding a hole and patting yourself on the back.