WHEN I first encountered the phrase “trigger warning” I immediately associated it with Benny Hill’s 1970s hit record, Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West). For those of a younger vintage, this was Hill’s sensitive etude on love, loss and redemption in small-town England which featured, among others, a cart-horse called Trigger. Lately though, I’ve learnt it’s a phrase that has come to be deployed in academia to warn students of a sensitive or fragile constitution that what they may be about to learn contains details that some might find distressing or troubling.

Trigger warning is often deployed in close vicinity to the words “snowflake” and “safe space”. To their critics (mainly on the hard right) they denote over-sensitivity and the shutting down of some types of debate in our places of higher learning, and thus must be considered anathema to the concept of strict academic rigour. I myself, belonging to an, ahem … earlier generation and have been known occasionally to cavil at the use of such words and what I think they represent. On closer inspection, though, I found that they really didn’t trouble me overmuch at all.

We can’t all be made of an iron will whose jaggy life experiences have fitted us with the emotional armour to deal with everything a cruel world might fling at us. We only need to look about us to observe people who are emotionally and spiritually more fragile than some of the rest of us, who have been blessed with a more robust essence (and how many of us – men especially – simply pretend to be impervious to fragility?) Depression, some forms of autism and even a challenging upbringing can render a person vulnerable when faced with certain situations and events. Does it not then become the responsibility of the rest of us who purport to care about our fellow human beings to create a learning environment in which all are included and no-one feels threatened? The existence of these is hardly likely to dilute their education or the quality of the teaching they might receive.

I suppose we ought not to be surprised that the forces of Conservatism are scornful of anything they perceive as “weakness” or “frailty”. These people have preyed on vulnerability for centuries and have often enriched themselves in the course of it. Margaret Thatcher’s entire economic strategy was built on the survival of the fittest and on judging the quality of people solely on their ability to make money. Britain’s industrial landscape is scarred by the remains of communities who were deemed surplus to the needs of the financiers and the corporate tax-dodgers before whom the Tories have ever since bent the knee.

When the citizens of these communities were considered to be of no more economic use they were discarded, and no-one lifted a finger to invest in whatever other qualities they may have possessed. It was as if they were another species, ill-deserving of the state’s compassion. “Don’t talk to us about human dignity,” came their haughty response. “How can you possess human dignity when you have harrowed and gouged beneath the ground for your keep or sweated and hammered at a furnace?”

To justify such inhumanity, Thatcher and her acolytes floated the insidious canard that those they had tossed aside were somehow the authors of their own economic downfall; that they were workshy, feckless and driven by base desires and unholy attachments. It’s how the ruling class in every society isolate and demonise incomers, immigrants and strangers; anyone, basically whom they perceive as being a threat to their economic hegemony.

The greatest irony of all this, of course, is that the Tories and the useful idiots from the middle classes whom they have seduced into ferrying and disseminating their falsehoods have been creating safe spaces and trigger warnings for centuries. The “snowflake” generation isn’t a recent phenomenon consisting of fey and footless millennials. It has been with us for generations and consists of the offspring of the affluent and the powerful who are sheltered from the reality of their parents’ actions and the destructive impact they have on the majority of their fellow human beings.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is an authentic example today of what a snowflake looks like, talks like and acts like. You can no more blame him for his view of the world than you can accuse an alligator of being somewhat belligerent and aggressive in the vicinity of moving flesh. He is the scion of a class that has successfully cosseted him in a world where there is no suffering, no poverty and where deprivation means that nanny is off sick for the day. War and bloodshed is what happened in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and poor people are created by God for the sole purpose of testing our generosity of spirit. They also come in handy when the odd war requires to be fought. Such attitudes can be seen in the current Conservative government’s Universal Credit enterprise and the British Army’s recruitment strategy.

The early lives of these aristocratic snowflakes must have been full of trigger warnings.

“Mummy, did all these people in Charles Dickens’ books really exist?”

“Of course not darling, Mr Dickens had a very vivid imagination; that’s why he was such a good novelist.”

“Mummy, what is a trade union and why did the Labour Party start?”

(To her husband) “William, what have I told you about leaving The Guardian lying about unattended?”

What lies were told at countless dinner tables in the castles and palaces of England’s green and pleasant land to explain why they were all feasting on never-ending supplies of food and wine while thousands were dying of hunger and malnutrition a few miles furth of the estate? What sinewy stratagems and bent narratives were told to reconcile adequately the teachings of Jesus in their beloved Bible with the story of how the wealth and influence of the aristocracy was obtained? In the Bible and history classes of Eton and Harrow there must have been trigger warnings and safe spaces.

Trigger warning: what you are about to hear contains descriptions of poor people and alleged inequality; a quantum of beastliness and a significant amount of nastiness and unpleasantness. There is a safe space in the East Wing for those who would prefer a gentler version of this lesson. That means you, Rees-Mogg, Cameron, Osborne and May.