This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
It’s not often that a Spiked article manages to penetrate my carefully curated and ruthlessly guarded Twitter news feed, such is the command that Musk’s platform has over my limited worldview. But one sneaked in the other day that caused me to pause for thought. Brendan O’Neill, the magazine’s chief political writer, has claimed that not only has the left lost touch with the working class, it actively hates it. Upper-class Democrats in the US view working people as rednecks, he says, whereas radical leftists in the UK call them “gammon”, which basically means pigs. The snobbery is “out of control”, so much so that O’Neill had people from across the political spectrum contemplating whether he might have a point, allowing the article to make its way into my prohibitive and sheltered feed. But does his argument really hold weight?
The insinuation that the left is somehow drifting away from the working class is not a new one. Paul Embery notes in his book ‘Despised’ that the Labour Party has transformed over the past thirty years to represent far more liberal, urban middle-class people than those living in more disadvantaged parts of the country. Not only has the party become increasingly detached, he argues, but it is increasingly ignorant of “how they think, what they believe, and why they believe it”. On social media, he adds, they follow or engage with only those who share their worldview. “They have confused Twitter with Britain”, and are all the more ignorant for it.
Labour’s humiliating defeat in 2019 – just two years after what must have been a momentary buck in the trend – is cited as proof that, at least in the UK, there is a gulf between the left and the working class. Brexit, too, was the preserve of the right wing and was overwhelmingly favoured in poorer areas of the country. But Labour’s part in both those events is hardly down to it abandoning its traditional values. More likely, it seems, is that politics has morphed into something else. As Jonathan Rutherford notes in the New Statesman, progressive politics is less class and solidarity and is more a question of group identities and self-realisation today, which underscores O’Neill’s point, if in a slightly different way. But what neither commentator seems to say is who the shift to the right serves, because it certainly isn’t the disaffected cohort in question.
Boris Johnson may have enjoyed unprecedented popularity in working-class areas when he was elected in 2019 and when he backed Brexit, but when the time came to hand out contracts for personal protective equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic it wasn’t the industrial areas that got the phone call. Lee Anderson likes to paint himself as a working-class hero but when confronted with how to help constituents on the poverty line he tells them to cook for 30p a day. Jonathan Gullis, meanwhile, has taken to calling his own constituents scrotes and scumbags and recently proposed that student finance should be restricted for low-achievers to keep them out of university, a move that will disproportionately impact kids in poorer areas.
Right-wing publications love to blame the left for 13 years of failed Tory policy, and perhaps they have a point that a degree of snobbery exists in some quarters, but to suggest that the other guys have the answers is simply not true. Johnson, Anderson, Gullis and Co have done nothing to improve the fortunes of the working people, if anything they’ve made their lives much worse, and this might be my limited worldview speaking, but there’s nothing snobbish about calling that out.
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