I went to the pub last night (thoughts on the election)

Last night I went to the pub. This wasn't a special occasion, just what I do pretty much every Saturday night. The Fleece in Cullingworth is, to use the jargon of the pub industry, a "wet led" boozer - no food other than crisps and peanuts, no fancy craft ales, no men with beards sipping thirds of strangely coloured liquid allegedly called beer. Just a clean pub with drinkable beer and a welcoming landlady.

I'm going to the bar for a refill and a bloke I've known off and on for some long while marched up to me, hand outstretched - "well done Simon, absolutely brilliant, I'm so pleased". I knew and everyone there knew what he was talking about - Thursday's election and the Conservative win. The handshake and thanks for me (undeserved as I'd done very little to secure the victory) was because, having been the local councillor for the village for 24 years, I was the first Conservative politician - albeit a retired one - this bloke had met since the election. "I'm not a Conservative," he said, "just a working class bloke but this is what we need."

All the pundits down in London are pouring over the new electoral maps, scratching their heads and asking what happened and why that working class bloke in the pub joined tens of thousands of other working class men and women in voting Conservative, many for the first time. And whether this is a one-off, the final act of the Brexit process, a condemnation of Corbyn's nasty racist views, or part of a longer trend for the working class vote?

Only time will provide an answer but it does seem that the collapse of the "Red Wall" of Labour seats in the North and Midlands marks both a victory in what some call a "culture war" and also the continuing realisation by many ordinary workers that their interests are no longer served by those more concerned about the pay of rich female newsreaders than with helping ordinary communities deal with the tides of social and economic change. Labour is now a party of the public sector manager, filled with people whose attitude to struggling communities is essentially to say "there, there. I know the Tories are horrid and poverty is dreadful" while promising free stuff to middle class groups - rail commuters, students, WASPI women, yummy mummies.

The Labour Party is filled with MPs who spend almost their entire time telling everyone that the places they're elected to represent are dreadful, poverty-soaked communities. You have only to follow Jess Phillips to see the politics of the begging bowl writ large. And Labour has treated the North like this all the time I've lived here - MPs, Council leaders, officials and officers parade down to London, cap in hand to ask for more cash. Not more cash to do exciting developments, brilliant initiatives, to invest in the genius of Northern enterprise or culture. No, more cash to employ the sort of people who think community development is about hugging communities not empowering them, patronising people who genuinely believe that working class communities haven't the talent or power to do things for themselves.

We see this denial of working class agency in the endless claim that the Brexit referendum was "fixed" or "stolen". We see it in the attitude of London liberals encapsulated by Emily Thornbury saying to a Northern MP: "I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours’”. And we see it in the ghastly mantra of Remain Ultras about those Northern working class leave voters being racist, xenophobic bigots. The message from continuity remain, from the Liberal Democrats and, above all, from the Labour Party has been that ordinary men and women are too stupid not to be suckered by advertising, too stupid to understand what they were voting for in 2016.

The people in the pub last night aren't stupid. They mostly work hard, are good at what they do and care for their community, their neighbours and their country. Such folk don't have a blueprint for a better world, just the desire for their government and leaders to occasionally sound like they give a toss about their ordinary dull lives. They didn't ask for - or really want - free broadband and nationalised railways but they would like more police who see their job as catching burglars and dealing with crazy drivers rather than indulging the latest fad. And they don't need free tuition for their kids (who're in college or an apprenticeship learning how to butcher meat, cut hair, lay bricks or bend pipes) just better funding for the primary school. There's no cry for taking over the water company or renationalising rail - if you ask them they'll support it but it's not important to them like making it easier to get a doctors appointment is important to them.

Last night the politics lasted less than five minutes, there were jokes to be made, football results to be considered, songs to listen to and the everyday things of ordinary life - the stuff that really matters, family, friends, jobs and health - to be shared. It is this that the grand media panjandrums don't understand, that politicians and advisors down in the Westminster bubble fail to notice. We're not talking about neocolonialism, intersectional feminism or neoliberalism (because we haven't the faintest idea what you're on about), we're talking about the things that actually matter. I hope the new government frames its policies round these things that matter - family, community, neighbours, health, jobs and friends.

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You're not cosmopolitan, you're privileged

Striking observation from Joan C Williams, author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.From an interview about the book:

Cosmopolitanism is seen as a sign of sophistication. But in fact, it’s a sign of privilege. It means that you went to university, you met people from all over the world and you have an international network and international opportunities. If you didn’t go to university, and your prospects don’t depend on an international network, but a small group of friends, then you’re going really to value that social solidarity. And you’ll be profoundly shocked that the PME (Professional and Managerial Elite) doesn’t seem to feel any responsibility to other people from their own country. This is just shocking and hurtful – something which, by the way, led to Brexit.

True I think.

....

Those folk you think are thick. They're probably wiser than you.

It seems - albeit a little tentatively - that people from 'lower social classes' are, in some contexts, wider than us clever folk with higher degrees:

The answer is that raw intelligence doesn’t reduce conflict, he asserts. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by Grossman and colleagues.

Now, while I appreciate that a visit to Keighley on a Saturday night might present a different view on the working class and conflict, the findings here are really rather interesting:

We propose that class is inversely related to a propensity for using wise reasoning (recognizing limits of their knowledge, consider world in flux and change, acknowledges and integrate different perspectives) in interpersonal situations, contrary to established class advantage in abstract cognition. Two studies—an online survey from regions differing in economic affluence (n = 2 145) and a representative in-lab study with stratified sampling of adults from working and middle-class backgrounds (n = 299)—tested this proposition, indicating that higher social class consistently related to lower levels of wise reasoning across different levels of analysis, including regional and individual differences, and subjective construal of specific situations.

I'm struck by the bounds of this wisdom measure - knowing limits to knowledge, acknowledging change and different perspectives - because they present a very different approach to how people might assess a situation or a decision from the preferred and purely reason-based approach of the intellectual. Us clever folk tend to presume that, because we know a lot about one thing and have letters after our names, we are better able to see to the right choice - we fail to do what the wise person does and recognise that our knowledge is limited. Moreover, clever folk nearly always (witness the typical approach to economic modelling) start from an assumption of a stable status quo - wise folk know change is constant. And, because we're clever, us folk assume that we are right and that your opinion (unless it starts from recognising I am right) is of no consequence or worse still, just plain wrong - wisdom (and a peek at history) should tell us that other perspectives are helpful not a challenge to our intellectual prowess.

So next time some intellectual giant puts you down as thick, take a minute to respond that you may not have that book learning but you've a perspective, some limited knowledge and recognise that things seldom stay unchanged. Oh, and that this makes you wise - so listen up, clever folk, hark to the wisdom of ordinary folk.

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Smoking bans - "you've taken away one of the few nice things in the lives of people you've never met."

From Old Mudgie (or his comment section to be accurate):

It is this type of pub that has been murdered by the smoking ban. Not the sort of place that the ban's advocates would deign to visit. Not the sort of area where people talk about hop terroir or food-pairings. But the last community back-bone of already depressed areas where me and my mates would meet for a few beers, a chat and yes maybe a ciggie. Pubs that don't get in the guides, don't get covered by the self-appointed double-barreled beer gurus on the internet. Pubs that provided a meagre living to one or two people who've put their whole life into keeping them open.

The group who've been hardest hit among my acquaintances are working single men, often middle-aged (not a demographic that the crafterati think about very much) for whom the local was often the only social outlet they had. This has led to more loneliness and isolation in this group and, by their nature, they aren't a group that get covered very much.

So as you sit in your smoke-free gastropub commenting on how delicate Pierre manages to get those organic scallops you can rest easy knowing that you've taken away one of the few nice things in the lives of people you've never met.

The smoking ban was unnecessary, illiberal and killed more jobs and maybe people too than it ever helped.

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It's not for the left to decide what is freedom

Freedom... we're talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother's interrogation
Freedom to live your own life...

A chunk of lyrics from Tom Robinson's 'Power in the Darkness', a song that became a sort of anthem for Rock Against Racism and the birth - or was it a rebirth - for Britain's cultural left. And, you know, I can't disagree with a word in that mantra, that statement of freedoms. As a child of '70s South London the events and culture of Rock Against Racism couldn't be avoided - at school badges sprouted, the radio echoed to a different set of musical sounds, there was a strut about Brixton, West Norwood and Crystal Palace that hadn't been there before.

Yesterday I went to the opening at Bradford's Impressions Gallery of an exhibition of Syd Shelton's photographs of the Rock Against Racism days along with my friend and former colleague, Huw Jones, who sort of famously features in the exhibition as (in his words) the 'token white' in the world's only Asian punk band - Alien Kulture. Now bear in mind that I'm a Tory, indeed I joined the Conservative Party as a teenager in 1976 almost in the teeth of this anti-establishment rock and roll sentiment. Even now, in an audience of now older Rock Against Racism aficionados I'm pretty much an exception. So Sid Shelton can - albeit a little hesitantly - include the Conservative Party in the parade of today's wrongness and racism.

All of which takes me to those lyrics and why they matter to me. Too often we forget that freedom - free speech and free choice - is central to our idea of civilisation. Indeed we trap ourselves in mealy-mouthed justifications of restrictions of speech or choice, always for good reasons never simply to oppress. It's not just concepts like 'hate speech', safe spaces or no platform but also the idea of preventing imports, the demonising of free enterprise and the banning of others' pleasures because we deem them unpleasant, unhealthy or unsightly.

Speech is central to this and we live in a society where the desire to prevent other voices is at risk of being institutionalised. Just as back in the 1970s the voices of black and Asian minorities weren't heard (and still fight for space), today there's a voicelessness about what some call the 'traditional working class'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of racism out there (and that 'traditional working class' is no averse to a bit of it) but there's also a sense of a new excluded group - that 'traditional working class'.

In its slightly clunky sociologist way, The Guardian has spotted this problem. Here's Lisa McKenzie (whose from the same Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining communities where my grandfather started life) talking about the issues:

Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it. Consequently they have stopped listening to politicians and to Westminster and they are doing what every politician fears: they are using their own experiences in judging what is working for and against them.

In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the “stupid”, “ignorant”, and “racist” working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime.

This analysis - reflecting the patronising, dismissive, even uncomfortable response of us middle-class professionals (regardless of our politics) to that traditional working class - cuts close to the bone of the issue. We don't talk about why boys from a white working class background do worst at school and are least likely to go to university, we don't look at how angry many of these pretty ordinary Britons feel left behind and we don't ask the impact of ignoring their culture in favour of a mish-mash of the elite's Britishness with assorted imported cultures. The idea of Englishness is seen as a problem - we are perhaps the only place where many observers see flying the national flag as an act of racist provocation or, in some ways worse, being ignorant and common.

As many readers will know, I have pretty liberal views on immigration but even I can see why many ordinary people are agitated by it. Yes some of the ways in which it's discussed can sound racist but get underneath that and you'll find a real set of concerns that have little to do with a fear of foreigners - frets about homes and schools, worries over jobs, the loss of community facilities like the pub and the post office, isolation, bad policing and a sort of feeling that lots is being done for some other people and nothing for you and yours.

Although Rock Against Racism started with the thoughts of mostly white middle class musicians, anger at the racism of the music establishment, it opened the door to a bunch of working class performers and, in the Ska revival, the first black-white musical fusion (as opposed to appropriation) since the height of the jazz era. It's right that we recall what happened back then but we also need to heed the words from Power in the Darkness and raise the banners of freedom again. Not just in the continuing opposition to racism but in liberating ordinary people from the oppression of the modern state with its nannying, its obsession with supposed anti-social behaviour, its demonising of pleasure and its desire to police your speech, your movement and your choices.

What I object to in all this is that Tom Robinson's presentation of freedom deliberately excludes the right in politics. Millions of ordinary people who will all put their marker down as supporters of freedom and choice are told by the left that their idea of freedom has no place because that freedom includes expropriation of assets, the belittling of wealth and success, and the sustaining of the state as an agent of oppression through advocating punitive taxation.

I'll stand side-by-side with anyone opposing racism, supporting gay rights or making the case for free speech. But when people want to deny the freedom to succeed, to limit the availability of pleasure and to attack the choice that's central to our consumer society then I'll be on the other side of the barricade defending liberty from attack. And when - as we see from the middle-class left time and again - you're dismissive, rude or condemning of the words some ordinary Briton expresses, when you seek to close down what they say because it offends you, then you have become the enemy of freedom. An enemy of the ideals Tom Robinson set out in those lyrics I quoted.

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Drink, smoke, vape, eat fast food? You're not welcome in the Labour Party

Mr R. McDonald - Labour Membership refused

I don't know about you, dearest reader, but I'm not at all surprised to read that the Labour Party has turned down the request from McDonalds to open a 'pop-up' restaurant at the Party's annual conference. I am slightly surprised that the Party hasn't issued a lengthy, slogan-ridden justification for the refusal but this leaves us open to speculate as to the reasons.

Top of the list of reasons will be some sort of ideological objection to Ron and his burgers. After all the modern Labour Party does ideology, near everything is washed through the sieve of adopted political constraints. And, as a massive multinational fast food retailer, McDonalds is going to be pretty far removed from adherence to the Party's virtuous views on employment rights, public health, taxation, advertising and, of course, the children.

Right now, however, Labour is hiding behind it being the sort of 'commercial' decision they don't discuss in public. Meaning that we can tell the truth about the party - it's run by a bunch of right-on, snobby hippies who are just a bit uncomfortable with the sort of eating habits that those ordinary voters get up to. Especially the fat ones.

As we discovered from some 'research' by lefty politics professors, the left in Britain is no longer a party of the people who drag themselves bleary-eyed from bed in the morning to go and work in a regular sort of job - whether answering the phone in a call centre, making interminable cups of coffee for slightly rude people or flipping burgers for other ordinary people to eat. The sort of people who are active in the Labour Party simply don't do these sorts of jobs, they work doing public health campaigns or equalities monitoring in the public sector and third sector. Labour's enthusiasts are filled with righteous passion for banning fatty, sugar-filled and meat-ridden food (for the sake of the children, of course) and find the persistent preference of the regular worker for fast food, cigarettes and cheap lager slightly distasteful.

Here are those professors on who the left are today:

"People like us academics and the London elite just shrug off concerns about immigration, they shrug off concerns about the decline of Britain as a military power.

"This is where I think some of animosity is coming from and the electorate is saying we count too."

These are the people who Labour leaders will turn to ahead of tuning their ears to the worries of people with regular sorts of job in the private sector. For sure there's shouting about 'zero-hours contracts' that most working folk aren't on. There's stuff about trade union recognition that was relevant in 1880 but isn't today. And there's a load of cant about 'local economic strategies' that just means fewer of the shops those working people want and more for the well-paid, caring, gentrifying Labour supporter. Those Labour fans think they're sticking it to the man by going on protest marches, signing petitions and sending affirmatory messages to each other about Evil Tories or their own self-righteousness.

Truth be told, most people - let's call them the working class - don't have the time or money to spend on marching through London waving badly written banners about saving the NHS or banning tax havens. And even if they did have the time and money, I'm pretty sure they'd rather spend it taking the children into town for a film and a meal out (perhaps at a McDonalds) or, for those who've managed to offload the kids, a couple of pints and a burger somewhere disapproved of by the sort of judgemental snobs who sit on Labour's NEC.

Although there's a tenuous connection between today's Labour Party and the old unionised working class, the Party hasn't made the slightest effort to connect with the new working class - the one's who're working (and eating) in McDonalds, blowing vapour and buying the biggest, cheapest pizza in the supermarket. The Conservative Party at least has an excuse (not a good one but, nevertheless, an excuse) as it's always had a tendency to see the working classes as, well, a bit common. What's happened is that the same slightly disdainful attitude is now a dominant ideology in the Labour Party - the habits of these people need to be changed for their own good (and, one guesses, so they can be allowed into the sort of 'polite society' inhabited by the typical Labour activist).

People who drink beer (the cheap session beer they sell in working mens' clubs and discount supermarkets), smoke, vape and enjoy fatty burgers or sugary sweets, these are the people who aren't welcome in today's Labour Party. Indeed, it's hard to think of anywhere that these people - millions of them - can find a political place that doesn't treat them like some sort of pariah. It's a sad state of affairs when the persistent lobbying of a few - a tiny few - fanatics has resulted in the lifestyle choices of millions being condemned as unhealthy, unsightly and unfavoured.

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We have Mr Potter's "discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class" - and the left don't like it!

There was a time when the mass of the population – you can call this the ‘working class’ if you like – looked like the crowd at one of those football games from the 1930s. Packed shoulder to shoulder, dressed the same, thin, pinched and unhealthy. Back in those days and through into the 1950s, those ordinary people stayed in the narrow confines of their regular lives – most worked in manual jobs, skilled or unskilled, and their pleasures were limited by the narrowness of their income. Football (as today’s fans keeps telling us) was cheap and the men topped this up with thin beer and stodgy food.

And during this time those men were uncomplaining – we had few if any riots, public drunkenness was rare and levels of crime were low. But looking at those men and women in old photographs, we see that their lives were hard and, by today’s standards, short. Most working class men didn’t live long past retirement age and there were plenty of premature deaths from disease, illness and injury. Despite this hard life, most ordinary men were accepting of their lot. Yes they voted Labour, electing one of their own sort into parliament, but that Labour Party – for all the radicalism of the Attlee government – didn’t want to change the structure of the economy other than to replace private ownership with state ownership.

Then something happened. The success of the economy plus the effectiveness of union campaigns saw wages rise. Those ordinary men – and increasingly the women too – began to cast off the cheap drab and to make a cultural contribution. Some of this – the music of the early sixties, for example – is overplayed as working class culture. The big bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were management not workers but, along with other changes, this music gave the ordinary population a justification to party. And from that time in the sixties right through to the millennium that’s just what we did – we went on a great binge.

We drank more alcohol trying out new drinks like wines and lagers, we ate out more as we embraced the burger, the pizza and lumps of chicken daubed in a secret mix of spices and breadcrumbs. And while we did this, the elite – those who had run everything and liked the old supine working class – grumbled about taste and the bad choices of other people (by which they meant those workers eating burgers and drinking lager). This was the change cursed by Mr. Potter, the scheming old banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said:

A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.

We still see echoes of this when – just as that old rentier Potter did – left wing writers like Michael Rosen rail against debt. Borrowing money is fine for the likes of us, say folks like Rosen, but the ordinary people should be stopped from taking on debt because it’s bad for them:

Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system.

The working class must be thrifty, must live within its means and mustn’t take on the trappings of their betters let alone put anything at risk in aspiring for a better future.

So we binged. And while we binged we all carrying on getting richer and piling up wealth. The wealth once held by landlords – state and private - and wealthy capitalists began to spread through society. We bought houses and saved money in pension schemes while enjoying cars, foreign holidays, meals out and central heating. Our lives were immeasurably better that the lives of those men shuffling to work a ten-hour shift and those women spending  80 hours a week feeding him and stopping the house filling up with soot.

From out of this change – this great binge – came a real working class culture. Not the make-believe one idolised by wealthy writers, that sort of Mike Leigh homage to a crap life so typical of how those who have present the culture of those who haven’t. And bits of that culture came as something of a shock to the left – they discovered that the working class is patriotic and that it will display that patriotism with enthusiasm. 

After years of sneering at the idea of loving one’s country, the left couldn’t somehow understand how ‘their people’ still sang the songs and flew the flags, celebrating Britain and, worst of all, England. These left wing folk still struggle – I listened to a Guardian journalist on the radio talking about singing by England fans. This man wanted us to stop singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Great Escape’ because he was uncomfortable with ‘what they symbolised’.

The cultural elite don’t like this – not just because of the nationalism but because, like draping your house in flags, it all seems just a bit tacky. When we visit my parents at Christmas, we have a little drive round to look at the Christmas decorations – not the state-sponsored and approved ones on the high street but the fantastic displays of kitsch plastic reindeer, flashing lights, gnomes and Santa people put on their homes. North Kent is great for this sort of display and the Isle of Sheppey – as a sort of distillation of everything North Kent – is best. But that cultural elite doesn’t like this sort of display and reserves sort of its best sneering to describe brash Christmas decoration:

“And what can I see from my office in Carnaby Street? I can see a giant, pneumatic, puce-coloured reindeer with white spots suspended from tension wires in space.”

This is from Stephen Bayley described as “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators.” For which you can read arrogant snob. It is a short step from this to a very wealthy Islington MP tweeting, slightly sneeringly, a photograph of a house draped in England flags. A tweet that got that MP into trouble (although, for the record, her resigning was one of the dafter – if admirable – decisions in recent UK politics). It has though brought out the worst is the left as they set about defending Emily Thornberry:

“I thought that hanging flags with a red cross on a white background out of you house windows was telling the world that you aspired to be a right-wing thug who hated everything from abroad (except lager and curry) and wished that a bunch of ex-National Front neo-Nazis ran the government of Little England.”

This, as much as Ed Miliband’s laboured efforts to look cool and trendy, is Labour’s problem. The people who run the Labour Party – at every level – simply don’t relate to the bloke who flies a big England flag on his house or indeed to that man's neighbour who, as we speak, is putting up Christmas lights, an inflatable snowman and a great big sleigh. The same is true for my party but we’ve an excuse – for much of our recent history, we simply haven’t tried to represent the ordinary worker. I think this needs to change because it’s absolutely plain that the left with its patronising, snobbish and judgemental attitude to people who fly the flag, eat burgers, give their kids a bar of chocolate and like X-Factor has nothing to offer those people. Right now the void – a voice for people with kitsch Christmas displays, great big England flags, white vans, tattoos – is being filled by UKIP, a bunch of people who think the modern world is crap and wish to return to some mythical Elysian past.

This view is the very opposite of aspiration, of the thing that George Bailey offered the ordinary folk of Bedford Falls. Rather than offer people opportunity, choice and a better tomorrow – the things that allowed us to change from a supine, shuffling working class to a brash, in-your-face flag-waving populace – what people are being sold is a comfort blanket, a message of ‘hold onto this and it will all be fine’. Instead of a world of new exciting things to do, see and play with we’re promised safety, security and the oversight of our behaviour by our betters. I don’t think this is what people want and I’m absolutely sure that, whatever people do want, it isn’t snobbish, patronising judgement of their lives, choices and pleasures.

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Tiptoeing back to the old conservatism...

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For a while, from the time Auberon Waugh called Maggie's 'mad period' in the late 1980s through to just a few years ago, the Conservative Party lost its purpose. We became captivated (as did Tony Blair, but that's a different story) with billionaires, millionaires, celebrities and the shiny lights of the big city. The real purpose of the party - set out at its founding by Benjamin Disraeli - was never the celebration of laissez faire, it wasn't some sort of whiggamore wet dream, yet this was what we got. We forgot that the purpose of the party is to better the condition of the working man.

Now I'm as keen on classical liberalism as the next man, the enlightenment settlement made for a better world in every way and capitalism is responsible for most of that betterment. But too many in the Conservative Party confused the idea of free choice, free assembly and free markets with a different thing called 'business'. We placed the businessman on a shiny pedestal, we wrapped public services in the language (if not the ethos) of business and we pretended that somehow better governance came from getting those business people into authority in government.

And the ordinary working man - the folk the party was founded to serve - watched as well-meaning policy was captured by the business class. There are, quite simply, too many business people who owe their wealth to tenders and contracts issued by government. There are too many cosy deals, consultants and  contracts that serve the interests of those commissioned and those commissioning rather better than they deliver for the receivers of service. The left chooses - out or either ignorance or misinformation - to call this 'privatisation'. Yet that same left is guilty of using 'in-sourcing' - bringing in well-paid outsiders and experts to manage public services.

On Saturday morning - because our ward surgery was quiet - I has a good chinwag with Baroness Eaton. We bemoaned some of the party's problems and agreed that, regardless of the actual policy solution set out, the current leadership too often start in the wrong place - with a sort of technocratic, elitist mindset rather than asking what the policy will do to meet our party's purpose.

All so gloomy. Made worse by there being no political party offering a positive, hopeful future to that ordinary worker. Rather we have UKIP's populist and exploitative agenda - forming a giant echo chamber for the anger, irritation and annoyance of those regular folk. The task for the Conservatives is to remember where we came from, what we're about. We aren't the party of the mill owner and mine boss - or their 21st century equivalent. We need to break the view - described by Charles Moore a day or two ago - that the Conservatives aren't the workers' friend. And this means finding policies that talk to those workers concerns.

Not the shouty, anti-everything policies that UKIP (and the raggedy bits of the left) promote but ones that link what we know about how free choice, enterprise and initiative raises everyone with the everyday worries of those ordinary folk - the cost of housing, the electricity bill, the need for a mortgage to fill up the car and the lack of a pay rise since we don't know when. Add to this a sense that those running the place - not just politicians but lawyers, doctors, social worker, policemen and legions of civil servants - are doing so in their interest not yours and mine.

Now I know most of these people aren't like that but I also know that unless we change the framing of policies we will ossify as the party of an elite. To change that frame we have to do three things - ask how every policy choice with affect ordinary folk, change the language using less of the 'save the planet' or 'change the world' nonsense, and set the policy platform exclusively on those who feel left out by what passes for economic recovery.

We make much of Adam Smith (and we should) but we can we remember that he supported progressive taxation, considered high degrees of inequality an outrage and warned us that giving business interests too much influence in government is a recipe for tyranny. It should be our task to work for a system that rewards enterprise but does so through the benefits of exchange not the machinations of government. And a system that offers the worker protection, support and a route to a better life.

The old conservatism - the one those maligned ragged trousered philanthropists espoused - served working people well. The new conservatism, all wrapped around with whiggish business interests and unwarranted moral judgement, serves those people less well. So let's tiptoe back to the old ideas of community, aspiration, opportunity and independence in a welcoming society. And away from the 'we know better' metro-liberal sanctimony that too often leads our policy thinking.

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Simon Danczuk has a point about immigration and wages - just not a very good one

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Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale and a rare working-class voice in the Labour Party has written a passionate - almost emotional - piece about the effect of immigration on working-class communities:

That many of these job opportunities have all but disappeared to some working class Britons in parts of the country worries me greatly. As a Labour MP, I strongly believe my party should be forever beating a loud drum about the value of work, about instilling a strong work ethic into people and about how character and achievement comes from hard work. My fear is that an increased reliance on cheap migrant labour to drive some sectors in our economy is chipping away at a bedrock of working class pride, allowing a once strong work ethic to drain away and it’s being done with a comfortable and badly misinformed political consensus. 

I understand this - I've asked on many occasions why all of the 400+ jobs killing chickens in my ward are held by immigrants when the rates of unemployment in Bradford remain stubbornly high. How is it that someone will come all the way from Slovakia or Romania to do a minimum wage job in Bradford but that city's home grown unemployed can't or won't take those jobs?

But we do need to recognise the fact that, across the whole economy, immigration has a positive effect on wage levels:

The research looks at the period from 1997 to 2005 and finds evidence of an overall positive impact of immigration on the wages of native born workers, although the magnitude of the effect is modest. Immigration during these years contributed about one twentieth of the average three percent annual growth in real wages.

So we get economic benefit from immigration - every study finds this to be true - but, as with every aspect of economic development, while the economy may benefit there are some losers within that economy:

“Economic theory shows us that immigration can provide a net boost to wages if there is a difference in the skills offered by native and immigrant workers. However, across the whole spectrum of wages it is impossible for everybody to benefit. Some workers will see a gain, others a loss.” 

Danczuk recognises this fact when he comments on the electricians and bar managers undercut by competition from immigrant. And it's important that we recognise how this can effect those working-class communities Danczuk is writing about. However, we have to ask some tricky questions here, with the biggest question being whether we want to forgo the positive economic benefits of immigration for the whole economy because there are some losers? We might also consider those broader societal issues of cohesion and social capital in answering these questions.

We could introduce an essentially protectionist policy - keeping out immigrants that compete with those working-class folk. I say protectionist because it's not really any different from excluding the goods that the cheap labour could make if it stayed in Romania or India. But protectionism produces losers too - we just replace one set for another.

Or we could find a way - some of that much vaunted redistribution - to ensure that the working-class communities in places like Rochdale don't suffer lower wages because of immigration. Partly this is about the level of minimum wages but it's also about taxation and about creating new opportunities for work that lift those communities out from low skill, low wage work.

Simon Danczuk's complaint also reflects a changing world. Those traditional working-class communities get fewer and smaller with each generation, the new jobs aren't unskilled labouring but a service sector jobs. For sure, working in a call centre is probably a pretty soul-destroying job but is it really any different from the dangerous, dirty drudgery that typified the work of past generations? The truth is that native-born folk don't take those bar jobs, labouring jobs and jobs killing chickens because they don't have to. This isn't the demise of the work ethic but simply that there are jobs that pay just as well in warm offices and shops. The decline of traditional working-class jobs can't be laid at the door of the immigrant.

Finally the work ethic (not a concept I'm a special fan of) isn't defined by a litany of pain or suffering but by that thing Danczuk has proved - if you put the effort in, learn and take the opportunities life throws at you, you've more chance of succeeding economically. And that's what that twenty-something Slovakia shows by being prepared to cross a continent to get a shot at a better future.

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Quote of the day - green politics and the privileges of the wealthy

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It's from Joel Kotkin and speaks of California. But it could apply in the UK - indeed in any European nation:

But now, having embraced a stringent environmentalism, the gentry seek to impose their “green” agenda on the hoi polloi. If this hypocrisy isn’t disturbing enough, consider the increasingly top-down nature of environmentalist politics. In the past, conservationists focused on how to protect people from harm and preserve nature, in part, so people might enjoy it. Many of today’s progressives not only are determined to protect their privileges, but seek to limit the opportunities for pretty much everyone else.

And the same goes for policies in health, in education and in criminal justice - the interests of the left wing gentry ar eprotected and the working classes get stuffed.

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The Labour Party: Patronising working people since 1900

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Chuka Umunna, a Labour Party frontbencher is continuing the champagne socialist tradition of patronising ordinary people. In this case ordinary people who (wrongly in my view - they should vote Conservative) chose to vote for UKIP:

UKIP voters are disconnected because many cannot send and receive emails, use search engines or browse the Internet, Labour’s shadow business secretary has suggested.

Chuka Umunna said that ‘a lot’ of people who voted for the party in its European elections victory were not computer literate and did not have basic online skills.

He promised that a Labour government would be ‘absolutely focused’ on connecting people who have been alienated from the wider economy.

Judging by my blog comments, email in-box and Twitter feed, UKIP folk seem only too well acquainted with the joys of the online world!

Essentially Chuka, in his £1000 suit, is telling the proles that they're too thick to understand. But then his party has been doing this for 114 years so far.

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Rebuilding urban conservatism isn't about working class voters

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There has been much talk of how the Conservative Party should muscle its way into Labour territory and become the 'Workers' Party'. It has generated a great deal of mirth amongst nice, well-educated, middle-class left-wing pundits - the sort who think being a football supporter and drinking a pint in the local gastropub qualifies them as 'working class'. The sort of people who really don't understand the extent to which the left's authoritarian streak is displayed in its ever more strident attack on working class pleasures like drinking, smoking, burger and chips or a flutter on the horses.

Oddly I really don't think that the Conservative Party has much of a problem with its working class support. We know that, back in 1979, the votes of the skilled working classes elected Margaret Thatcher and that those voters - and their children - have stuck with the party since. And we know that Conservative support amongst the 'unskilled' working class (I dislike that term but calling them DE Social Class is even more impersonal) was at or close to its highest in 2010.

So despite the admirable efforts of David Skelton and his Renewal group, there isn't all that much more scope for increasing support from these groups. Don't get me wrong, the Party is right to talk about the living wage, about the value of trade unions and about building affordable homes. Just as important there is a strong argument in saying to working class voters that the Labour Party takes them for granted, abandoning them to the worst communities, the poorest schools and the least stable jobs.

But this will not sort out the Conservative Party's long term renewal (although it will help in getting a Conservative government in 2015) because it's not those working class voters that are the Party's problem. The problem is two other groups - ethnic minorities and the urban middle class.

On the former the problem is stark - here's Tim Wigmore setting out the issue:

BME voters are 33 per cent more likely to vote for Labour than white voters – but they are seven points less likely to vote Conservative than white voters. Unless this changes dramatically, it will be a roadblock to the Tories ever winning another election.

We know that the single indication that someone won't be a Conservative voter is that they are "Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic" (BAME as the ghastly acronym goes). And we shake our heads and ask why? It's not that the Party lacks ethnic minority MPs or that those MPs don't get attention or preferment - one of them was even discussed as a possible leadership challenger. Just as importantly those ethnic minority Tory MPs represent very safe seats places like Witham, Windsor, Stratford, Bromsgrove and were selected as candidates by an overwhelmingly white membership. The Party simply doesn't look racist in these places.

Yet go into inner-city Bradford, to East London or to Leicester and people will tell you that the Tory Party isn't for them, it's out-of-touch, elitist and, most significantly, racist. Until the Party shifts this perception - and the problem is perception not fact - then it will not get the support from among those minorities it needs. The problem is visceral, fundamental and won't be sorted from the centre. The Party has to be active in those communities. We should also shift our language on immigration - right now we're on the horns of a UKIP dilemma but this isn't a long-term issue in the way that ethnic minorities not voting for us at all is a long-term issue.

The second group may seem very different - that young urban middle class, the sort of trendy, hipster vote. The kind of people who are buying £600,000 houses in Hackney. If they've that sort of money and a belief in home ownership and hard-work then shouldn't they be voting Conservative? The problem is that they're not, they're voting anything but Conservative. Why? For many of the same reasons that those ethnic minority voters don't vote Conservative - they see the Party as out-of-touch, elitist and socially repressive.

These people didn't see the legalising of same sex marriage as a triumph for a Conservative Prime Minister. They saw the debate as a few Tories forced into accepting the change while most screamed blue murder from the side.  If we are to change this we need to start talking a different language - not gimmicks about greenery or tokenistic policy platforms - but the language of community action and involvement. And we need to be on the ground in the urban places where the young urban middle class is living, in East Dulwich, in Stoke Newington, in Chapel Allerton. The sad thing is we once were in these places but have withdrawn to the suburbs further out and to rural exurbia.

Building a genuinely national party should be the aim. And that means putting resources on the ground knowing that the fruit could be eight, ten, even twenty years before it's ripe. So long as the Conservative Party combines short-term targeting with centralised message management, we will continue to decline. We do need renewal - David Skelton is right - but that renewal is as much about presence and activity as it's about policy. And the message, instead of central and controlled, must be local and specific - we should talk directly about the concerns we hear from the communities we want to support us.

It's great that there's a campaign to change the Party. What we now need is something more than a nod of partial agreement from the leadership. We need to resource the fightback, to support the few Tories on the ground in urban England and to start listening to the voices of those urban communities.

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How the ragged troused philanthropists were right...

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'The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!'.

So proclaimed Frank Owen of the 'ragged trousered philanthropists' who had the audacity to vote Conservative. And thus was born the myth of the Tory working class - trained, almost dog-like, to nod to their betters and defer to their thoughts.

It always seemed that 'the left' are deeply concerned at the prospect that any 'worker' might vote for a political party other than one 'of the left' (whatever that means). After all, Tories "despise the working class", how can a member of that class vote for them?

All this explains why the Conservative politicians for whom 'the left' reserve the greatest vitriol - even hatred - are those who challenge their perspective. When Norman Tebbit, Eric Pickles, Patrick McLaughlin or even Nadine Dorries speak up the sound of left-wing hackles rising can be heard right across the nation. These people are the acme of class traitorhood, the very personification of false consciousness, the quislings of the working class.

The left is quite comfortable with David Cameron and George Osborne because they are what Tories should be: inherited wealth, top public school, Oxford, horse-riding - all the stereotypes of left-wing iconography. It makes for an easy campaign, roll out Dennis Skinner ranting about privilege, talk about 'out of touch Tory toffs' and add in images of top hats (or that over-used Bullingdon photograph - I wonder whose copyright it is, they should have made a fortune).

The problem is that it really isn't as simple as that, this class divide malarkey. For sure we can show people about the idea of surplus value with three slices of bread and a knife but that doesn't make it true nor does it put a roof over someone's head and a meal on the table. More to the point Norman, Eric and Nadine are proof that, not only does the Conservative Party not "despise the working class" but people from that class can get to powerful positions in the Party. This is not how it should be!

Today a man earning fifty or sixty thousand a year as a skilled operator working on shift is considered working class (and will most likely be a member of that working class institution Unite the Union) whereas a man earning half that amount from his fields is a rentier ("boo-hiss"). The argument to those ragged trousered ones a hundred years ago - that they should throw off those capitalist shackles - no longer stands since the ragged trousers have been replaced with designer clothes, two weeks in Tenerife and a new (-ish) Audi.

It seems the 'philanthropists' were right - invest in the free system and everyone gains. We don't know whether Owen was right (although there has been the occasional hint as to socialism's inadequacy as a system) but it doesn't matter because capitalism worked. The 'conditions of the working man' (the improvement of which Disraeli had set as the Conservative Party's mission) were raised and continue to rise.

We will continue to see the myth of the working-class Tory peddled - the idea that independence, self-reliance, hard work, decency and choice represent some sort of misplaced confidence in the capitalist system, a confidence that will fail the working man. And the belief that some syndicalist wonderland will come forth from the casting aside of capitalism.

Those values - working class Tory values - that the left rejects are in the soul of the Conservative Party. But we are, above everything, pragmatic and know that the consequence of Frank Owen's system is not Utopia but Venezuela.

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This isn't public health it's an attack on the lifestyles of the poor

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I want to be angry. I really do.

So we are launching a 10-week consultation, seeking views on five key areas:

 

• a ban on multi-buy promotions in shops and off-licences to reduce excessive alcohol consumption
• a review of the mandatory licensing conditions, to ensure that they are sufficiently targeting problems such as irresponsible promotions in pubs and clubs
• health as a new alcohol licensing objective for cumulative impacts so that licensing authorities can consider alcohol-related health harms when managing the problems relating to the number of premises in their area
• cutting red tape for responsible businesses to reduce the burden of regulation while maintaining the integrity of the licensing system
• minimum unit pricing, ensuring for the first time that alcohol can only be sold at a sensible and appropriate price

But somehow, since I knew it was coming, I am resignedly depressed. I joined a Party that stood for personal responsibility, choice and independence but now find myself watching as an unjustified and unjustifiable attack on the lifestyles of ordinary people is prosecuted in the name of “health”.

There is no evidence to support the contention that alcohol is an especial problem – consumption has fallen and is falling further, violent crime is at its lowest level for thirty years and young people’s drinking behaviour is extremely moderate (and is matched by sharp declines in other drug use).

I can only conclude that these proposals are the bastard child of a terrifying union between temperance campaigners and a disdainful upper middle class that cannot countenance the idea of poor people drinking. It is Titus Salt revisited – a man who wouldn’t permit his workers to drink while enjoying a drink himself.

These proposals hand to public health officials the power to shut down pubs (the few that survive the smoking ban, massive hikes in duty and now the late night levy). The reason for this appears to be that we, like Sir Titus, don’t approve of working-class people drinking. It’s not the consumption of alcohol that is the issue but by who and where it’s being consumed. We appear to be OK with public school educated journalists and doctors quaffing champagne. We can just about tolerate a couple of university educated chaps enjoying a pint (just the one, you know) of “craft beer”. But some poor old man buying a can or two of cheap lager – that is terrible and eats away at the foundation of society.

The advocates of minimum pricing are quite clear – they are deliberately targeting the cheapest alcohol, the stuff that the least well off buy. This is despite the fact that – unlike smoking – drinking rates increase with social class and income. It’s those middle-class journalists who are drinking too much not the ordinary working class bloke.

These are not public health proposals.

These are not community safety proposals.

These proposals are a patronising and offensive attack on the lifestyles of ordinary people who, for whatever reason, can’t afford posh beer, malt whisky and fine wines. Why should they be punished just because we don’t approve of their tastes?

I give up.

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I do rather wish Guardian columnists would stop treating the working class as imbeciles

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It is well known among the cognoscenti that the adverts we see contains special powers that make it nearly impossible for the innocent viewer – especially if that innocent viewer is from the lower socio-economic classes – to resist the blandishments of the business present products or services before them.

“The current crisis of public health is not in any case about the collapse of personal responsibility but a reflection of a toxic environment in which making healthy choices has become increasingly difficult, particularly if you are on a tight budget or work long hours.”

Scuttling from a back-breaking job cleaning toilets to collect the kids followed by a desperate search for some affordable grub to silence the rumblings in those kids tummies, these poor folk from lower socio-economic groups are society’s victims – dragged into McDonalds no doubt by a special advertising pheromone affecting only working class people on less than twenty grand a year (and detectable only by Guardian columnists).

This is all utter and complete tripe and Felicity Lawrence reveals both her prejudice and her patronising nature by suggesting that nothing in the so-called “obesity epidemic” has anything at all to do with personal choice or responsibility:

“...the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.”

Now – leaving aside that the obesity epidemic, rather like the alcohol pandemic, is something of a New Puritan fiction – it still remains the fact that whether Mary-Jo is grossly overweight is a concern for Mary-Jo and for no-one else. And it remains the fact that most people who eat pizza, who pop in for a McD or who guzzle the occasional fizzy drink are not obese and present no health problem as a result of their diet.

Yet people who write in self-regarding journals such as the Guardian persist in pointing at the working classes – with their drinking, smoking and fatty foods – and saying that they are the blameless victims of mass marketing. I hate to disappoint Ms Lawrence but she – and all her righteous, lentil-knitting, whole foods munching mates – are wrong.

Those ‘lower socio-economic groups’ that the Guardian so likes to patronise smoke, drink and eat burgers because they like smoking, drinking and eating burgers. These things give them pleasure – as does having lots of sex and watching reality TV shows. If you want to change their behaviour, you have to offer them affordable alternative pleasures that are as good.

And anyway the whole argument collapses when we’re presented with the real facts:

The actual figures...show that the trend from 2002 has actually been flat. For 2009 ... the proportion of all men who were obese was 22.1 per cent, the same as in 2002.

So Ms Lawrence, just shut up and go away. Leave the working classes to the pleasures they choose and stop patronising them.

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The Guardian's writers never check their facts do they? The example of Richard Seymour

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Too much of our politics is dominated by the discussion of class – working-class, middle-class, upper-class and so on. These terms mean almost nothing – is the multi-millionaire builder working-class? How is all this defined? So my apologies for writing about the psephology of class in response to a rather poor article by some chap called Richard Seymour:

The relentless, long-term narrowing of the Tory base since the 60s – as it has become more explicitly the vehicle of financial and monopoly capital, and less willing to articulate popular working-class concerns – has seen Tory support recede from working-class areas.

Arrant nonsense – support for the Conservatives among C2DE social classes has risen since that time not fallen. Here are the facts for C2 voters from Ipsos MORI:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	26	41	40	40	39	27	29	33	37
Lab	49	41	32	36	40	50	49	40	29

And for DE voters:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	22	34	33	30	31	21	24	25	31
Lab	57	49	41	48	49	59	55	48	40

The truth is that the Conservative Party’s problem is with AB voters not working-class voters – the reason for the Party’s failure to win overall last year lay in getting just 39% of AB votes not in getting the votes of the working class English.

But that truth wouldn’t suit the Guardian, would it! The biggest demographic shifts in British politics have been the shifts of the skilled working class from Labour to Conservative and the loss of Tory AB votes to the Liberal Democrats.

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