Curing the working classes of their sins is now official Labour policy

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It has been a very long time since the Labour Party I see across the chamber in Bradford had a working class majority. Gradually - to the point of exclusion now - the Party has become home to an assorted collection of mostly middle class worrywarts. Most of these are public sector employees of one sort or another, certainly the links to private enterprise, small business and entrepreneurship are vanishingly small (although it's interesting to note that a third or more of Bradford's Labour Councillors are private landlords).

This takeover of the Labour Party by people whose day jobs are to patronise the working classes means that the policy agenda throws up stuff like this:

Ed Miliband plans to impose tough restrictions on the sale and advertising of alcohol, junk food and tobacco if he wins power, it was claimed.

The Labour leader’s plan would end the £300million sports sponsorship by drinks firms and impose minimum alcohol pricing to try cut down on the damaging effects of heavy drinking on people’s health.

The blueprint, revealed in documents leaked to the Mail on Sunday, also proposes new laws to limit the amount of sugar, fat and salt in food aimed at children, and a ban on advertising unhealthy products on TV before the 9pm watershed. 

This is the authentic voice of the nannying fussbucket, a sort of health fascism that sees the lifestyle choices of the working classes as sins. People are not to be allowed choice about products that their masters deem to be unhealthy or socially problematic. The four great vices of the working man - drinking, smoking, fast women and slow horses - are to be discouraged, banned, limited and controlled for the good of those men.

This is the logic of Titus Salt - alcohol, gambling and such were denied to his workforce (all wreathed in a fog of non-conformist Christianity) while Titus could serve fine wines at dinner and attend the races without fear of retribution. This is the damnation of the pauper revisited, a return to those 19th Century campaigns for assorted prohibitions and behavioural controls.

The Labour Party was created to promote an economic message, a message of liberation and freedom for the working classes. It's true the party always had a 'know-everything' tendency best typified by the racist, anti-Semitic, eugenicist Fabian Movement of the Webbs, G B Shaw and H G Wells. But this was swamped by more practical men and women from real working class backgrounds who saw improving the lot of workers as the essential mission of the party.

All this has gone now but for little angry echoes. Today the Labour Party is the party of the middle class public sector worker, its ranks filled with social workers, teachers, community workers and so forth - plus a smattering of social science and arts academics. And its policies reflect the prejudices of these people and their unwavering belief in Douglas Jay's dictum that the man in Whitehall (or the town hall or the ivory towers of ex-polytechnic academe) really does know best what is good for the working classes.

So in an age of austerity Labour want to control the little pleasures of the ordinary men and women it claims to care about. Labour want to make those little pleasures more expensive, harder to obtain or, in some cases, impossible to get at all (unless you're on the sort of wage that MPs or top social workers can command). All because these self-appointed experts with their pseudo-science believe they can cure the working classes of their sins.

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Middle class bureaucrat attacks the working class for...er....being working class

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Peter Brant who is head of policy at the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (perhaps one of the more patronising job titles I've read recently) seems to think that working class parents are bringing up their children to be too working class.

He highlighted barriers to children from less well-off backgrounds being able to achieve their potential, including a lack of shared cultural experiences such as watching plays and taking up hobbies, and a lack of ‘cultural reference points’.

The working classes also have different attitudes towards people and relationships’, including more ‘subtext, nuance and casualness’ in middle class relationships.

The working and middle class also enjoy different food, restaurants, and clothes, he said.

There you have it folks. Nothing to do with working class children being dumped into the worst schools. Nothing about 'like selecting like'. Zilch about the expectations of parents, teachers and peers. Nope.

This man believes the problem poorer kids fail is not looking like middle class kids. And presumably liking a kebab after six pints of Carling. So we must send them to special classes where they can learn how to be like the middle class kids, so they can 'fit in'.

Perhaps, rather than running down working class pleasures and choices, people like Peter Brant need to think about challenging the sneering dismissal of those working class pastimes - whether it's the 'different restaurants', a different choice in drink or a liking for baseline, tattoos and the wearing of baseball caps the wrong way round.

Social mobility isn't about 'fitting in', about conforming to someone elses average. Social mobility is about opportunity, about giving people the chance to succeed, about education and about celebrating the passions that bring achievement. To say that the way someone talks, walks, dresses, drinks or eats is the problem is not just wrong but an insult to all those working class men and women who succeed in their lives.

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It was foul murder - how Labour killed the pub...

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Murder most foul, as in the best it is.

But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

The modern Labour Party, for all its supposed "working class roots" rather dislikes the pleasures of Britain's actual working classes. And nothing illustrates this better than their direct, premeditated assault on the pub.

Here's Peter Oborne (getting it spot on for a change):

Some people believe Labour’s defining legacy is Iraq. Others think it is the hunting ban. But the issue which has affected most people and which has damaged the fabric and appearance of British community more than anything else is the loss of the local pub.

And Labour didn't kill the pub from neglect, the act was deliberate - the smoking ban and the duty escalator were introduced in the face of the industry telling Labour that this would kill the pub. And the first pubs to go were the proper locals - 'wet led' and used by people who walked there for a drink, a chat and a fag with their friends.

The Labour Government did this deliberately - they could have stuck with the manifesto promise and protected pubs from their righteous legislation. Instead they forced a ban through that has closed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pubs and clubs. Places where, for generations, working class men and women had gone to enjoy the small pleasures their lives could afford - a smoke, a drink and good company. Gone forever, killed off by Labour.

It was foul murder.

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