By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail
The incredible sulk: All week, the Left have been frothing with fury that their fellow Britons could be so wicked and stupid as to vote in the Tories. Nothing better shows their contempt for ordinary people...
Just over a week has passed since perhaps the most extraordinary General Election result of modern times, and at last the dust is beginning to settle. In Westminster, David Cameron’s new all-Conservative government has settled down to business, while a succession of ambitious contenders have set out their stall for the Labour leadership, most of them insisting, not entirely plausibly, that they never agreed with a word Ed Miliband said anyway.In the real world, most people have simply got on with their lives. Yet in one strange corner of Britain, the campaign is far from over. This is a world in which we are forever poised on the brink of Socialist conversion, the only obstacles are the Right-wing press and the brainwashed masses, and Ed Miliband was the greatest prime minister we never had.
This is the world of old-fashioned union leaders, liberal Twitterati and Left-wing academics, who have spent the past week in a laughably self-pitying sulk. For while most commentators, whatever their political allegiances, saw the election as proof that Britain remains at heart a deeply pragmatic, even conservative country, the self-righteous moralists of the bien-pensant Left have drawn a very different conclusion. Like Mr Miliband, they can’t accept they lost the argument and burn with pious indignation at the supposed stupidity of the ordinary voters who let them down.
Alas, there was worse to come. Even as Guardian readers were weeping into their soya-milk lattes, anarchist protesters were taking to the streets of London, daubing obscenities on — unforgivably — a monument to those brave women who served their country in World War II.
Disappointment is, of course, part and parcel of political life. Even so, the reaction in some quarters to the General Election result strikes me as not merely disproportionate, but deluded — if not deranged. Take, for example, the Anglican canon Giles Fraser, darling of the metropolitan chattering classes. Four years ago, he resigned as chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in protest at plans to remove forcibly the anti-capitalist protesters who had set up a ‘shanty town’ camp outside, saying he could not support the possibility of ‘violence in the name of the Church’. ‘Right now I feel ashamed to be English,’ began his column for The Guardian last weekend. ‘Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us.’
From this you might think that Mr Cameron and his colleagues were committed to abolishing the NHS, scrapping foreign aid and slashing welfare to the bone. In fact, the Tories are committed to spending £11 billion a year on foreign aid, £111 billion a year on welfare and an extra £8 billion on the NHS.
You might disagree with some of the Government’s choices. Fair enough. But given the facts, Rev Fraser’s analysis had all the rigour and proportion of a toddler’s tantrum. Alas, there was worse to come. Even as Guardian readers were weeping into their soya-milk lattes, anarchist protesters were taking to the streets of London, daubing obscenities on — unforgivably — a monument to those brave women who served their country in World War II.
And in Cardiff, the ludicrous figure of the singer Charlotte Church joined a rabble of anti- austerity protesters, carrying a placard that read: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’. (By ‘it’, she presumably meant democracy.) Perhaps the most flagrant example of Left-wing blindness, self-righteousness and sheer intolerance came from the pen of Rebecca Roache, a philosophy lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. Writing on Oxford University’s Practical Ethics blog, Dr Roache announced that when she saw the election result, she immediately checked which of her Facebook contacts followed the pages of David Cameron or the Conservative Party on the social networking site, and promptly ‘unfriended’ them. To support the Conservatives, she explained, ‘is as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist or homophobic views’.
In her opinion, such views must be made ‘socially unacceptable’, with ordinary voters deterred from holding them by the chilling fear that Dr Roache might unfriend them on Facebook. I should perhaps point out that Dr Roache really does exist. I have not made her up, though it is tempting to suggest she must have been invented by a satirist keen to puncture the intellectual bullying and posturing self-importance of the academic Left.
The depressing truth is that views like hers are far from uncommon in those leafy little corners of metropolitan Britain where two or three intellectuals gather to lament the false consciousness of the working classes, who do not know what is good for them and really ought to be guided by their moral superiors. Among the bohemian Left, with their state-funded salaries and public-sector pensions, the idea that any sane person might vote Conservative, or even hold conservative opinions, is almost unthinkable.
And while you will rarely hear people saying they ‘hate’ the Labour Party, you certainly hear it about the Conservatives — or, as Left-wing activists like to call them, ‘Tory scum’. The very fact that such terms are bandied around so freely says something very depressing about the state of public debate in this country. Yet among certain fringe groups — union leaders, comedians, university lecturers — expressions of hatred for the Conservatives and their voters are all too common. ‘I’ve instinctively hated the Tories since birth,’ comedian Charlie Brooker once wrote in (you guessed it) The Guardian. ‘If there was an election tomorrow, and the only two choices were the Nazis or the Tories, I’d vote Tory with an extremely heavy heart.’
It would be easy to dismiss this as exaggerated posturing for melodramatic effect. But the fact is that in some areas of our national life — especially the universities and parts of the media — such views are regarded as mainstream. One anecdote tells a wider story. A friend who teaches at Cambridge once told me he is afraid to admit to his colleagues that he reads The Times, lest they dismiss him as a brainwashed lackey of Rupert Murdoch. Instead, he pretends to read The Guardian, even though he can’t abide it.
The state is always benign; private interests are always suspect; individual aspiration is mere selfishness; profit is a dirty word; and there is, of course, no such thing as being too Left-wing. This is not so much an issue of conscious bias as it is a case of what the American writer William H. Whyte once called ‘groupthink’: an intellectual conformity which is all the more insidious because it is so unconscious. Its precepts are simple and unchanging. Patriotism is evil. Austerity is wicked. To question mass immigration, to praise the British Empire, even to fly the national flag, is tantamount to racism. The state is always benign; private interests are always suspect; individual aspiration is mere selfishness; profit is a dirty word; and there is, of course, no such thing as being too Left-wing.
This is the ideology that dominates Twitter, where actors, comedians and intellectuals have spent the past week frothing with fury that their fellow Britons could have been so wicked as to vote for Mr Cameron. It hardly needs pointing out, I hope, that this world view is founded on an utter ignorance of British history, a complete disregard for basic economics, a basic lack of faith in democracy, an astonishing intolerance of dissenting opinions and a snobbish disregard for the common man.
Indeed, given the Twitterati’s loathing of Nick Clegg for having gone into coalition with the Tories in 2010, I often wonder how they would have treated Labour’s Clement Attlee, who went into coalition with Winston Churchill in 1940. Presumably Attlee would have been treated to the same sickening abuse that is thrown at the Conservatives and their supporters today. Still, it is worth remembering one basic fact. For all the sound and fury of the keyboard Socialists, the election proved they are a tiny, unrepresentative and largely powerless minority. For there is, of course, another Britain.
This is the country that the vast majority of people inhabit — a country very far removed from the gloomy Orwellian dystopia portrayed by Mr Miliband and his admirers, or by those BBC journalists who love to paint our country in the worst possible light. This is the Britain of the silent majority — a decent, tolerant but quietly conservative bunch, horrified by the antics of the anarchists, scornful of the entreaties of demagogues such as Russell Brand, and much more interested in bread-and-butter issues than in the smug sixth-form pretensions of the former Labour leader and his Oxbridge chums.
What Left-wing intellectuals can never get into their heads is that most people are simply not very interested in party politics. They have much better things to worry about. Yet it was a mark of Mr Miliband’s utter detachment from social and political reality that he and his allies were sucked into the echo chamber of Twitter, which is inevitably dominated by students, Westminster journalists and jumped-up B-list celebrities who think they’re as clever as the lines that are written for them.
Instead, they should have learned from Tony Blair, whose triumphant campaigns between 1997 and 2005 were based on his appeal to ‘Mondeo man’ and ‘Worcester woman’ — normal, unshowy people with normal, unshowy anxieties and aspirations. The poet Rudyard Kipling once called them the ‘sons of Martha’ after a Biblical story — the backbone of the nation, the people who in every age ‘take the buffet and cushion the shock’.
But Kipling’s admirer Margaret Thatcher, who learned his poem by heart and won her first election in 1979 with a massive swing among Labour voters and union members, put it slightly differently. This, she said, was ‘a Britain of thoughtful people — oh, tantalisingly slow to act, yet marvellously determined when they do. It’s their voice which steadies each generation, not by oratory or argument, but by a word here or there, a sudden flash of truth which makes men pause and think and say: “That makes sense to me.” ’
Thoughtful, quiet, pragmatic, cautious — this is the real Britain, a long way from the hysterical stridency of the student union Left. It is not necessarily a Tory Britain. Sometimes it turns to Labour, as in 1945, when Attlee won a landslide victory not by rhetorical shrillness or class war posturing, but by appealing to the generosity and public-spiritedness of the common man. But would Attlee, a morally austere, deeply patriotic, cricket-loving man, make it in today’s Labour Party?
. . . when they looked at Mr Miliband, they saw a quintessential metropolitan intellectual, intoxicated by his own ideological pretensions, who had absolutely no concept of what life was like outside the Oxbridge and Westminster bubble Somehow I can’t see him winning an endorsement from its chief paymaster, the hard-Left union chief Len McCluskey, let alone the approval of the preposterous Russell Brand. Instead, they found their champion in Ed Miliband, whose defining characteristic was his utter inability to understand the silent majority. And as the past week has shown with unmistakable clarity, this is a failing he shares with countless other liberal intellectuals, who appear to regard their fellow countrymen with horror and hatred.
Future historians will surely be intrigued by the fact that Mr Miliband, who went to a comprehensive school, proved so much less adept at reaching ordinary voters than Mr Cameron, who went to Eton. Yet the truth is that understanding the common man is less a question of class than one of outlook. When the silent majority looked at Mr Cameron, they saw a dutiful, businesslike family man — a child of privilege, to be sure, but one whose values and ambitions were not so different from their own. But when they looked at Mr Miliband, they saw a quintessential metropolitan intellectual, intoxicated by his own ideological pretensions, who had absolutely no concept of what life was like outside the Oxbridge and Westminster bubble.
To the liberal intelligentsia, of course, all this must seem intolerably baffling. And in fairness, if you get all your news from The Guardian and your opinions from Twitter, then the reality of British public opinion must come as a terrible shock. But if there is one lesson that the next Labour leader really ought to learn from the Miliband debacle, then it is that the woolly theories and self-regarding babble of the chattering classes count for absolutely nothing.
There are, after all, an awful lot more Worcester women than there are university lecturers. They may not shout and scream as loudly as the Rebecca Roaches of this world, but their votes are infinitely more important. If the Labour Party heed that lesson, then they might just stand a chance of rebuilding their shattered reputation. But if they neglect it, then eventually they will appeal only to Len McCluskey, Giles Fraser and Charlotte Church — perhaps the ultimate coalition of the losers.
For a once great party, that really would be a tragedy.
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