Working class Brits did not ditch the Labour Party … it ditched them
Their unconditional, unreserved support for Labour is starting to feel very much like a thing of the past
FROM Attlee to Blair, my mum lived and died as a Labour voter.
For my mum’s generation, voting Labour was more than a political choice, it was an expression of tribal loyalty and fierce working class pride.
Being a Labour voter was central to my mum’s identity, as unchangeable as her blue eyes.
But my mum died in 1999 and her kind of unconditional, unreserved support for Labour is starting to feel very much like a thing of the past.
An ICM poll last week revealed that a majority of the poorest members of society now favour the Tories rather than Labour.
This is more than a curious blip in the opinion polls, it is a watershed in our history.
It tells us that the Tories are no longer seen as the party of heartless toffs and that Labour are no longer perceived as the champions of the poor.
Decades of unthinking loyalty to any political party are gone forever.
It is not just the unskilled and semi-skilled workers who would rather vote Conservative than Labour – it is every part of society apart from teenagers.
Kate Bush is totally in touch with the mood of the nation.
Increasingly, it feels as if we are all Tories now.
Paul Nuttall, the new leader of Ukip, wants his party to wipe out Labour in England and Wales just as the SNP have wiped out Labour in Scotland.
And perhaps they will.
But if there is no longer any social stigma in a working class man or woman voting Tory, then Theresa May’s soaring popularity is a problem for Ukip as well as Labour.
Would my mum still be a Labour voter today?
Or would she have turned away when Tony Blair lied through his teeth about Iraq and then ran off to stuff his pockets?
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Or would my mum have given up on Labour when Gordon Brown called Mrs. Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” for daring to raise the subject of unfettered immigration?
Or would my mum have ditched Labour in the age of Jeremy Corbyn and his grotesque menagerie of unpatriotic, right-on Islington liberals?
I will never know.
Perhaps my mum would have stuck with Labour, even now.
But I am glad she did not live long enough to have her heart broken by the tragic decline of the party she supported for her entire adult life.
I am glad she never saw Diane Abbott change the subject to Labour’s comfort blanket of the NHS every time someone mentions immigration.
I am glad my mum never saw the dreamy look John McDonnell gets in his eyes when he speaks of the IRA.
I am glad my mum never saw the Labour leader describe terrorists as his friends.
I am glad she never saw Emily Thornberry sneer at our nation’s flag.
And I am glad that my Labour-voting mum never saw the party she supported come to despise ordinary men and women and care nothing for their concerns and aspirations.
For history will record that the British working class did not abandon the Labour Party.
Labour abandoned them.
Trump risks losing voters
EVEN before he gets anywhere near the Oval Office, Donald Trump has reneged on his promise to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
I wonder how many more of his mouthy campaign promises will be broken.
I wonder if the Great Wall of Mexico will ever be built. And I wonder how his excitable supporters will feel about it. After Trump’s victory, a number of idiots on the Left like
Guardian journalist Monisha Rajesh seriously called for his assassination.
But if I was Donald, I would be far more worried about my own disappointed supporters.
YOU could argue that the greatest talents of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties have all passed away over the last 12 months – Leonard Cohen at the age of 82, David
Bowie at 69 and Prince at 57. As we enter December, I find myself constantly playing You Want It Darker, easily the best thing I heard this year – Leonard Cohen’s beautiful, bittersweet goodbye.
It feels right that a dying man in his eighties made the album of the year.
2016 has been the year the music died.
For the love of Boris ...
Who knows the truth?
It would hardly be the first time that Boris has told an audience not necessarily what he believes but what he believes they want to hear.
One glaring example – during the referendum Boris made the prospect of Turkey joining the EU sound like a very bad thing indeed.
But when our new Foreign Secretary visited the country in September, he promised Britain would “help Turkey in any way” to join the EU.
At best, this is mealy-mouthed hypocrisy.
And at worst, it is telling someone big fat fibs.
Despite the accusation that is regularly flung at his lovable mop-top, Boris’s problem is not that he has a vaunting ambition.
His big problem is that he desperately wants to be loved.
R.I.P Manuel
HOW sad that the final years of Andrew Sachs, who has died at the age of 86, were tarnished by the scandal caused by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and their puerile bullying of an elderly man.
And how fitting that the world will remember the comic genius of Sachs, above with John Cleese, and be laughing at the exploits of Fawlty Towers’ Manuel long after it has forgotten all about Brand and Ross.
Park Life is hardly typical
THE Lib Dems overturned Zac Goldsmith’s 23,015 majority to win the by-election in Richmond Park, one of those leafy constituencies where being in the European Union means having a delightful young Italian make your skinny latte, hiring a nice Polish gardener to tend your lawn and employing an uncomplaining Romanian lady to come in and do for you twice a week.
This will have zero impact in Richmond Park.
Richmond Park is a lovely place.
But it is hardly typical of our country.
And if the result means anything, it is surely that any sitting MP whose views on the EU radically differ to those of his constituents is up for the chop, no matter the size of his or her majority.
Goldsmith is a Euro- sceptic.
But Richmond Park is pro-EU.
In many Labour constituencies across our land, it’s the other way round.
Plenty of sitting Labour MPs will be trembling with fear today.
Congratulations are due to candidate Sarah Olney, above, and to the Lib Dems.
Richmond Park does not give them a mandate to thwart the democratic will of 17.4million British people.
But now they have nine MPs, it definitely means they are going to need a bigger minicab.
Nativity farce
THE headmistress at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Worcester has walked into a winter wonderland of controversy by asking parents to pay £1 per ticket to watch the school’s nativity play this Christmas.
Headmistress Louise Bury is attempting to raise money to buy books for the 40 per cent of children at St Joseph’s who speak English as a second language.
This is a noble cause but a quid to watch a nativity play still seems a bit on the steep side.
£1 to watch five-year-old wise men in cotton-wool beards struggling to remember their lines, pint-sized shepherds in bed sheets picking their noses and a one-eyed doll standing in for the baby Jesus?
I have sat through a few nativity plays in my time and I always felt that, all things considered, the school should be paying the parents to watch this stuff.
Freedom to panic, Europe
THIS could be Black Sunday for the European Union.
In Italy they vote in a referendum on constitutional reform, which will probably result in the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, while in Austria today’s election could possibly result in the EU’s first far-right leader – the Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer.
Either result, Renzi losing, Hofer winning, would be catastrophic for Brussels.
And in the first half of 2017 there are elections in Holland and France that could result in referendums on EU membership.
Even two out of five Germans say they want a referendum on EU membership.
Two out of five Germans!
So why are we so timid about leaving?
Why do many of us suspect that this Government is bottling out of Brexit?
We’d better get a move on with leaving.
Because soon there will be nothing left to leave.
Petty pugilists
IT all kicked off at the press conference for the David Haye v Tony Bellew fight.
Passions ran high as insults were traded, punches were thrown and Haye denounced Bellew as a “bell end” on live TV. But all the ruckus only revealed boxing’s central problem – these days the actual fights are never as exciting as the press conferences.