When a freshly-appointed Baron feels able to devote his maiden speech in the upper house to a condescending de haut en bas attack on commoners for being too damn posh, it’s entirely clear that Britain’s outdated honours system produces some rather rum results. But such was the lack of self-awareness on display when former Labour MP Lord Watts waded into the Corbyn supporters for constituting a “London-centric hard left political class who sit around in their £1m mansions eating their croissants at breakfast and seeking to lay the foundations for a socialist revolution.”
Nor is the he only prominent figure on the Labour right out to depict those of us who back the leadership as effete ineffectual trendies, condemned never to lift anything heavier than a pepper mill as we add condiments to our delicious gluten-free wholemeal vegan pasta and aubergine bake. Take Gary Smith, GMB’s Scottish secretary. Smith argues that the only people behind Jezza on Trident are “professional posers” busy playing “student politics” while “sipping lattes in Islington”.
Because, you know, we denizens of N1 like nothing better than a exquisite organic Kopi Luwak to accompany our morning artisan-baked Viennoiserie. For us, it is as natural a match as bread and dripping is for the sturdy blue collar masses that we are asked to believe make up the natural constituency monopolised by Progress and Labour First.
Those old enough to remember Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch might like to picture it re-enacted by four northern Labour MPs, all keen to stress their impoverished upbringings and impeccable proletarian virility. One of the quartet will almost certainly be Michael Dugher, a man who can’t get through a media interview without making sure that the journalist knows that he was raised int’ pit village, which in terms of horny handed son of toil credentials certainly trumps such inconvenient CV items as a career as a SpAd.
Discussing unskilled labour from eastern Europe is “not something that nice, polite, leftwing people do at dinner parties in North London”, Dugher opines. And there was me thinking that the stereotype was that we talk of little else, especially when recommending Polish chappies able to do a spot of cash-in-hand plastering for us. Dugher’s point here is that ‘umble folk can’t be doing with us north Londoners and our fancy Big Smoke ways, and Labour can only avert core vote meltdown by pledging to clamp down on immigrants coming over here, taking our jobs and stealing our women.
Enough of all this nonsense. It is high time that someone came to the defence of the Americano-sipping north London left, and it probably takes a self-professed metrosexual male moisturiser user like me to do the job. For a start, the social composition of constituency Labour Parties in the area in which I live is no different from anywhere else in Britain.
Sure, we have a disproportionate number of teachers and local government workers. But that’s the way it was under Blair and Brown, and from all empirical evidence, it is as true in Darlington as it is in Dalston.
However, the idea that union activists and tenants movement activists run a mile because they are repelled by our airy-fairy middle-class ways is a complete myth. The key point is that thanks to the huge jump in membership under Corbyn, in absolute terms we have many, many more working class and black members than we did a year ago. That wouldn’t have happened had any of the other three candidates had won, and Watts, Smith and Dugher know that full well.
Then there are the house price insinuations. In most of inner London, a “£1m mansion” equates to what would in the rest of the country be seen as “an average terraced house”. Five will get you ten that Lord Watts’ accommodation is somewhat grander.
I don’t live in a mansion myself, having to make do with a mere “£500,000 luxury apartment”, of the type known elsewhere as “a two-bedroom shoebox flat”, roughly in line with what is now the average price of a London home. But Labour Party members who do occupy houses in the main do so because they got on the housing ladder two or three decades ago.
Most young Corbynistas are Generation Rent, and without a radical change in this country’s housing policy, they won’t get a similar chance. That’s why Miliband’s rent-controls-but-not-so-anybody-would-notice stance was one of Labour’s most popular policies in 2015.
Finally, it’s worth noting that for all the sneering, the populations of Camden, Islington and Hackney remain majority working class. Far from being out of touch with their concerns, local CLPs are campaigning hard to get out the vote out for Khan in May, and look set to deliver a Labour victory.
Sneering and childish myth-mongering of the type peddled by Watts, Smith and Dugher is not only inimical to serious discussion.
It’s deliberately insulting to activists in one of our party’s strongholds, and should be no more acceptable than the slurs against Grimsby on offer in the latest Sacha Baron-Cohen film.
If the Labour right wants its arguments to be taken seriously, it might like to try engaging in adult political debate instead of assassination by caricature.
