In praise of populism

We need a political party my nan could vote for.

In 1987 I was working part time on the checkout in a branch of Woolworths in Essex. A teenager marking time after sixth form and before I got a ‘proper’ job. University wasn’t really an option right then, though I did eventually end up going to Polytechnic.

It was a general election year, and the first since I could vote, and while ringing up Pick n Mix, and selling packets of seeds to old people, I’d often chat about the upcoming vote with my fellow shop workers.

I remember one of them, Cheryl, a youngish upbeat mum with a couple of kids, telling me in no uncertain terms ‘I’m going to be voting for Mrs Thatcher.’

I was incredulous. The biggest political influence in my life at the time was my nan, a tough Scot who had moved to Essex in the late fifties. She was as working class as you could get. She sometimes told me how growing up she’d worked in the Dundee jute mills, so she was the real deal.

My nan couldn’t stand Mrs Thatcher.

So I asked my co-worker Cheryl why she was voting for her.

And without hesitation she said ‘Because she’s for us, she’s for the working class.’

That was the political tension in the 80s. Who could really claim to be for the working class?

The obvious answer was Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. He had the support of Billy Bragg and the Red Wedge, stood in opposition to unemployment and de industrialisation, and had been on the side of the miners during the strikes, albeit in a slightly hedgy way.

On the other side was Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher. She stood for the new way of doing things, a deregulated form of capitalism which brought us The Big Bang in the City and privatisations like Gas, (Sid had been told in 1986), and gave council house tenants the right to buy their homes.

Not wanting to annoy anyone, but in retrospect it’s clear that Thatcher won the argument, at least at the time, because she went on to win a third victory, and second landslide in that 1987 election. Securing 376 seats, and a reduced majority of 102, which she could simply not have done without the endorsement of a big chunk of what was then called the C2 D vote, the skilled working class. Especially where I lived, in the South East.

A huge section of the British working class didn’t vote Tory in 1987 of course, especially in areas we now think of as The Red Wall. And it’s not hard to see why, Mrs Thatcher’s reforms left an awful lot of people behind, especially in the former industrial North. To many, an unforgivable human price to pay for the Lawson Boom.

But the Tories have got form when it comes to dumping wholesale, parts of Britain they find inconvenient. And unlike Northern Ireland now, at least Teeside wasn’t negotiated away to the Belgians.

My point is that there was a genuine argument back then about which political party ‘really’ stood for the working class.

Labour with its roots in organised labour and the union movement. Or The Tories, with their barrow boy supporters and Loadsamoney mentality.

We don’t spend much time asking the same question today. Because the answer is obvious. Which party best represents the British working class? Neither. They both hold the working class in absolute and utter contempt.

These days both main parliamentary parties seem united in a belief that regular working people lack even the ability to accomplish even the most basic of everyday tasks, such as deciding what to feed themselves, how to pick fact from outrageous fiction on the internet, and perhaps most importantly, deciding how to spend their own money.

Of course the elites don’t put it like that.

Instead they claim that food labelling is ‘confusing’. Suggest that shoppers are too bamboozled by insidious advertising and two-for-one offers to work out which is the more healthy, a basket of fresh vegetables, or a frozen pizza. But the implication is the same. You’re too stupid to choose your own dinner. So we will have to choose it for you. For your own good.

Both parties tell us that the online world is awash with lies and disinformation. Which is true, but only because they, and people like them, helped put half of it there. They were the ones claiming that anyone opposed to lockdown was basically a murderer, that there was no possible way Covid started in a gain of function lab, or that the reason that so many cancer patients went untreated during the same period was that they chose to metastasise rather than bother the sainted NHS.

And their plan to deal with all this nonsense includes The Online Harms Bill, a piece of legislation supported by both Labour and the Tories, which presupposes that regular members of the British public are unthinking vectors of Hate, one micro aggression away from a race riot. I wrote about it here if you’re interested in my take.

And of course both parties, despite trying to talk up their fake differences at every opportunity, also unite in bovine supplication at the feet of teenage death cultist Greta Thunberg and her ilk. Climate change is real, and we need to do something about it. But that’s not what they say, instead they tell us that the world will literally collapse in fire unless they take an unprecedentedly large chunk of our wages, and spend it on windmills and subsidies for unreliable green technologies.

I’m criticising both parties here, but of course it doesn’t really matter what the Tories think anymore. Because they are going to lose the next election. And lose it bigly. Just as they deserve.

The coalition of voters Johnson put together to win in 2019 has been absolutely shattered by Tory betrayal, on everything from Brexit, to ‘levelling up’ to covid cake. And just as the Labour Party has turned its back on its core constituency. So the Tories seem to have fallen out of love with theirs.

The Tories have been in power for over twelve years. And in that time have introduced a tax regime which goes out of its way to punish the self employed. Overseen multiple, and never ending attacks on drivers. Made home ownership a fantasy for all but the richest. And stood by and allowed the destructive creed of identity politics to poison society.

But if anyone thinks Keir Starmer’s Labour Party offers a principled antidote to Tory malfeasance they are deluding themselves. This is a man who spent three years actively trying to overturn the largest democratic vote in British history. And who is guaranteed, on day one of his administration to prostate himself before Ursula Von Der Leyen and make the Remainer dream of rejoining the EU inevitable.

Starmer’s priority isn’t to fight for the little guy, instead he promises to make Britain a ‘clean energy super power’. An ambition shared no doubt by every bus driver in Bolton, midwife in Middlesborough and Scouse binman.

The Labour Party has lost sight of its original purpose, which was to empower regular people who had traditionally been exploited by the elites. To allow them to make their own choices, and take charge of their own lives.

But now, instead of empowering regular voters, the party clearly  sees itself as their nanny. A benign guardian whose job it is to stop the unenlightened from falling under the spell of rapacious capitalists, swivel eyed racists and sugar pushing Mr Kipling.

If you want to know what Britain will be like under this version of the once great Labour Party, look at Scotland now.

An illiberal and authoritarian one party state, with few checks and balances imposed on its bonkers anti human, socially divisive and economically ruinous policies.

Remember how the joyless Labour Party demanded that the destructive and largely pointless covid lockdowns be imposed for longer, made more restrictive, and include legal sanctions for the unvaccinated.

Does anyone really believe that once in power they will show restraint? That they will see their  huge three figure majority as anything but a mandate to impose a shopping list of failed social policies and illiberal restrictions on our everyday lives?

So look forward to rent controls. Sky high taxes. Hate speech laws policing conversations in the privacy of your own home. A bankrupt public purse. An economic landscape which is repellent to international investment. Wealth taxes. Divisive new laws introduced under the guise of equity and fairness. A grievance culture embedded into the legal system. You know, all the fun stuff.

Keir Starmer is attempting to sell himself as a centrist, who will choose practicality over ideology. But Starmer is no Tony Blair. And his party is not New Labour.

That why it’s time for a proper populist party.

We have been encouraged to shun populism of course. It’s a Trumpist dog whistle. Populism as a code for racism, boorishness, and the worst reactionary instincts of the uneducated masses. A sort of Poundshop nazism, fascism lite.

But in reality populism is simply a label the self serving political establishment uses to smear genuinely popular political ideas, to sneer at little people, and denigrate their needs and aspirations.

In reality, and by definition, populism is simply a series of policies and positions which are popular with the majority of people. It is neither left wing , nor right wing. And in a democracy, that’s a pretty good place to start.

And here’s a hot take. We don’t need a political movement which fights the culture wars. We need a party which ignores them, or at least refuses to engage in the self defeating nonsense of identity politics.

We need a party which vacates this pointless, shriek filled battlefield and leaves the elites to argue amongst themselves about their pronouns, and refuses to engage while the great and the good disappear up their own backsides debating whether or not getting sums right is colonialist.

Instead we need political leaders who get on with the actual job of making sure the lights stay on, that we have a functioning healthcare system, and that there are fruit and vegetables on the shelves in Tescos. Getting sucked into the culture wars is a distraction, a waste of time and political capital.

We need a positive party which does not define itself by its opposition to something else. Which is why the appeal of parties like Reform seems so limited. Reform is essentially a protest party, fishing for grumpy converts in the admittedly massive pool of disaffected Tory voters.

It’s no secret what regular voters want. Because they keep voting for it. And they keep being fobbed off, betrayed, ignored, and insulted when they do.

They want to live in a sovereign nation state which is in control of its own laws, money and borders.

They want a functioning health system that doesn’t treat patients as an annoyance and inconvenience.

They want to put the heating on when it’s cold and not spend the next few hours warm, but worried about how they are going to pay for it.

And they want a government when reflects their own sense of fairness and natural justice. A system which offers, if you’ll excuse the cliche, ‘a hand up not a hand out’. Which ensures international corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

Which doesn’t assume it is simply ‘racist’ to prioritise local people over foreigners and new arrivals. Which tackles the very real epidemic of crime blighting our cities, towns and communities.

And which most of all doesn’t treat them as a mob of unthinking hate filled xenophobic scum.

Not too much to ask.

But unfortunately that list of aspirations seems not just at odds with the priorities of our technocratic bosses, it represents everything that causes them to clutch their pearls, shudder and recoil. Nationalism, equality of opportunity, small ‘c’ conservative values, morality, localism and family.

The working classes put their trust in the Tory party in 2019 and the Tory party absolutely blew it. Now it’s Labour’s turn.

Am I being too optimistic to hope that after the inevitable disappointment of this next bunch of out of touch progressives, we might finally turn a corner and open the way to a new political movement that actually represents the working people of this country?

A party both my nan and Cheryl from Woolworths would be happy to vote for.

Don’t hold your breath.

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Just as a note. I didn’t mention William Clouston’s SDP in the article, but I do think it has a lot of good things to say on the subjects I talk about in the article. It’s sound on social issues but a little to the left on economics for my tastes. But if you, like me, are feeling politically homeless at the moment, it is definitely worth a look. https://sdp.org.uk

Thanks again!