Bring back the big beasts – young, arrogant and ignorant politicos are to blame for modern Britain’s soulless politics, and Labour’s resounding general election defeat
The rise of these people is hardly limited to the Labour Party. A former policy unit apparatchik and ministerial bag carrier from the John Major administration now sits in Number 10 Downing Street, re-elected to serve a second term as Prime Minister having transformed the Conservative Party into an ideologically rootless but effective vote-winning machine. The difference between David Cameron and Torsten Henricson-Bell is only one of competence, not of kind.
Nearly a month after the ideologically barren, soul-sappingly irrelevant general election – and Labour’s abject defeat at the hands of David Cameron’s Coke Zero Conservatives – it is time to face facts: the Bright Young Things of British politics, the embryonic career politicians shimmying up the greasy pole in search of a safe Westminster seat courtesy of their party machines, are the symptom, not the cure, of Britain’s political ills.
Never mind that Douglas Carswell, their latest victim, is actually UKIP’s member of parliament and no longer a Tory. The protesters may not have done their homework in this case, but the scene would only have been worse had more of them known this fact.
(The general degree of hatred and outright hostility shown by the activist Left increases exponentially as you move further away from the dull, lumpen centre of British politics and towards the right.)
“I’ve just been attacked by a – by a mob, walking home. You can see I’ve just been surrounded by several hundred people, by hard lefties, just… just unbelievable. It got really, really nasty, and I’m an elected MP trying to get home at the end of the day and I run into a mob who, you know, were insane.”
Insane is just about the only word strong enough to describe the hysteria which has gripped much of the Left since David Cameron’s unexpected election victory. From the expressions of disgust in their fellow voters for not embracing Ed Miliband, the alarmist warnings that the NHS would now immediately be sold off to Evil American corporations and the melodramatic apocalypse warnings sounded by those who just like their government big and intrusive, it quickly became apparent that the Left were drinking so much of their own Kool-Aid that they were no longer capable of viewing conservatives as anything more than two-dimensional cartoon villains.
And it is far easier to shout “Tory scum” while chasing UKIP’s sole MP into the back of a police van than it is to ruminate on why his party picked up thirteen per cent of the national vote.
The only comfort for the British Left – not that they are rational enough to notice at present – is the fact that the Tories are so timid in their embrace of real conservatism, and so intellectually stymied from having nodded along to arguments about the inviolability of the post-war consensus for so many decades, that even given a free hand with their slim parliamentary majority they are unlikely to do anything to radically shrink the state where it most needs to be shrunk.
But this won’t be a comfort forever. Eventually, at some point in the next few years, the Left will stop taking so much joy in self-righteous opposition and actually aspire to govern once again. And this will not be possible if the Labour Party becomes indelibly associated with screaming, hate-filled mobs shouting “Tory scum!” at decent public servants as they go about carrying out our democracy.
More Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch here, here and here.
UPDATE:
Appearing on the BBC’s Daily Politics show today, Douglas Carswell had this to say when asked by Andrew Neil if he had not somehow deserved the abuse he received because of UKIP’s political stances:
Andrew Neil: Does it have something to do with UKIP, though, because it is – although the UKIP overall policy attempts not to be racist, there is a widespread feeling that there is racism in your party?
Douglas Carswell: Well, maybe one or two commentators watching this show and watching those clips might want to ask themselves has stuff they’ve said over the past seven or eight months perhaps created the intellectual space that allows a mob to feel it’s justified to attack an MP.
I’m not sure that “intellectual space” is necessarily the best term to describe the cumulative effect of all the anti-UKIP commentary flying around before the election – after all, there was certainly nothing remotely intellectual going on in the minds of the snarling young activists who hounded Carswell yesterday – but his point is a good one, and well made.
Having made the immensely difficult decision to abandon the Conservative Party (which itself has largely abandoned its own conservatism in the successful hunt for centrist votes) and lend my vote to UKIP in the general election, I have been waiting expectantly for Ukipper buyer’s remorse syndrome to kick in with a vengeance.
In some ways, this is only to be expected – UKIP actually declined in terms of Westminster representation, and to suffer buyer’s remorse one has to actually have gained something. And since a majority Conservative government was the least worst option of all the possible outcomes involving the major parties, again there is little cause for regret – we will finally have our EU referendum and a few more token efforts will be made to restrain the growth of the state.
But this isn’t why I have no regrets about my voting decision. I stand behind my choice because nearly every objection to UKIP’s policies – both in politics and the popular culture – is based on a two-dimensional cartoon villain caricature of what it is to be a small government eurosceptic, and because so very many of the people leading the anti-UKIP mockery are virtue-signalling simpletons who couldn’t construct a coherent political thought if one came packaged with IKEA-style self-assembly instructions.
Take this effort by Russell Howard, released just before the election, shown in the video above.
It really is that simple. Chuka Umunna is not necessarily a bad person – in many ways he was one of the few truly competent performers and articulate voices in Ed Miliband’s team of losers – but the mere act of his installation as the successor to Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Kinnock would be enough to permanently alienate many of the voters who spurned Labour this May.
They may still regurgitate the language of standing up for the working man, the poor and the vulnerable – when they are in public. But behind closed doors their love of the EU, heavy handed regulation, bloated public services and open door immigration with no effort to up-skill the domestic workforce to compete made quite clear that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party was very much in it for selfish reasons.
Semi-Partisan Politics 