Bishop Hill Lost in self-loathing
Sep 2, 2014 Climate: Parliament Greens On the Telegraph's blogs page today, Sean Thomas takes a pop at the political left and in particular their self-loathing, their contempt for the working classes and the pernicious effects this has had on the country.
...this shame and self-hatred now dominates Left-wing thought, whereas it was once balanced by the decent Left: who were proud to inherit the noble traditions of radical English patriotism.
Evidence for this disease is all around us, but shows up particularly in two red-button issues-of-the-day: the independence referendum, and the appalling revelations from Rotherham...
...too many... especially on the Left, most especially in the Labour Party, despise their own ordinary people: the white working classes.
Take this comment by Jack Straw, Labour MP for Blackburn, and Home Secretary from 1997-2001, when the Rotherham atrocities were beginning. “The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent.” It is almost unimaginable that any senior politician would say this of his own people in America, Russia or France. Yet here it comes straight out of the mouth of a very senior politician indeed – along with many other expressions of Guardianista sneering: at the white working classes with their “chav culture”, “BNP values”, “Gillian Duffy bigotry” and so forth.
The thought struck me that environmentalism and global warming millennarianism is another aspect of the same thing. Where once the people at the top of the Labour and Liberal parties might have worried about the welfare of the poor and the not-so-rich and concerned themselves with giving them a hand up, now they worry whether those same groups are over-consuming. The focus has shifted to keeping them down and under control.
There are exceptions of course - MPs whose focus remains on the poor - but as you survey the Labour benches at Westminster, you don't see many people who think that way.
Reader Comments (24)
'as you survey the Labour benches at Westminster, you don't see many people who think that way.'
Spot on. Sadly, that applies across the House!
Rotherham and climate alarmism are both instances of the Left failing to see the wood for the trees. or perhaps of the operation being successful but the patient died.
In the case of Rotherham the police, social services and even the local Labour MP were so terrified of committing the appalling offence - the worst they can imagine - of exhibiting racism that they looked away from much more grievous offences, for 16 years. So at least their own anti-racist credentials got nicely burnished while racist Muslim paedophiles did whatever they wanted with white 12-year-olds.
In the case of climate alarmism the same breed of bien pensant handwringers loudly protests about "deniers" while deliberately looking away from the real evil, which is resurgent fascism of a malevolence not seen since the 1930s.
In both cases, each lot of leftist moral incompetents uinquestionably feels really great about themselves as they do this.
The extent of the personal consequences for the villains of Rotherham gives us a good idea of what will happen to the ecofascists when they too are rumbled: nothing.
They don't want them down and under control, they want them to revolt and smash the system so that the Left can build their socialist paradise.
Green policies driven by the CAGW scam are an important part of this; the European communist states fell because their citizens could see that the alternative offered a better standard of living. They hope that if enough people can't afford to heat their houses, run a car, go on holiday etc. they will revolt.
Drivel, NW.
Keir Hardie would be repulsed by the current Labour front bench. Ed Miliband has no idea what it is like to work for a living and has a fairly privilege life.
It is easy to see the Green Taliban infulatrating the Labour party and influencing their policies. Some of the worst excesses of Green "thinking" has come from the former Labour government so that gives us a flavour of what Ed Miliband will do if in power. A huge increase in fuel poverty, unemployment due to expensive energy damaging industry, nationalisation for dogmatic reasons, etc. He will follow Francois Hollande's suicidal policies.
I am not sure about his main assertion [that letting the Labour party run the No campaign is the reason the Yes vote is up - I think the same would have happened if the Tories had run it] but as usual Thomas makes some interesting and valid points.
To resurrect Kim Beazley Snr's quote yet again:
True believers have been replaced by careerists. The Labour Party is now like the late mediaeval church: hardly anyone running the show believes a word of the dogma, though will spout it from time to time to keep the plebs contributing (money, votes). The recent head boy of 'Fair shares for all' is now trousering £7m a year. Perhaps he's giving much of it back to the good people of Sedgefield who made it all possible for him. Or perhaps he's exploited their naivety is a way which would have made the most hardened 19th century mill owner blush. If a bishop, having preached his morning sermon on temperance and chastity, was found in the afternoon in bed with two tarts and six bottles of claret, he would be have to go: form, if not faith, matters. But in the Labour Party you can be a complete hypocrite and do very nicely too.
Mind you, the Gillian Duffys of this country do themselves no favours; when interviewed recently about voting for MEPs, she ripped into Labour and its lost principles, lauded others, then voted …. Labour. Enough to make you despair.
Unlike Orwell, Thomas seems to be all mouth and no brain. It's impossible for tories to lead the no campaign with only one MP in Scotland. If anything, the yes voters are explicitly rejecting being ruled by parties that don't represent them. In fact, every time George Osborne or some other tory or Blairite copycat-tory opens their mouth they reveal the deeply patronising and insulting attitutes that caused the ScotNat vote to move from 30% nationalist in the 70's to overwhelming today. There is a two-nation schism: the South of England unfailingly now copies the USA on everything while Scotland and the North of England would prefer a more Scandinavian system where the gap between rich and poor is less stark. This schism will widen until some real growth comes from making things and selling them, rather than the debt-based artificial growth from restricted housing development and casino capitalism that seems to fuel the South-East economic faux-booms. Almost un-noticed has been the real growth in Scotland due to selling food and drink in much larger quantities to Europe under the quality label of 'Scottish'. This surely came about due to devolution and the SNP's hard work in particular as opposed to the nonentity yes-men of Labour and the arrogance of tories who cared zero about local democracy. And what a laugh it was when the economically-inept Alistair Darling tried to talk about job losses from Faslane when it is blatantly obvious that the nuclear Subs were only placed there to make Scotland the nuclear target rather than England.
There was a very good article by Simon Danczuk (Labour MP for Rochdale) in last weeks Sunday Telegraph:
"The problem then, as now in Rotheram, was a middle-class management in children's services that simply didn't want to know and didn't care".
Without constant vigilance large public sector organisations become self serving and resistant to criticism, as we see most often in the case of NHS whistleblowers.
The solution: replace the cults of management, leadership and self preservation with cults of service and functionality, with a central role played by user complaints and suggestions. That means giving much more power and status to those who actually do the work.
Current energy policy is a war on the poor, not only in the UK but in the world at large. It takes a special kind of f*ckwit to claim he is putting the interests of unborn generations ahead of the suffering of his fellow man.
It seems a little early in the day for JamesG to be so excitable. Whatever works for him, I guess. But from a wide range of meaning-free assertions, I really can't ignore this gem:
"it is blatantly obvious that the nuclear Subs were only placed [at Faslane] to make Scotland the nuclear target rather than England"
Oh yes. Because the Soviet Union was (and Russia is) so short of warheads that they only had the one for us.
Well, if the current 'labour' party is defenestrated, I for one will not complain. I voted labour all my life until Blair...not anymore. I saw the effects of PC in education in the Liverpool FE college system. People appointed to be the anti-racist spokesperson, simply because thier husband was black. Yet when it came to teaching the appropriate Eng. Lit. course the appointee failed to teach to the correct syllabus, so most students failed. People appointed because they were not white European and they were not male. Screw the students, they don't matter. We have more black lecturers..
I couldn't agree more with your final points. Ed Miliband when he became leader of the Labour Party set out on a period of research and consultation in order to formulate policies that would make Britain a fairer place particularly for the disadvantaged. How and with whom did he do this research? You'd think working and living with the working class in order to see what issues they face and how the state fails to help or even makes things worse for them. But no, he went instead to see highbrow university folk, spending time discussing the issues with Oxbridge intellectuals who've never walked in the shoes of the poor and yet feel entitled enough to advise on "how one should deal with them".
confused on Sep 2, 2014 at 1:54 PM
"Screw the students, they don't matter."
There was a similar agenda with the young white girls in Rotherham.
This saga is, hopefully, nearing a sensible resolution:
Arrest warrant for Ashya King's parents being reviewed, says Theresa May
The Home Secretary says that the Crown Prosecution Service is reviewing the arrest warrant for the parents of gravely ill Ashya King amid growing outrage over their treatment
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/11070260/Arrest-warrant-for-Ashya-Kings-parents-being-reviewed-says-Theresa-May.html
It looks like the UK kicked off a European Union Arrest Warrant on unsubstantiated fears and the Spanish had little leeway to use their common sense.
At least the British public have been shocked into doing something, and forced the Authorities into reconsidering the case. Long may it continue, though we still have some way to go:
"The weight of opposition to the treatment of Mr and Mrs King will raise hopes that they could be released in the coming hours.
However, it was reported that officials in Spain have now said the couple are still due to appear before a judge on Wednesday morning."
I suspect that most of the Left in the UK gave up on the working class long ago when they realized that most of the people who used to be in unions were only in them for better better pay and conditions, to limit competitors for their jobs, and, in many cases, because they weren't allowed to work of they weren't a member. They certainly weren't in them to bring about a pseudo-Marxist revolution.
The Left had assumed that their utopia (ruled over by them of course) would come about through mass mobilization of the working class. When it became obvious that the working class had other ambitions - for the most part to become middle class, the Left, like a jilted lover, became spiteful towards these ungrateful wretches - especially the working class men, who at the time, made up the largest and most potentially powerful sectors of the workforce.
The Left then stopped trying to gain control through using the muscle of the lumpen proles, instead they went for a top-down imposition - through infiltrating all levels of government and the quickly expanding public sector, quangos and NGOs.
Now we have a situation where people who once would have been advocates for the working class, genuinely or not, flitting between all these sectors, caring little for any particular job other than as a vehicle for ideology and the working class are only there to be milked to fund all this, occasionally as a rhetorical pawn but otherwise kept in its place.
"It takes a special kind of f*ckwit to claim he is putting the interests of unborn generations ahead of the suffering of his fellow man."
It balances out all the financial screwing they're going to get later, don't ya know.
Shifting to the U.S. and a slightly earlier time: I'm reading Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962); the famous attack on pesticides. (For me this is part of a project to understand the thinking of the boomers).
Carson can fairly be suspected of being more concerned about flowers by the roadside, and recreational salmon fisheries to attract tourists, than she is about, say, food production and the eradication of disease. She has what she needs, as long as someone keeps up the supply of birds and flowers, and she doesn't want to have to be afraid of what technologists are coming up with. The last time there was a true epidemic affecting middle-class children in the West was probably the polio outbreak of the early 1950s; the only disease Carson really fears is cancer. She even says the U.S. can probably reduce its food production (so they should be willing to cut back on the use of pesticides); as evidence, she points out that the government is subsidizing farmers not to produce crops. Rightly or wrongly, governments do this to support prices; there was plenty of room to increase food production in 1962, especially given the needs of the poor countries. Carson had a First World/upper middle class perspective at best. Her many acolytes want programs to increase the price of food and energy, with no sacrifice of their own standard of living.
The problem that the Left can never overcome is that it can never present a consistent set of values, as it has abolished the idea of values altogether.
Thus we get ludicrous situations like the Muslim football team (this was in France) which refused to play against the gay football team, at the same time as the gay football team was refusing to play against the Muslim football team, leading to mutual accusations of homophobia and Islamophobia, a complete PC stew that was headed for the courts.
Two 'victim' groups, but no 'oppressor' in sight. Quel horreur!
I don't know, we have a President going around apologizing for our misdeeds.
Mark
A lot of the white working class and trendy middle class still vote Labour though.
How thick is that?
I expected the Rotherham debacle to badly damage Liebour, I was very surprised it didn't.
Obviously benefits and public sector non jobs come first to these excuses for people.
George Monbiot, writing in today's Guardian, is quite explicit about his hatred for his own country, here