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.