Working-Class People Can Like Opera Too, You Know

Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines:

He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti.

He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream two dozen times” — and an opera buff — “Oh yes, I’ve been to Glyndbourne.”

When he is not visiting French vineyards — “St Emilion is my favourite wine and such a beautiful village” — he can be found looking around art galleries. “I particularly love the period of Cubism, from Picasso right up until Jackson Pollock,” he says. “I always enjoy the Tate.”

This is Len McCluskey, the left-wing firebrand who has recently taken over as leader of Britain’s largest trade union, Unite. There is a chessboard on the coffee table in his office. “If only we could resolve all our disputes by playing a game of chess,” he says.

And:

The man who still describes himself as “working-class” despite his love of opera and fine wine thinks that background matters now as much as ever.

What a depressing way of framing the piece. That “despite” is dreadful. Why should an appreciation of opera, chess, wine, Shakespeare, Picasso or even afternoon tea become barbs with which to taunt someone, far less justification for suggesting they must be some kind of hypocrite? Such labelling is facile and grotesque.

Even people with dreadful or loopy politics are allowed to like good things. The alternative, as implied by Ms Sylvester, is that these interests are the preserve of the few not the many even though there’s nothing in Shakespeare or Verdi or afternoon tea that suggests or demands they can only be enjoyed by the lucky, affluent few – far less that any working-class man made good is a parvenu for appreciating these things. There’s nothing “non-working-class” about Mozart. Know thy place or be a hypocrite is not an attractive message.

On the other hand, if Ms Sylvester is suggesting that it’s awfully unusual for a Liverpool docker to enjoy these things then that’s a bleak commentary on England’s education system.

Mind you, there are some on the Tory right who’d agree with McCluskey when he says:

“I don’t blame David Cameron for going to Eton but how can he truly understand ordinary people? More than half the Cabinet are millionaires. They don’t know what it feels like to struggle with the mortgage. Of course there’s a class issue. I don’t believe these people live in the real world.”

That said, I doubt he’d have cut John Major or Margaret Thatcher much slack on these grounds even though neither had the advantages enjoyed by either of the two most recent Labour Prime Ministers.

Still, McCluskey may well prove one of Cameron’s useful idiots. There seems every chance the unions will over-estimate the public’s appetite for union militancy. If Dave really is a lucky general – a proposition that has yet to be tested properly – he will be Thatcher’s heir in that respect at least and perhaps Len McCluskey will be a part of proving the boy right after all.

*McCluskey says:

He is equally inspired by Karl Marx and Fidel Castro. “I couldn’t choose between them. Marx was a great philosopher, Castro is a tremendous leader of his people who’s been heroic. Certainly neither of them are villains.”

A daft question that gets a daft response. Even if you think, as I do, that American policy towards Cuba has been witless and wicked and completely counter-productive, the notion that Castro is a hero is something that only belongs in leftist comic books. Marx was at least interesting; Castro is a thug and a prison warden.