The middle-class left cracks me up. They’re always wringing their hands over the lack of working-class people in politics. And yet the minute a man from a working-class background – a former miner, no less – starts to soar in the political realm, they launch a hate campaign against him. They brand him thick, an imbecile, a Rottweiler, a piece of gammon. ‘What’s this gruff, ill-educated blowhard doing on our turf?’, they essentially say. It seems they like the idea of working-class people, but not the reality.
Of course I’m talking about Lee Anderson, the colourful, outspoken Tory MP for Ashfield. He’s become the bete noire of the university-educated left. Virtually every day there’s a Twittermob of the plummy and right-on denouncing Anderson for some speechcrime or other. Today they’re up in arms over comments he made in this magazine about the death penalty: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed’, he said. Everyone needs to lighten up. Even I, an implacable opponent of the death penalty, can see that’s a funny line. We want funny lines in politics, no?
Anderson’s gruffness unsettles them because it looks like a reassertion of working-class independence
The most striking thing about the chattering class’s disdain for Anderson is how bemused and haughty it is. They don’t just disagree with him – they cannot believe he exists. They cannot believe there are such ruffians out there, and what’s more that one of them has ascended to the deputy chairmanship of the Conservative party. A ‘prime piece of gammon’ in the political realm? Alongside all those clever, refined PPE grads? The horror. He should have stayed down the mines.
We need to talk about the classism in Anderson-bashing. You can see it in the language his haters use. He’s always a thug, a ‘Red Wall Rottweiler’, ‘gammon’ of course – that vile piggy insult the bourgeois left uses against anyone lower down the social ladder who holds views they disapprove of. And of course he’s stupid. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen posh people call Anderson a thicko. That they cannot see what terrible optics this is suggests they might not be the brightest themselves.
Anderson is all about ‘being stupid’, says a privately-educated columnist for the I newspaper. The bloke’s an ‘imbecile of the very highest order’, apparently. Anderson is clearly ‘stupid and ignorant’, says James O’Brien (Ampleforth, £28,000 a year). Today the Poke has collated the funniest tweets about Anderson and they mostly consist of members of the cultural elite calling him a dumb oaf. ‘Oh my God he’s so thick’, says a ‘comedy writer’. It’s an orgy of over-educated condescension.
The snobbery of the anti-Anderson set can most clearly be seen in the discussion on food banks. One of the main reasons they have it in for Anderson is because he once said there isn’t really a ‘massive use’ for food banks – the problem is some people don’t know how to budget and cook ‘properly’. Well-off lefties still call him ‘30p Lee’ after he said it’s possible to make a nutritious meal for 30 pence, blissfully unaware that their use of that insult reflects far worse on them than him.
These are the same people who sing the praises of ‘tin can cook’ Jack Monroe. And isn’t she all about encouraging the poor to be better at cooking and budgeting? Indeed her books are given out at food banks. It is so clear what’s going on here. Monroe, with her Guardian-friendly anti-Tory bent and her recipes for banana bread with rose petals, tahini and pistachio nuts, is seen as the acceptable face of anti-poverty campaigning, whereas Anderson, with his apparently bonkers claim that the gammon don’t actually need constant external assistance, is seen as a lunatic. Even though Monroe, by her own admission, is a ‘middle-class, well-educated young woman’ and Anderson’s a former miner who knows ‘what it’s like to put your last fiver in the gas meter’.
This cuts to the heart of why so many on the left loathe Anderson – because he dares to talk about working-class self-sufficiency. He challenges the view of London’s Fisher-Price Marxists who look upon the less well-off as hapless creatures requiring the charity and pity of their betters.
Actually, he says, people can look after themselves, with a bit more know-how. The reason this idea, simple as it is, causes such dread and outrage in the smart set is because it threatens their entire worldview. It punctures their self-flattering conviction that they, the socially aware middle class, have a burning moral obligation to care for the down-at-heel. Anderson’s gruffness unsettles them because it looks like a reassertion of working-class independence; like a two-finger salute from the Red Wall to those laptop elites who think they know best.
Here’s the funniest thing about the left’s agitation with Anderson – it was their very betrayal of the working classes of the Red Wall that made the Anderson phenomenon possible. Anderson was a Labour councillor for years before becoming a Tory in 2018. You don’t need a degree in PPE, or anything at all, to understand why so many working-class people in the Midlands and the North left Labour for the Tories. It’s because Labour treated them as witless, ‘low-information’, unhealthy and probably xenophobic morons whose votes for Brexit were so catastrophically stupid that they would have to be voided and a second referendum held.
Anyone who’s still confused as to why Anderson and many others abandoned Labour after all that has no right to call other people imbeciles.
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