Why does Labour loathe ordinary people?

The jaw-dropping contempt dripping from the reply suggested by Labour’s sacked health minister Andrew Gwynne to a 72-year-old lady in Manchester who had complained about her bin collections may seem shocking but is scarcely surprising. In a WhatsApp chat with Labour councillors, Gwynne proposed to respond with: ‘Dear resident, F*** your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ This is entirely symptomatic of the way that ‘the people’s party’ now regard those who elect them.

The ‘let them eat cake’ attitude by Labour’s finest towards ordinary voters first came to widespread public attention during the 2010 general election. It was then that Gordon Brown had his notorious encounter with another disgruntled northern pensioner who had dared to raise her concerns about immigration with the prime minister. Forgetting that the microphone in his lapel was still live, Brown branded the woman a ‘bigot’ – a publicly broadcast insult that may have cost him the election.

Brown’s proudest boast was that Labour looked after the welfare of the elderly, the poor and the forgotten. The phrase ‘winter fuel payment’ was always on his lips, though he has been noticeably quiet about it since his current successors scrapped it last year. This has led to the suspicion that modern Labour puts the interests of illegal immigrants ahead of those of disadvantaged indigenous Britons.

The enormous gulf that has opened between Labour politicians and their natural supporters was thoroughly exposed in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, when the largely working-class people who had chosen to vote Leave were branded as ‘Gammons’ and ‘thick’ by those who disagreed with them. The Labour grandee Emily Thornberry’s tweeted sneer at a white van man’s patriotism for displaying English St George’s flags during a by-election in Rochester in 2014 forced her resignation from the shadow cabinet – a setback from which her career has never really recovered.

There has been a huge sea change in Labour’s relationship with the ordinary working class, who first brought it into being 125 years ago as the political arm of the trade union movement. Labour at the dawn of the 20th century was obviously and specifically the voice of the teeming masses in the industrial cities – particularly in the north, midlands, Wales and Scotland – who toiled for their daily bread in harsh and unforgiving conditions. Improving their lot and securing a fair deal for such folk was the purpose for which the Labour party was founded.

But there were always two strands in the Labour movement: working-class trade unionists whose primary goal was to better the state of the class from which they came; and middle-class intellectuals like the Fabian Society, with a theoretical passion for remaking society in a Marxist mould. Though the rank and file of the party – and most of its MPs – were unashamed, horny-handed sons of toil, many of its leaders – such as Hugh Dalton, Harold Laski, and Stafford Cripps – were desiccated theorists only acquainted with working-class reality at a safe distance.

But by the end of the century and the birth of New Labour, the form and composition of the party had been turned inside out. Blue-collar trade unionists had diminished to a vanishing point, and typical New Labour activists and MPs were college-educated public service employees, teachers, lawyers, and journalists with somewhat detached and superior attitudes to the white urban proletariat. The recent death of John Prescott perfectly symbolised the demise of Old Labour and the triumph of the New.

Labour’s founding fathers were, on the whole, decent and patriotic. In fact, Keir Hardie – after whom Sir Keir Starmer’s parents named their son – had distinctly Farageian views when it came to the influx of immigrants, whom he saw as threatening the jobs of British workers. It is a supreme irony that the party he founded now despises the ordinary people of this country that it is supposed to represent.