It is surely only a matter of time before someone with a mischievous glint in their eye invites the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, Helen Goodman, to open a fête in a place with which she is entirely unfamiliar, e.g. Bishop Auckland.
Helen recently turned up as guest of honour at a fête in a village in the constituency she has represented for nine years. She delivered a moving eulogy to Ingleton, praising its beautiful waterfalls and deep, labyrinthine caves. The villagers listened with a dawning hilarity. Mrs Goodman had confused the village she represents with one of the same name some 70 miles away in the Yorkshire Dales. There are no caves or waterfalls in Ingleton, Co Durham. In my imagination I can see her right now standing on the steps of Bishop Auckland’s Victorian town hall, offering a stirring tribute to the town’s natural attractions — magnificent harbour, ring of splendid fiery volcanoes, and vibrant and colourful Maori community.
Goodman was selected as Bishop Auckland’s Labour candidate in 2005 via an all-women shortlist, which is one of the conduits for preventing local people getting selected (there are plenty of others). Across the north-east, once the bedrock of Old Labour, Blairite monkeys, wonks and dweebs with no connection to the area were parachuted into safe seats in the 1990s and 2000s — the most hilarious of all, of course, being Peter Mandelson smirking triumphantly at the poor people of Hartlepool.
The exclusion of local politicians is one of the reasons that the British people, outside London, have lost faith in their MPs and consider them somewhat out of touch. Not all quite as magnificently out of touch as Helen, mind, but in general disregarding of their wishes and aspirations. This was the conclusion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, out this week, which reported a considerable hardening of public opinion about immigration — ‘a persistent public anxiety’ which the politicians will ‘ignore at their peril’, as well as a growing rejection of the multicultural vision of Britain.
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