I am guessing that Tory MP James Daly has given up trying to defend his majority of 105 in Bury North, has accepted that he will need to find a new job in the next 12 months and has decided to go out in style. I can’t think why else he would say, in an interview with the i newspaper, ‘When you think about the family, it’s about stability. Most of the kids who struggle in Bury are the products of crap parents and so what do we do to try to address that issue?’
He must surely know how his words will be used: that they will follow him around for the rest of his time in parliament, that they will be used to portray him as a heartless, Alan B’Stard character, that they will be used over and over again in the coming election campaign as representing the moment, supposedly, when a backbench MP let slip the Conservatives are, at heart, still the Nasty Party. Daly’s mind may no longer be in parliament, but does he really hate his colleagues so much that he wants to condemn those who might still have a fighting chance of retaining their seats? As for the New Conservatives – the grouping to which Daly belongs – they might as well now pack up and go home.
The first rule for anyone who aspires to be a representative of the people is: don’t insult the electorate
Conservative MPs could sort of get away with this kind of comment in the 1980s, the era of ‘greed is good’. Insulting the electorate caused no end of offence, of course, even then. But there were just enough voters who shared a harsh attitude towards the low-aspirational poor to carry a bumptious MP along. But that era ended abruptly in 1997 when Tony Blair showed how it was possible to win an election with conservative policies – you carry on pushing pretty much the same policies as Thatcher and Major were doing, but without the harsh language. Send out the message that you are with people, not against them.
None of this is to say that Daly does not have a point. Evidently, there are a lot of parents who do fail their children, and not just on the poorest fringes of society. As Lara Prendergast wrote recently, there are plenty of middle class parents who resent their own children for ruining their social lives.
But Daly surely ought be wise enough to realise that attaching the words ‘crap parents’ to any child who is struggling at school is going to seem like a dagger to the heart of a great number of parents who are not crap but who are bringing up children in incredibly difficult circumstances. Either because they cannot find work or decent housing in our dysfunctional housing market, because of illness, disability, breakdown of family relationships or some other misfortune.
There were Tories in the 1980s who kept going on about single mothers as if they were a plague – apparently oblivious that the single parents were often the ones doing their hardest to bring up the kids after a partner had run off. The country is full of children who have one crap parent – but another who is putting in every effort they can. If, as an MP, you are going to condemn the former you need to make damn sure to heap praise on the latter.
The first rule of business, as Gerald Ratner showed us (in a 1991 speech which confirmed that the attitudes of the 1980s were not going to survive the following decade) is: don’t insult the customer. By the same token the first rule for anyone who aspires to be a representative of the people is: don’t insult the electorate. I don’t know Daly, and I suspect he is not really a heartless person. He did, for example, support Liam Fox’s Down Syndrome Bill, which suggests he has some appreciation that people can struggle in life for reasons other than their own turpitude. But his words are a symptom of a party which increasingly looks as if it has been in power too long.
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