When we were children my mum always stopped to talk to the lollypop lady outside my old primary school in Stockport. She was a nice lady, my mum said, except for one thing – she voted Tory. I was shocked when I heard it. I couldn’t imagine how a nice lady like that could do such an awful thing.
It had long since been impressed on me that the Tory’s were bad rich people who stole from the poor. So why did the Lollipop lady who earned a pittance for standing in the middle of traffic vote for them ?
‘Her daughter’s gone to Oxford. She thinks she’s one of them now,’ my mum kept saying.
Each lunchtime we filed into the school dining hall to tables upon which were rows of miniature milk bottles, complete with a little blue straw. They looked exciting to me, as we didn’t get child-sized bottles of milk at home, or straws and I desperately wanted one.
I never did get one to take home, however. The Milk Snatcher stole them.
In the playground, we sang a ditty with accompanying mime of a stick figure getting squashed between the palms.
‘Here’s Margaret Thatcher
Flick her up and catch her
Squishy squashy squishy squashy
Theres Margaret Thatcher’
If you’d asked us who she was; we couldn’t have answered for certain, only that she ruled over the land and took our things and put our parents into a frothing rage at the mere mention of her name. I knew what she looked like however, because my parents let us stay up late and watch Spitting Image and nobody decent would want anything to do with such a dreadful looking, crow nosed puppet that stole milk and made my mum so angry.
Nobody except the Lollipop lady of course. I used to look at her smile as I crossed the road and try to see the evil in her that voted Tory.
Fast forward to this election when my mum, and pretty much every other Tory hater from the eighties, begrudgingly put her X in the Tory box. I expect the Lollipop lady did too, though she’s long since abandoned her post.
‘Well there’s nobody left to vote for is there,’ Mum said with a sigh, ‘but still, it did feel a bit dirty. ‘
What happened to the laughter when she switched on Thatcher’s final Spitting Image episode where the haggard old puppet walked alone in the Houses of Parliament weeping.
‘Ha ha! Off you go you evil old cow!’
But these are bygone eras. That England is gone, but Labour has not noticed. And the North has moved on. When Corbyn attends the Miners Gala, he is attending a relic, something in the same category as Morris dancing or Maypole twirling.
Mum voted for Blair with the same exuberance as everybody else. But by the end of his premiership, much of the working class had soured against him. The Iraq war was incredibly damaging to the image of a party that insisted on claiming the moral high ground.
Boris’s landslide victory came as no surprise to me. Labour has, over the years, become an increasingly distant entity in the lives of ordinary people around here. The left may bang on about their solidarity with the working class, but change ‘working class’ to ‘uneducated white male’ and you will know what they really mean; thick, racist, knuckle-dragging ‘gammons’ on the wrong side of history.
The pronoun policing, the sneering, the hatred of progress; of poor people having holidays, driving cars, eating nice food getting treated equally. All these blend together into a growing conviction that we were not the many in their eyes, but the dwindling few that need not be listened to.
Has Labour learnt anything by its defeat? If their present choice of candidates for leader is confined to super rich socialists such as Emily Thornberry, (Lady Nugee) married to a wealthy judge, millionaire lawyer Keir Starmer, or the far left in the form of Rebecca Long Bailey, lawyer, they can expect good slapping at the next bye election, not that they will take any notice. Labour is a political corpse awaiting the embalmers.
Lindsey’s playground ditty:
…which I’m not convinced she and her playmates ever sang, reminds me, in a way, of one we students used to recite just before the Beatles caught our attention over here in 1963:
A Lyke-Wake Dirge
…but which we also never actually sang; so Lindsey Dearnley and I are even-steven…except I have no tattoos.
As a New Zealander with British heritage, I don’t get a vote in the UK, nor should I! But I have watched your democracy these last few years, and been very impressed. You have probably thought the B thing has been an embarrassment for democracy, but actually I find it the opposite. It has proved its worth, in spades. Parliament worked as it should, despite a creepy opposition, and a duplicitous Brussels trying to thwart the will of the majority who so clearly voted for freedom. The government tried everything to get it done, then went back to the people, correctly (eventually!).
And then this absolutely wonderfully loud clear second, even larger vote for restoring the independence of the UK. At the same time, such a clear message to the appalling far left haters & wreckers Corbyn has polluted Labour with. The man is a racist and a supporter of Jihadis, apart from advocating the proven disaster which Socialism has proven everywhere over the last century.
So well done, ordinary British people. Your natural decency surged to the fore, just in time, as it has done several times so decisively throughout history.
Than you!…many here are very happily surprised at the election result…right up to the count,that result,would have seemed seemed beyond our wildest dreams.
Democracy BROKE OUT!
However,we shouldn’t rest on our laurels as the repair of our long broken politics will need patience..and more than a smidgeon ruthlessness..
Ps..THANK you!(not than you)
kfr are fair game. Qisas payback for Paki-bashing in the 70s.
Everyone is aware of what is happening. If Boris does not sort things, something else will appear which is Left wing economically and right wing socially.
How about stopping grooming gangs – 1 m youngsters estimate to date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpwroHQE6nU
I hope this does not deflect too much from the issue you have raised but I feel that Britain is afflicted with what might be called a “criminal justice blob” similar to the one Michael Gove battled against in the education system.
It is taken as all but proven that rehabilitation of criminals is more effective than tough sentencing. Evidence to refute this is routinely suppressed. I get the impression that in Left-liberal circles the idea that criminals should be treated harshly is viewed as not merely unenlightened and actually rather vulgar. Criminality is, we are told, a social ill requiring a therapeutic remedy.
Priti Patel may talk tough but she will need a tremendous amount of political will and popular support if she is to succeed. Dominic Grieve talked tough when he was Shadow Justice Secretary but softened his tone once in office and in the clutches of “experts”.
mana in London
You appear to deride Peter Hitchens somewhat but he has repeated at length “The Long March Of The Institutions” and how the most successful revolution is one where all the edifices remain intact but are changed utterly from within. Is he not also been correct in saying that Mr. Johnson is no Conservative?
J. O’Connell
You seem to know a bit about Peter Hitchens. Are you able to answer a question which I and others attempted to post at the Mail On Sunday a few years ago? My question was “moderated” out. As I avoid abusive or intemperate language I can only assume my question was censored because Hitchens did not wish to answer it. Note that comments on his column are dealt with independently of the usual Mail system and are probably monitored by him.
Hitchen’s column disappeared for a few weeks prior to the 2015 election. Only his daily blog was kept going. Once the election was over his Sunday column returned. My question: why?
Hitchens implies that we are all fools for voting at all. Instead we should boycott the elections and set about forming a new truly conservative party. If you read his column you will detect a tone of contempt for the lazy masses who can’t be bothered to bring about his yearned for conservative revolution (surely a contradiction in terms).
mana in London,
All he seems to yearn, or yearned for, is/was A Conservative Party.
J O’Connell
I would say that Roger Scruton has a clearer idea of what it means to be conservative. Hitchens on the other hand, and I have read a couple of his books as well as his blog and MOS column, seems to yearn for a cultural revolution to restore Britain to a pre-1960s society. I’m sure he must realise this is not possible and has settled for expressing moral revulsion at contemporary culture.
I guess you weren’t able to answer the question I posed in the first paragraph of my previous comment.
Much as I like hiswell argued,though curmudgeonly given,opinions,Id venturea lot of Peter Hitchens antipathy could be read as a thinly disguised(to himself) self loathing,in that he personally held those leftist beliefs and cant forgive himself for being so badly misled.
Ps..because that is how I feel about my previous life as a ‘socialist’.
When working class people voted Conservative they were still voting for socialism, because the Conservative party is no longer conservative (the philosophy, not the party).
When Johnson gives an amnesty to illegal immigrants and delivers BRINO, the working class will have to vote for another party. One that appeals to them doesn’t yet exist.
Sounds a bit like the Peter Hitchens viewpoint to me. From his pulpit in the Mail On Sunday he has been preaching for many years that the Conservatives would never win another election. When they were forced into a coalition in 2010 he took his point be proven. The 2015 and 2017 victories were explained away as the false triumph of a party which had long since ceased to be truly conservative and therefore not actually a Conservative victory at all. Presumably, he is equally dismissive of the latest result. Yet again the foolish British public have failed to rise up and create the new conservative movement he claims they need.
Liberal Left values are now so much a part of our social fabric that it is all but impossible for a party to be elected without showing their support for them. Imagine the fate of a party which declared there would be no increased spending on “our NHS” as it has more than enough funds already.
Now that the famed “long march through the institutions” has succeeded and socialist values prevail in all areas of public life perhaps a younger generation will eventually turn against the stultifying puritanism of the Left wing activists and weary of their boring, stale and (ironically) established revolution.
But surely it’s not impossible to imagine a Party which announces more money for the NHS, for the police, for social care and for immigration control but no more money for ‘foreign aid’, fake charities and the garden path of ‘climate change’?
To deal with just one point in your reply:
Imagine that the incomprehensible foreign aid budget was cancelled and the money saved was diverted to the allegedly over-stretched police force. How do you imagine they would use this new source of funding? My guess is that it would still not be enough for them to seriously fight crime but easily enough to increase the number of diversity, inclusiveness and community outreach projects because the socialists who have come to dominate our public services “know” that this is the best way to tackle the root causes of crime.
The will to defend the law abiding public from criminals is seriously lacking in our system of law enforcement. Without that, extra funding will never be put to good use.
Hubris! Hubris!
Labour is infested with a parasitic growth called Momentum. This growth has hold of all the most important levers of control. They are certain of the rightness of their cause (“We may have lost the election but we won the argument”) just as they are sure that “in their heart of hearts” the British people want an undiluted socialist government. It’s just a question of persuading them to vote for it (damn that democracy!).
Now that a new generation of voters have grown up on a diet of soft socialism, far Left politics have become more palatable to them. The need for greater diversity and inclusiveness, imminent environmental catastrophe, Western post-colonial guilt are all treated as self-evident truths. With the broadcast media and the tech-giants shoring up the socialist mindset a future Labour landslide is very much in the pipeline.
Where were all the so-called Labour moderates while Momentum were throwing their weight around? They were happy to stand behind Corbyn when the 2017 election made him look like a vote winner. Am I the only person to be dismayed that in spite of the loss of MPs Corbyn’s Labour party still drew a very large share of the vote?