Labour got what they deserved for abandoning their traditional working class supporters
THE LABOUR Party thought it could do it without the working class and it was wrong.
Labour reckoned it could be openly contemptuous towards its traditional supporters — you know, the ones who are not avocado-munching Marxists, the ones who live beyond the London bubble, the ones who didn’t go to private schools, the ones who never touched a copy of the Guardian in their life — and somehow still muster enough support to win the General Election. Wrong.
There are simply not that many avocado-munching Marxists in the country, comrade.
Labour has spent years calling the 17.4million people who voted to leave the European Union stupid, racist, pig-ignorant peasants.
This is just in — calling people stupid is not a vote-winner.
And now, this sorry excuse for a Labour Party has been given the apocalyptic kicking it so richly deserved.
Under the extremist stewardship of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and the brain-dead thugs of Momentum, Labour happily abandoned the working class. And now the working class has abandoned Labour. My guess — for ever.
‘OUT-OF-TOUCH’
The North is blue. The Red Wall has fallen. Great Grimsby. Scunthorpe. Even Bolsover — home of Dennis Skinner, the erstwhile “Beast of Bolsover” — is Tory today.
This country will never elect a leader who openly despises the nation he seeks to represent. Why would we?
Labour — this jaw-droppingly out-of-touch Labour Party, this North London protest group masquerading as a serious political party — forgot why it was founded more than a century ago.
And no, it wasn’t to represent a bunch of privately educated revolutionaries in Islington. It was to stand up for the working man and woman.
Labour spat on the very people it was meant to represent. And now watch Labour choking on its own spit.
Brexit — and the endless sneering at Brexit, and the thwarting of Brexit, and the endless attempts to abort Brexit — was just the start of Labour’s spectacular fall.
Corbyn’s Labour never understood the working class.
Hear this, comrade — the working class do not want handouts. They are not victims. They can’t be bought with glass beads, shiny trinkets and promises of free broadband.
And they do not think they should apologise for being British and for loving this country and its history.
TORIES ARE THE WORKING CLASS PARTY
All across our nation, working-class communities decided that the Conservatives were the true party of the working class.
And let’s be honest, those Labour-voting heartlands have always had plenty of reasons to NOT vote Tory.
Although Boris’s spectacular victory is being compared to Mrs Thatcher’s glory years, Maggie was always heartily despised in the regions where they built ships and mined for coal and did jobs where you got your hands dirty.
For when these hard-working communities were tossed on the scrapheap of changing times, there seemed scant sympathy or understanding in Maggie Thatcher’s Conservative Party about the human cost of deindustrialisation.
These proud working-class communities in the North and the Midlands were never Tory. Until now.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that the more low-paid, low-skilled workers living in a constituency, the better the Tories did.
Think about it — the Tories are the party fighting for struggling families now.
And their victory is so complete that the leaders of the two opposition parties, Jo Swinson and Jeremy Corbyn, have either resigned or are about to resign.
These men and women in those post-industrial communities saw their families suffer dreadfully when the old industries died.
They were never going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and his Communist clowns.
But getting them to actually break the habit of a lifetime and vote Tory signals an historic change in our politics.
After this week, the old tribal party loyalties have gone for ever.
It no longer matters a damn how your parents and your grandparents voted.
Boris Johnson has been swept to power by millions who never voted Tory in their lives. Now he has to keep them.
And he has to show he is a Prime Minister who understands that there is a country beyond the M25.
Brexit is just the start.
The Prime Minister’s in-tray is piled high with the housing crisis, rising crime and communities across our nation that feel totally forgotten by Westminster. Brexit should have been done and dusted years ago.
And the only reason it is not is because the establishment cynically thwarted the result of the 2016 EU referendum.
But all the yakking about revoking Article 50, and a second referendum, and arcane Parliamentary procedures, and cobblers about a “People’s Vote” is suddenly in the past.
If Remainers want us to be members of the EU then they must now be prepared to campaign for decades.
The Brexit debate is over and Boris Johnson has a mandate to reshape our country as a global nation that is open to trade with the world.
Frankly, Boris’s election campaign was uninspired.
Boris beat Corbyn the way that boxer Anthony Joshua beat roly-poly Andy Ruiz Jr in Saudi Arabi — safety first, nothing fancy, just stay on the end of your jab and, above all, WIN. Because the consequences of losing were just too bloody awful to contemplate.
But if the campaign was uninspiring, Boris remains an inspirational politician.
People like him. He gives them optimism and hope. He puts a smile on faces.
His enemies paint him as a racist, right-wing bigot but the man is exactly the opposite.
Boris is a tolerant, big-hearted, one-nation Tory with a razor-sharp mind and an endlessly generous spirit.
The newspaper article that is always cited as evidence of his racism — the one where he compared women in full-body burkas to a letter box — was actually advocating their right to dress any way they choose, no matter how ridiculous it looks.
There is no hatred in Boris Johnson. There is no poison. And God knows there has been a poisonous atmosphere in our politics for years.
I live in an inner-city, safe Labour seat, and usually there would be the leaflets of three or four parties represented in the windows of our neighbourhood.
But there were no leaflets in windows at this election. Because there is too much hatred abroad, too much toxic division, too many idiots willing to stick a brick through the window of someone who dares to disagree with them.
BEGIN TO HEAL
Whatever our beliefs, the great hope now must be that we can start coming together as a country, and begin to heal, and start building some kind of national unity.
A Tory Prime Minister elected by the working class seems a good place to start.
My parents — a Labour-voting mum and a Liberal-voting dad — despised the Tories as the party of the rich, the privileged, the out-of-touch toffs.
That sentiment has been shared by millions of working-class men and women since the end of World War Two. Until now.
From the Black Country to Blyth Valley, we are all Tories now.
It is ironic that it took an Old Etonian Oxford graduate (although he was a scholarship boy at both Eton and Oxford) to make the Tories the natural party of the working class.
And now Prime Minister Johnson and his new Tories must prove they are worthy of all those working-class votes.
LABOUR MUST SOUL SEARCH
And let us hope that the Labour Party can find its soul again.
Let us hope that this formerly great party of compassion, social justice and equality can kick out all the bigots, middle-class Reds, IRA groupies, friends of Hamas and Hezbollah and the anti-Semites who would rather wave the Palestinian flag than the Union Jack.
But it is likely that Labour has already been dumped in the recycling bin of history.
Because this doesn’t feel like a defeat for the Labour Party. It feels more like a death.
It is hard to see how Labour can crawl out from under this landslide.
These last years have not really been about party politics. They have been about the will of the people coming into direct conflict with the will of the establishment.
The combined forces of the House of Commons and House of Lords, the BBC and Channel 4, the Supreme Court and expensive lawyers, RADA revolutionaries like Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan and Emma Thompson, all placed themselves above people.
All of the political paralysis, and the national humiliation of never getting Brexit done, and the endless frustration of seeing democracy being cheated stems from an arrogant establishment that refused to accept the largest vote for anything in our history.
What a shameful, anti-democratic place this country would be if they had won. But they lost. Now let us move forward at last.
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Millions of working-class men and women just placed their faith in a decent, brilliant, chubby-cheeked, shaggy-haired, dog-loving toff to deliver a better tomorrow for ALL of our people.
As unlikely as it seems, you are a working-class hero now, Boris.
And if you make your supporters proud to be working-class Tories, then you, Carrie and your dog Dilyn will be in No10 for the next ten years.
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