BITE SIZE: I'm sounding the alarm - working class people are being excluded from politics by the fear of thought crime
Only those with a comprehensive knowledge of acceptable jargon can these days participate in debate free from an overwhelming fear of getting cancelled
I THINK I am fairly unusual among political commentators in knowing and regularly interacting with a lot of working class people.
It is a quirk of my background. While I am not exactly of working class stock myself, I was brought up in a very low income household, my schools were state ones and my cultural influences and interests reflected that: football, The Jam, beer, north country novelists such as Barstow and Sillitoe, a whole street’s belief in Sunday’s roast beef etc. (Not that I am saying you have to share any or all of these interests to count as working class yourself!)
My better half was raised in a traditionally working class, aspirational household and has done very well careerwise. Yet she still rejects the notion that she has become middle class. So the O’Flynn household is steeped in working class attitudes and sensibilities.
Without seeking to blow my own trumpet too much, I often felt this put me at an advantage when compared to other national newspaper political columnists. It definitely influenced me in launching in 2010 the Daily Express campaign to take the UK out of the EU. My media peers generally thought I had gone mad. But I could feel support for the stance bubbling up among intelligent working class and lower-middle class people. I knew we could at least go close to making it happen.
This is why I today wish to sound the alarm about the impact of the past few months in politics: the two-tier justice response to the summer riots, the rise and rise of state policing of opinions including those of Allison Pearson, the police investigating school children for “non-crime hate incidents”, the actual imprisoning of people who spoke out on social media about the murder of little girls in emotional and absolutist terms.
As a now-veteran columnist, I have decades of experience of navigating the fine line between raising concerns about issues the tyrannical modern left seeks to hush-up and falling foul of their draconian powers to crush dissent. Learning how to couch a dissenting thought without leaving oneself wide open to cancellation by people who hate you is akin to learning how to throw a punch at Tyson Fury without taking one back.
I am highly concerned by the number of acquaintances from normal, non-media and non-political backgrounds who now tell me they have no idea if they are allowed to voice their opinions or not, so just keep quiet. They haven’t stopped thinking, but they have stopped being able to freely express their views in the workplace, the pub or – most of all – on social media.
The whole notion of actively participating in political debate or politics itself, with its ever-changing code of acceptable jargon – whether we are meant to say coloured person or person of colour, or Afro-Caribbean or African-Caribbean this month was something even Amber Rudd fell foul of when she was Home Secretary, for heaven’s sake – feels increasingly impossible to those not schooled in the milieu.
Typically, it is the Labour party which is presiding over this exclusion of the working class, though the Tory party did a lot of the spade work over the last decade.
Anyhow, this was one of the points I raised during my appearance yesterday on Dan Wootton’s brilliant Outspoken podcast.
You can watch the programme here
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I’d be interested to hear what my subscribers think about this. Do you agree there is a specific and sinister move from on-high to render politics a specialist, credentialed profession that excludes many millions of citizens through the creation of a climate of fear? Is democracy being put at risk as a result?
There are just too many thick, jobsworth numpties being paid by a massively oversized State to promote and enforce these ridiculous impositions. But the State has only the money it extorts from the tax-paying minority, so this parasitic and immoral arrangement will persist until they revolt, and force the State to shrink both its role and its expenditure. Then the jobsworths would also be forced to get genuinely productive work.
Salmon Rushdie once quiped that the right to be offended was the new human right. The proportion of the population keen to exercise this new right appears to be growing and the state protection they enjoy is quite chilling.
Frm Henderson's "luxury beliefs' replacing property and wealth as the means to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi, to Goodhart's Anywheres and Somewheres, via a demonology of 'hate' to be controlled or suppressed by legislation with plod actively pursuing non-crime 'hate' incidents, one could say that what is going on is -erm -intersectional. (of various repressive tendencies). Except it isn't really for I agree that at root it is the exclusion of the working class from political life, with politics left o the self-appointed Brahim class. It adds up to a caste system or, as some describe it, neo-feudatlism.
I read articles about this sort of thing and nod sagely at whatever the latest description is. But it is deeply worrying. Konstatin Kisin pointed out a difference between Russia and the UK over the number of knocks at the door by the police. In the UK there have been thousands - I forget the exact figure he quoted - but only a few hundred in Russia. Perhaps the Russian population is more intimidated and cowed, but it would appear, as Esssex police demonstrate, there is a marked enthusiam here in the UK for punishing wrong think.
The establishment has always feared the mob and that reached a zenith after the Feench revolution. That fear has never gone way, merely temporarily suspended when the 'salt of the earth' were needed for the trenches before being recast as the scum of the earth again. There is self congratulatery snobbery in the establishment that runs through a lot of this. Major and Blair may have announced the end of class war but the reality is that it never went away.
It has been exacerbated by 'critical theory' in which power structures, of oppressor and oppressed, are said to define everything in modern capitalism. The morally simplistic sieze on this as their defining mission in life. We see this more or less weekly in London with marches in support of Hamas (sorry, Gaza). That so many need to feel a moral purpose is worrying.
In the US, the DNA is freedom/get goverment off our backs and the Demcrats attempt to reengineer Amercain DNA has run out of road. In the UK and EU it is have goverment solve every problem even personal ones.
All that said, I think the author is right. Working class people are not wanted in politics. The Labour party which began as champions for including working class people has morphed into their greatest oppressor. In politics, we only have middle class snobs now. It's not looking hopeful.