THE BIG READ: The Jam, The Clash and why working class voters have rumbled Rishi Sunak
The Prime Minister is simply not authentic when pretending he intends to deliver for Red Wall voters. And they can spot a poseur a mile off.
IN THE summer of 1977, Joe Strummer and his bandmates in The Clash were boiling with vitriol towards Paul Weller and The Jam.
They had thrown The Jam off their White Riot tour because that band’s manager – Paul’s father John – was so incessant about his boys being paid on time and also because The Jam were reluctant to lend their equipment to minor bands on the undercard.
So they slagged The Jam off in a new song, writing: “They got Burton suits, ha, you think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money.” From the point of view of The Clash, The Jam were not authentic to the rebellious and democratic ideals of punk.
And yet there can be little doubt as to which band was authentically working class. The Jam’s members had all attended Sheerwater Secondary Modern school in Woking. The Wellers ran the band as a family firm, with John managing them and Paul’s sister Nicky running the fan club.
With no money behind them – John had worked as a building labourer and mini-cab driver – it was essential that they earned a living simply in order to pay everyday bills and they could not afford to have their properly tuned instruments wrecked by amateurs either. These working class lads wanted to be commercially successful and a fixture in mainstream popular culture. While The Clash had a policy of boycotting Top of the Pops, The Jam abandoned a tour of America just to fly home and perform on the show when Going Underground got to number one in the charts.
Strummer, whose real name was John Mellor, famously sang that his daddy was a bank robber. In fact his father was a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office who had sent him to private school. And while The Jam embodied the Mod sensibility – clean living in difficult circumstances - by dressing up in “Burton suits” and working hard, The Clash raided the rebel dressing-up box, pulling out leather jackets and studded belts.
So who was authentic and who was ersatz? It’s pretty clear what I think as I have furnished you with the above information as a parable about how middle class people often misunderstand, misinterpret and patronise working class ones.
I have been put in mind of all this by the actions of the Conservative Party, especially its approach towards the working class “Red Wall” voters whose support propelled it to a big parliamentary majority more than four years ago.
On all substantial matters the interests and values of these voters have been ignored or over-ridden. Despite the Brexit promise of control and a manifesto promise of lower volumes, immigration has been permitted to soar, placing extra strain on social cohesion, public services, housing availability and wages in working class jobs. The tax burden on work has also soared, with thresholds frozen during a brutal spell of double-digit inflation. Law and order has been weakened, with short jail terms being marginalised in favour of “community punishments” (so-called presumably because it is non-affluent communities that get punished when their victimisers are permitted to retain their liberty). Most infuriatingly of all, illegal immigrants have been permitted to run rings around British border control and been put up in posh hotels at the expense of taxpayers.
This all culminated in Rishi Sunak’s “centrist dad” Cabinet reshuffle before Christmas: David Cameron was brought back and Suella Braverman thrown out for the sin of observing that multiculturalism had failed, immigration was out of control, and Islamist “hate marchers” were running amok in London.
In that reshuffle, Sunak sought to sugar the pill for working class social conservatives by bringing back Esther McVey as “minister for common sense”. Basically, McVey’s job is to fulminate against political correctness and wokery, as she had been doing on her GB News show. Recently she said that the campaigning postmaster Alan Bates should get a knighthood and Sunak’s spokesman said that “sounds like common sense”.
This tokenistic and patronising approach towards social conservatives rears its head again and again because the Government presumably believes they are too stupid to notice what is really going on. For instance, McVey’s fellow GB News presenter, the Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, said that the Government should defy the Supreme Court and send flights to Rwanda anyway. The audience is presumably meant to conclude that Lee is one of their own and remind itself to vote Tory again as a result. Yet this is just something Anderson is saying – there is no prospect of it happening. And it shirks the fundamental issue, which is that a Government with a substantial parliamentary majority can enact legislation to ensure its writ runs and yet this one has failed to on this issue time and again. It’s just more ersatz posing.
Sunak himself has been guilty of this too. Take his ridiculous decision not to meet the prime minister of Greece in order to appear tough on the Elgin Marbles. That row blew up just after shocking new statistics on the volume of legal immigration were published showing Sunak had done nothing to impose restraint but instead had instead carried on with Boris Johnson’s ultra-relaxed approach.
So the working class get palmed off with gimmicks and poses, while the Blue Wall affluent types win on the substantive points every time.
This week we see the Rwanda Bill back in the Commons and Sunak resisting amendments to toughen it up so that it actually might work. As former immigration minister Robert Jenrick has written, Sunak is currently putting forward legislation
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