Why does the Left patronize and sneer so much? Comment from Nick Cohen

[heylilbunny]

It is true that on MN and the Guardian comments section and everywhere in the UK left there is a sneering derision for our own traditions and nation. And I would never vote for the Tories or UKIP but I hate the Left's "discourse" most of the time.

A quote: "It could not because Labour’s leadership of former special advisers does not look like the people it wants to represent and does not look as if it likes the look of them either. In this, it is typical of the wider educated left in England, which almost alone in the world, makes a virtue of denigrating its own people.

The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave."

That last line is so familiar on this board.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labour-left-miliband-hating-english

[southeastastra]

it's all a bit crackers the system we have in the uk and it's unfair. if you are middle class you grow up knowing how to play the game and get on in life (whether that suits you or not) so naturally want to 'conserve' this and keep the oilks out

some working class people don't understand how politics affect their daily lives and just don't both voting for something they don't understand

i don't sneer at the middle classes but i do think they happily sit in their home counties homes dressed in barbour and don't want to do anything to help get the rest of the country moving. it seems they just want to moan about how lazy the wc are.

as long as we have a silly class system and unfair schooling in this country it will remain the same.

[southeastastra]

i know that didn't really answer your question op

[Theknacktoflying]

Maybe because being leftie needs someone to make a value judgement or some non-quantitative assumptions about a particular situation.

Look at the Labour narrative that the Labour party is the only party for those people who work hard - it is patronising and discounts things like life choices and decisions. People don't choose to be poor, sick but in the same way why hold another class responsible?

There are a lot of middle class people who are not native to the whole class system, but instead also find themselves being outsiders looking in

[thehumanjam]

On Mumsnet you see sneering from the left. But in real life I see sneering from the right. People have lost the ability to have a debate in a reasonable fashion. Watching PMQs it would appear that the aim is to shout down anybody with a different opinion.

[southeastastra]

no one wants to talk to each other. and parents choose schools miles away from the kids they live next to so they can be with kid who are the 'same' morally, religiously and intellectually as their own.

it's crackers

[thehumanjam]

That's true SEA. A friend told me that she vets people before arranging play dates to make sure they are her type of people. I don't even know what "type" I am yet. Whatever happened to diversity?

[southeastastra]

that's depressing but not suprising

all kids are segregated by their parents i see it happen all the time. it's just awful. i could sell my house tomorrow for £££ as it's in the right catchment for a desirable school. not one my kid could go to though not being religious

[PausingFlatly]

I haven't been able to turn on a telly for years without being bombarded by all major parties claiming they are "the party for hard-working families™."

And if you were to believe some of the (hardly left wing!) media, the Labour party are the English middle-class. Them with their university educations and champagne.

That's the same media merrily churning out exactly that caricature of "working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs" - and scrounging, fatty skivers to boot - of which you complain.

Good trick, though, to spend years generating all those vile stereotyping stories and programmes - and then indignantly claim it was some nebulous "Left" wot said it.

[GiddyOnZackHunt]

I've said on here before that Labour in the '70s moved from representing what the working people wanted to what the intelligentsia thought the working people should want. The Labour party of the first half of the 20th century, the party that created the NHS, supported the men in heavy industry and fighting for the ordinary person to have control of their destiny has gone. In its place is theoretical socialism which is all for the underdog everywhere.
Trouble is that it has to some extent lost touch with the changing concerns of the ordinary person and has lost its focus. I think Ed Miliband got that but came from the soft handed southern school of socialism and was damned by the press in an expression of their self interest.
Blair managed to pull off the trick of being in with the Labour party AND the Chipping Norton/Murdoch set. That's why he won.
I don't know how that hcan be replicated now that Blair's done it and been shown to have done it.

[blacksunday]

Yeah, that article is pretty funny:

The biggest failure of understanding is the most paradoxical. Labour and the left do not take the right seriously. They dismiss its leaders as greedy fat cats and public school toffs, and do not grasp how formidable they have become. A friend made the point when he told me that at 8.30am on Friday, when Ed Balls lost his seat, the trading floor at Credit Suisse at Canary Wharf erupted with cheers. I don’t doubt there were similar yelps of delight on every other trading floor in the City.

As if the public were ever in doubt that the Tories represented the interests of city finance!

I think Nick Cohen has a pretty messed up view of who he considers to representative members of 'the public'.

[PausingFlatly]

blacksunday, I actually paged up to find out how old Cohen was, thinking, "Bless, is this a student journo who's only just discovered the City?"

[Horsemadbird]

You may dismiss the City traders Blacksunday but the financial markets, the economy and the power of the pound are what the entire security, welfare and lives of 63 million folk hang on.

And your dismissal of that utterly and perfectly supports that article and is why Labour are currently unelectable.

They didn't lose because we are all thick idiots taken in by the Daily Mail, the lost because many of the ordinary people of this country don't trust them, don't want them and don't agree with their policies.

They need to listen, interact and change or they will be in the wilderness for far longer than the Guardian predicted ten years.

[PausingFlatly]

I don't think blacksunday is dismissing the power of City traders.

Just pointing out that they're hardly representative of "the public" as a whole. And that it's hardly news that the Tories align with the personal interests of City traders and individuals with money.

Which is NOT the same as the economy as a whole.

It's in the personal interest of bankers to be given enormous personal rewards for gambling. It's not in the interest of the country, which has to pick up the pieces when they lose.

[Linguini]

The hardworking family's tax-pound paid to set up and run the nhs, the post office, rail and road services, schooling and legal aid.
The city financiers and private banking sector fuck right up and need trillions of tax-pounds to be bailed out.
The Tory gvt sell off the rail, the post office, the nhs everything to give themselves a huge fortune.

Horsemadbird, who is now paying for the banking crisis? Its not the city. Its the disabled, the SAHM, young children and the unemployed.

I don't know how you, knowing this, can say "the welfare state depends on the finance industry"

[hackmum]

If we're going to start talking about sneering, then I suggest people read every single article published about Ed Miliband by the Mail in the past year, including Richard Litttlejohn's statement that he would rather hire Jimmy Savile as a childminder than have Ed Miliband in charge of the NHS.

The biblical injunction to remove the beam from one's own eye before tackling the mote in someone else's springs to mind...

[blacksunday]

Exactly, pausingflatly.

[BoneyBackJefferson]

the left "sneer" because they can do very little else, as for the system being a "tradition" there are a lot of traditions that are wrong should we keep them as well?

The FPTP system is outdated and is no longer representative of the populations feelings, its needs changing.

[claig]

'Why does the Left patronize and sneer so much?'

Fundamentally because they have nothing else. The reason is that politics is about power and trying to win power from an existing ruling elite. The leadershiip of our left wing movements are mainly unlike the people whose side they claim they are on. Miliband and all the rest of the Oxbridge graduates and SPADs are nothing like the people they claim to represent. They are an Establishment metropolitan elite divorced from ordinary working people. That is why ordinary Labour voters think they are not on their side.

"Speaking about his recent visit to Mr Miliband’s seat, Mr Farage said: “The welcome I received was eye opening. No, not everybody told me they were going to vote for UKIP next year, but everybody told me they were utterly fed up with the Labour Party which they had always believed was supposed to be on their side.

“Not a single person had a good word for Ed Milliband, not as a man of course, but as a politician. Essentially, Labour is losing its heartlands.”

“The people of Doncaster, and a large swathe of Northern constituencies are utterly fed up with the seminar room, teenage politics of the modern Labour Party and they are increasingly turning to UKIP to provide a real alternative,” Mr Farage added."

www.thestar.co.uk/news/ukip-s-nigel-farage-says-party-can-oust-ed-miliband-and-win-doncaster-seats-1-6944560

The Labour elite, just like the Tory elite, but even more so, are divorced from the people. Gordon Brown's treatment of Mrs Duffy, whom he called "that bgoted woman" after she brought up immigration, shows how out of touch they are and even how the political class has disdain for ordinary people.

The left know they are out of touch, they know they are from Oxbridge, and that is why they cannot connect with the people and their only strategy is to scaremonger about the NHS or sneer at the people in the hope of dividing and ruling them. They have to appeal to all minorities and sneer at the majority because the Labour Oxbridge leadership are themselves a minority among the people they claim to represent.

Why are Simon Danczuk and John Mann not leadership candidates, why are 4 of the 6 talked about candidates from Oxbridge - BBC history documenatry types like Tristram Hunt - and the other two metropolitan elite types? Why no gritty Northerners like Danczuk and Mann?

The latest new trick they have I heard for the first time last night on Sky News and today from a BBC reporter - it is "pale, stale and male" - another attempt to denigrate and divide and rule, but that is all their think tanks have got, so my guess is we will hear them laughing about that for many years to come. But of course the people will not go along because Farage is "pale and male" but he certainly isn't "stale".

The Tories have been useless in that they have no confidence or belief in what they are and again that comes from their out of touch background from Eton etc where they also know that they are a minority among the people. Because of that, they have no anchor, no core belief, which is why Cameron embarked on modernisation and hoodie hugging , encouraged by former Etonians who work, as all our metropolitan elite now do, in charidees, the third sector and in their beloved Biig Society. But this election has taught them a lesson, they know that a huge portion of Tory voters dislike them but had no other choice, and they have now appointed a working class MP from Essex as their Deputy Chairman and it seems may have the guts to finally hit the metropolitan elite's BBC.

Labour called the people "nasty" and the no-confidence Tories called their own party, and by extension, its core vote, "nasty". That is how useless and out of touch both lots of Oxbridge graduates are.

They don't want real politics, they don't want a raucous PMQs, they don't want to really challenge each other and fight for ideas and ideals and ideologies because both sides have none - apart from serving the Establishment, and because both sides "are in it together". They want consensus, they want committees, they want Russel Brand to speak to them and give them the benefit of his "knowledge" and "advice" in Parliamentary committeesr in his kitchen, they want a circus, a show, a spin and a spectacle because that is the only way they know to appeal to the people.

But is shallowness, lack of fight, cosy consensus and lack of guts is exactly why politics has got real again and is appealing to real people again and is no longer just an Oxford Debating Society academic's game.

Farage is back, UKIP's NEC refused to accept his resignation, and Farage is quoted as saying "the fight is here". The SNP turned up in town today and they look like a formidable crew. Twenty year old Mhairi Black has more fight in her than the entire crew of Labour leadership candidates combined. She's not metropolitan, she's not Oxbridge, she's real and she will fight for real people. There won't be any consensus, the SNP and UKIP are up for the fight. God help Labour if they don't get it right.

[Tanith]

You could ask exactly the same question of the Right. And probably get the same answer.

Some people on the Left patronise and sneer; some people on the Right patronise and sneer.

Labour claims it's the party of hardworking people. So do the Conservatives.

I'm sorry, but this is all just navel-gazing pontification and I don't recognise any of it from real life.

[claig]

But the right patronise ad sneer less. They don't mock England flags, they don't use metropolitan lines like "pale, stale and male" unless they are the politically correct modernisers, they don't call people like Mrs Duffy "bigoted", they don't call huge portions of thw working class and middle class sexist, racist and homophobic and they don't penalise aspiration. Lots of the metropolitan modernising right are politically correct but not as politically correct as the left.

'Labour claims it's the party of hardworking people. So do the Conservatives.'

But which one of them did the 'hardworking people' believe.

As David Miliband said "you can't blame the people, the voters and say that they didn't get it"

[heylilbunny]

"pale, stale and male" is going to be a massive turnoff for white men - imagine if it was "pale, stale and female". Why do they do such stupid things? If you insulted other groups in this way Labour would be the first to condemn you - at the top of their lungs.

[Tanith]

I am a voter.

I don't believe the Left sneer or patronise any more than the Right and I don't recognise any of this thread from real life. I mix with all social backgrounds.

I do see a lot of sneering and patronising in the media and on here - from both sides. Those that indulge are as bad as each other.

[AuntieStella]

"I don't recognise any of this thread from real life"

That's one of the strengths of MN (when it doesn't turn just plain nasty). It helps remind you that the views of you and your circle are not the only ones. Nor the only reasonable/correct/beneficial possible world view.

[MissMuffetisin]

So the left are sneering and patronising
Perhaps they should take David Cameron's advice and " calm down dear"

[RosaGertrudeJekyll]

So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave

Yes! Seen exactly this on these boards time and time and time again.