Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

With the above in mind, though, I am wary about giving TOO much credibility to the idea that Labour these days = 'elite London metropolitan middle-classes who don't understand the real working class'.

It's a huge oversimplification, and one that very much suits current Conservative spin lines. And it ignores things like Labour vote holding up much better among the working class in cities, and Labour leadership under Corbyn still having people like John McDonnell, child of a docker and a cleaner who grew up in Liverpool slums. And big shifts like city demographics getting younger while towns get older while age is an increasing factor in inequality, and a lot of Northern/Midlands towns having become more middle-class in demographic anyway over the past 20 years or so as they become commuter satellite towns for the cities - like Stockport now has a very poor working class living alongside an increasingly wealthy middle class.

But there is still a gradual move of Labour away from its traditional base and away from policies which support that base, and this started right back with New Labour, and that current Labour has allowed a lot of people with loud voices who aren't from that base but claim to speak to for it to shout over everybody else (literally in some CLP meetings). And when you respond to any criticism or disagreement with "fuck off and join the Tories", turns out some people do.

Interesting article. Working class northern Tory MPs ON PURPOSE (plus, sigh, one keen on GRA reform). It does seem that the Tories had much more savvy in this campaign than we - let alone the oblivious Woke Twatterati cult - realised.

I looked the Tory manifesto and thought it was very clever in this respect. There is photo after photo of candidates who are teachers, nurses, police officers, doctors, charity workers, a sheep farmer, and of all ethnicities. They now have Britain's first openly gay Muslim MP (in one of those supposedly racist Northern constituencies!). It was clear from looking at the manifesto that there was a conscious strategy to move away from the stereotype of Tory MPs as former lawyers and investment bankers. They positioned themselves as the party of the workers, and Labour as the party of the elite.

As regards social mobility, I have been convinced for years that the actual driver of social mobility for the baby boomer generation was nothing particularly to do with grammar schools or government policies but rather the fact that thousands of men had died in the second and first world war.

This phenomenon had two distinct outcomes.

1. By 1950, there were hundreds of thousands of missing adult males between the ages of 30 and 60, who would have been, alternatively, occupying jobs and positions of seniority in the British labour market.

2. Because of these missing men, there were hundreds of thousands of babies that had not been born between 1920 and 1950.

These two outcomes reduced competition for opportunites, employment and advancement for those babies that were born post-1945. In short, there were fewer people above them to impede mobility, and there were less of them than there should have been.

In short, the social mobility of the baby boomers was the result of a quirk of history, not a progressive development. And when we talk about the decline of social mobility today, I suspect we are just reverting back to the norm.

More importantly - far more importantly - there was a ready supply of well-paid working class jobs, so you could live a decent and dignified life if you were either unsuited to a middle-class career, or chose not to take that route in life.

Yes.

Re people feeling like the Conservatives respect them - they don't though, do they? Especially not this particular lot of Conservatives, the Boris Johnsons and Jacob Rees-Moggs don't have a great record on that. I think it's more like something Jess Phillips said post-election, that one of the things she heard again and again on doorsteps was "I don't like Corbyn, I don't trust Corbyn" and when she said "do you like Boris Johnson?" they said "Oh God, no." But, she said, the difference was that people were used to not liking or trusting the Tories - with Labour they feel properly let down.

I think grammar schools now are very different to grammar schools when I was there in the early 80s. Sure there were middle class kids but there were more kids from the local council estates than middle class ones. My grammar school was near dartford which had 3 big council estates & was before right to buy came in so majority working class

The mix gave me a chance to meet ppl whose parents had been to university and/or had professional jobs. I didn’t know anyone who’d been to university - no one in my family had.

DH is sane background as me but unlike him his sister didn’t go to the local grammar & the difference in their outlook, beliefs, lives despite having the same upbringing is massive

I think it's really difficult to compare going to university now with going to university 35+ years ago before the big drive for more graduates.

How do you compare the choice of an 18 year old to do a journalism degree at an ex poly in 2019 with a 16 year old joining the local newspaper in 1985?

How do you compare somebody taking a well paid manual job that could support an entire family in 1972 with a graduate working for Deliveroo in 2019?

I was referring to religious orthodoxy, especially as it affects girls

Ah, I see. My parents are actually both Catholic, and not very serious about it, so I have little experience of that, beyond the inherent misogyny of Catholicism, and it was tempered anyway by going to a girls' Catholic grammar school with very feminist teachers. In fact, the only orthodoxy we were sold was that getting married and having kids was Bad Feminism, and to be avoided in favour of a career, contributing to the world, and financial independence. I'd like to think they've moderated that stance a little bit now. It was pretty much a British lower-middle class version of the Indian school featured on Netflix's Daughters of Destiny documentary, if you've seen that (if not, it's worth a watch).

No grammars here, meaning that the very large majority of those who did go to uni (and did proper degrees, not Mickey Mouse ones) couldn't go to the local one as grades weren't good enough. People who then got very good degree results too btw, so they weren't just not smart enough.

I can well believe it. For all their talk about "lived experience", the Woke are not prepared to listen to other people's lived experience if it doesn't conform to their narrow world-view.

Quite. As another aspect to this: two of my eight greatgrandparents were not white. I see myself as white because that's how I "look" and so do my parents and how I am perceived to "look". But the British working class has been multi-ethnic for a long time, particularly for those whose ancestors came from industrial port cities, as some of mine did. Another thing the bourgeois Woke don't understand at all.

A bit of a lightbulb moment for me. I would almost certainly class as an anywhere, except growing up I felt like a nowhere (boarding school, distant parents etc). A sense of belonging has been really important. Possibly why my sympathies lie with the somewheres, even though am surrounded by anywheres.

I sort of dug deep wherever I lived, learning the language and having local friends rather than rely on a readily available expat community. I also acquired a couple of 'adoptive mums', one Jewish in New York, and one Muslim in Asia, and spent a few months living with them and their families.

I like grounded people.

Equally I gave up quite a classy career when I had children. I wanted them to belong, not be dragged round the world. I certainly did not want them to board. Ironically though central London and the schools they went to proved to be 'anywhere' places, and school friends are already seriously scattered.

Something to think about. Thanks.

Re: grammar schools. My grammar school certainly wasn't a flagship for social mobility, and is probably even less so now. The local house prices alone make sure of that. The demographic was pretty much the same as the very expensive private girls' day school where I later taught.

Fascinating thread. It's the first thing I've read in years that's made me really reconsider my views and where they come from. I'm particularly interested in the educational divide article, as a graduate Remainer with non-graduate Leaver parents. I have accused my DM of unthinkingly voting Leave as a kind of impotent way of 'sticking it to the man'. But I'm now feeling a bit more sympathetic to those who did that. If you don't listen to the people, they are going to do what they can to make you listen.

I voted Lib Dem with a heavy heart in spite of TWAW, but this thread is making me feel a bit less despairing about the GE result even though I loathe Johnson.

Also re. grammar schools - yes, that was my step up too, and I am very grateful for it. It's one of the few things we don't talk about in this house, though, as DH (who is now a senior academic) ended up in a secondary modern where he was told he didn't have the ability to do an O-level in the subject he now teaches. Understandably, he gets quite upset about how the system wrote him off, and made it much more of a struggle for him to get to university.

Hey GC, noodle, how fabulous is this thread and to ‘meet’ each other like this! I love this forum, so many great women here. Are either of you from a mixed background? Did either of you have any problems with orthodoxy if you see what I mean?

Yes, my parents met here - my mother is from an EU country. It's been quite interesting over the last few years observing an underlying tension between the two immigrant communities (i.e. EU vs Commonwealth). There is undoubtedly some resentment amongst those from former Commonwealth countries that the UK went into a relationship with the European Communities straight after passing an immigration law that turned its back on the former colonies. My mother, in turn, resents the fact that she is resented. She dislikes Priti Patel because she sees her attitude to EU citizens in the UK as motivated by her background.

Can you explain what you mean by orthodoxy - I'm not sure I've understood your meaning?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has always come in for a lot of crap from the Woke for daring to talk about this.
I can well believe it. For all their talk about "lived experience", the Woke are not prepared to listen to other people's lived experience if it doesn't conform to their narrow world-view.

I'm an anywhere from a family of mostly somewheres. I don't think I realized how much having lots of somewheres in the family influenced how I feel about things until I started paying attention to the sneering tone from the political class and went, wait a minute, that's my family you're talking about you smug gits.

Likewise.

I don’t understand why people think they will suddenly throw money at the state?

I think lots of people have no faith that either party will help them, but they at least feel that at this moment in time the Conservative party respect them.

That whole parachuting in woke candidates from fuck knows where thing didn't work out so well for Momentum, did it?

It's emblematic of the whole bloody thing, Kitten.

Which btw, re the oh hey these people are talking shit about my family bit, is how I've often found myself looking at someone who as Lang puts it identifies as our representation and going "this person is lying about their background, or at least putting some serious spin on it, because they wouldn't have that noblesse oblige tone if they were really from the background they claim to be from".

(A certain Guardian journalist comes to mind)

Grammar schools were never a great conduit for social mobility, though. In reality social mobility most came from the fact that there was a significant growth in what we would regard as middle class jobs in the thirty years after the end of the Second World War, and that the demand for talent always outstripped supply. More importantly - far more importantly - there was a ready supply of well-paid working class jobs, so you could live a decent and dignified life if you were either unsuited to a middle-class career, or chose not to take that route in life.