Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

My dad has been complaining about the destruction of the grammar schools for as long as I can remember, since well before Blair actually. Even though he didn't go to one (his route out was via a trade union that taught him what it turned out were highly portable skills).

GC, Bovary, Noodle - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has always come in for a lot of crap from the Woke for daring to talk about this.

Me too. I hadn't been aware of the concept but it's what I see here all around me.

I think grammar schools were gone long before that - abolished in 1965 I think. Kent was one of the few places that hung onto them. It was my route out - bsck thej no one I knew had coaching to get in so it was mix of kids of all classes & backgrounds

Kit19

I think fundamentally no party is willing to be honest about why they want immigration because the real reason is the demographic time bomb that is the baby boomer generation. They are a demographic time bomb because they are an unusually large generation but that also means they have the most voting power.

I have tried having this conversation with members of my own family of that age and it is extremely difficult to do as they always take it as an insult when it really isn't a case of blaming them for being a large generation but the need to acknowledge the problems this presents as the approach retirement age.

If I find it hard to have a sensible conversation with my own, largely mild mannered, family on the issue it is hardly surprising politicians don't want to touch that hornet's nest so instead talk around it.

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.

The somewhere v anywhere thing is something I find v interesting as technically I fit into both camps.

Key bit here.

A key tactic by Conservative HQ was to put local candidates in the northern “red wall” seats, and Young thinks that was a winning formula

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

On the issue of moving, there is a sociologist I think who talked about the concept of 'rootedness' being an underexamined factor.

Almost certainly not the one you mean, but Joan C Williams is an American academic who speaks very well about the class differences in valuing rootedness as opposed to opportunity as it pertains to class in the US, but much of it also applies to the UK. She did an excellent presentation on this at the LSE.

www.lse.ac.uk/International-Inequalities/Videos-Podcasts/Why-did-Trump-win-Overcoming-Class-Cluelessness-in-America

The related book is also excellent.

BovaryX Noodle GC - white Caucasian here but with a history of being raised in non-white places. Women playing the "traditional" role of raising children, providing produce etc but still ruling the roost. There's no way they'd accept the shit that's going on here, even though there'd be a male chief of each village.

I was born in the 1970s on a council estate to working class parents and we were skint growing up. However I got out (grammar school, uni) as did my sisters. I & they are now middle class.

i absolutely do not want to dole out benefits to a grateful peasantry, I want working class people to have what I had - a chance! My parents wanted us to have a better life than they did (mum horrendous life when her mother died at 8 Abd her father remarried an alcoholic unable to bring up her children & leaving my mum to do it even though she was only 14, dad one of 9 whose father buggered off and left his mum)

My parents had shit poor childhoods with no chances and wanted us to have a better life. What I want to know is where ppl lost hope that their lives could improve? Growing up I don’t remember a sense of ‘this is how it is and you’re powerless’ . Is there any possibility of bringing back a belief that it is possible for things to change if you get given a chance? And of course to give people those chances?

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-boriss-babies-theyre-young-fun-and-working-class-qr59rrhrp?shareToken=7bb7b762ae09c5b70e8de36490347fa2

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.

It's so refreshing to find I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

My preferred option for Brexit would have been to remain in the EU but for the government to address all the causes for the vote to leave - ie listen to the people and make life better here. Ha! Naivety in a nutshell. They already can make life better within the EU, they just choose not to. They already can restrict immigration, they just choose not to. They already can improve public services, they just choose not to. What a mess.

DH and I were talking about Alan Johnson being angry with the Momentum guy and we thought there aren't really any politicians with gravitas, passion and experience. They all seem to be bubble-dwelling career politicians who have absolutely no idea what it's like to live payday to payday. What hope is there?

I think the following article from the Guardian is terribly relevant to this conversation; it's from 2016, and it's a pity that no-one in the Labour party seems to have paid attention. It seems incredibly prescient considering the result of last week's election:

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/05/trump-brexit-education-gap-tearing-politics-apart

As a brief summary, the author, David Runciman, argues that the main divide in education is based on education, and that the education divide doesn't translate into a divide between ignorance and knowledge, but between different class interests. Being more educated doesn't mean that you are more right, but that you are more capable of making what are essentially self-serving arguments.

It's kind of easy to see how that works in terms of the election; middle-class Londoner Labour candidates argue that what they want is the best for the country - bearing in mind that quite often what they want is to dole out benefits to a grateful peasantry - and whilst the working classes of the midlands and the north may not be able to marshal arguments as effectively, they can still chose to go to the ballot box, and put a cross against the name of the Tory candidate.

Indeed. My best friend is Portuguese and she is baffled as to why we don’t remove non contributing individuals after 90 days. They certainly do there but successive British governments have chosen not to.

I have been a life long labour voter but could not vote for Corbyn as I don’t think he could run a bath let alone a country. I was hoping for a hung parliament but instead we have a conservative majority who will be keen to roll back the state even further. To be fair to them, they have never pretended to be different. Conservatism is about small state. What I am still struggling to get my head around is people in a dire situation eg like the ppl on bbc the other day living in a bed sit & dependent on food banks voting conservative because they wanted a change because their labour MP has done nothing for them. Genuinely who do they think has formed the government since 2010?

The conservatives have been in government since 2010 & could have made many changes to housing for example but choose not to. I don’t understand why people think they will suddenly throw money at the state? I don’t mean that sarcastically btw I mean it genuinely.

It's funnybisntnit, how do many pictures of India and Africa are pictured of poverty. When I visited my grandmother in Mumbai, she lived in a flat with a cook and 2 servants! My 70 year old mother's Nanny died recently aged in her 90's. She lived with our family until then, looking after the children, Jacob Rees-Mogg style

In fact every single perfectly reasonable complaint on this thread is a failure of Westminster not Europe. The chances of Westminster actually addressing these issues, while bogged down for decades in scrambling around for trade deals are extremely slim.

Well said.

I wish people would be tougher on Westminster instead of blindly accepting reasons like we can't afford to do this or we aren't allowed to do that.

Same background here. A female relative tells of how she cried and cried when she first came here. Because she had to do housework for the first time. They had lived in what, in the UK, would be classed as a mansion.

But isn’t that partly because many Asians from Uganda and Kenya had an upper middle class lifestyle? It must have been a shock to have gone from a villa in Kampala with a driver and a maid to anywhere in the UK in the 1970s
My dad was Asian from Kenya and you're exactly right. They were mostly government workers and civil servants. They had British passports and lived an upper middle class life with servants. My mother lived the same life in Mumbai. People who can't understand how Priti Patel, who was a refugee herself is how she is maybe think she was like a Syrian refugee fleeing a war zone. Many of my friends and family were expelled from East Africa. Many are quite right wing. Probably because they were expelled by a hard left regime.They made very successful lives for themselves but They were middle class in India and had the education and the means to move to Africa in the first place.Same as eu migrants now. The ones that move are the more resourceful from those countries in the main.

However, in practice, there are all kinds of things that could simple free movement for all unjust. Because there is also a sort of right to the integrity of the local community, to keep the results of your own labour, to a relationship with place. Not to mention mundane things like how the community governs itself and so on.

These are fair point, but, this is all rather descending into blaming the EU for choices successive Westminster governments have made.

In the EU freedom of movement is a qualified right. Individual nations can remove non-contributing individuals after 90 days. Westminster chose not to do this.

More local governance has always been an option that Westminster failed to implement. I have touched on Labour's failure to support real devolution, the Tories are worse.

In fact every single perfectly reasonable complaint on this thread is a failure of Westminster not Europe. The chances of Westminster actually addressing these issues, while bogged down for decades in scrambling around for trade deals are extremely slim.

Well-off professional class people tend to be less rooted but for those who are poorer or who have spent their whole lives in one place, whose relatives all live close by, or lack skills in demand elsewhere, it is far more unsettling or even threatening if you are involuntarily rooted in an area in such a way to see it change around you
Yes. There is a world of difference between me voting remain because I want my children to have the opportunity to live and work in Europe and go on Erasmus like I did, my friends fretting about how theyre going to get their next an pair, and many the people I've worked with in the past who have worked in factories all their lives and suddenly find themselves surrounded at work by Eastern Europeans speaking their own language to each other until eventually they were let go, never to work again. They werent thick or racist. They were just defeated. That was new Labour's fault and has led to this, but the worst thing for me is that some of the people on the same side as me have shown themselves up as nasty, classist and sneering.