Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

My Dad stopped voting Labour years ago after being not-quite called a racist by a Labour councillor for pointing out that the recent influx of Polish labourers were undercutting his prices, and how was he supposed to deal with that in an industry without unionisation? (No solutions were offered btw, just insults.)

One of his justifications of voting Tory is that they treat benefits as a necessary evil, one to rely on short term and then get on to something self sustaining. By contrast, he thinks Labour want to have a class of people long term dependent on benefits, that it suits their ideas of the working class as a people who are dependent on the state, rather than the backbone of the country that he views himself as.

For him there's a lot more dignity in the Conservative narrative and it actually sounds a lot closer to the old narrative of the Labour party. Labour used to be the party of the workers - something people could be proud of - now it's the party for the vulnerable and needy, and whilst it is an admirable aim there are many people who don't want to label themselves as that.

That’s very interesting about the necessary and contingent city John. I hadn’t heard those terms before.

I live and work in the West End so necessary city in both parts of my life. And yes there is a lot of money lavished on parts of my village. Specifically I work in Mayfair where there is rarely a leaf out of place. But we also really struggle with homelessness as I’ve mentioned before on this thread. My local high st (quite a well known street) is a hub for homeless people (mainly Roma) and begging day and night. There’s a small shanty town of tents that pops up now and again on the route of my walk to work. It is also virtually impossible to get a GP - I have just left one which became overwhelmed by serving the transient population here. So although parts of this place are buffed to perfection we also have a great deal of stress and pressure which the local council struggles to deal with.

I keep making the point about Roma because I think the Roma issue encapsulates a lot of what is being said. Most of the Roma gangs here are not quite trafficked but it’s certainly organised. There are groups of women and some children with a male minder, carving up the street and targeting particular venues. They are in my particular area as it has a very large Arab population who are under a religious requirement to give alms particularly to children. Overnight every single doorway is occupied - again usually by a group of women and one man. The children don’t seem to be sleeping out though thankfully.

The issue highlights the one of the downsides of untrammelled immigration which of course we are not allowed to talk about as well as the fact that this particular group of homeless people do not want help in the way that we would imagine homeless people want help.

What can our local council do? Absolutely nothing it seems. So we live with seeing this awfulness on our streets and get inured to the degradation.

Sorry, I haven't read the whole thread.

I've been thinking about poor working class people voting Conservative as being a bit like women being less likely to convict rapists.

When you're working your fingers to the bone and only just getting by, it's easy to lack sympathy for people making no effort and being only a little worse off. However, I think there is an element of thinking, "If it's their fault they are on benefits, then it means it won't happen to me."

There is definitely an element of racism going on amongst working class voters. Saying that Labour didn't listen to legitimate concerns about immigration is right, but widening this to say that a disturbingly large amount of people are not the racist little shits they actually are is wrong. Racism had a massive contribution to Brexit (this is spoken from personal experience as someone married to an immigrant in one of the Brexit voting Northern towns).

And finally, I think that Labour is failing because it appears to be emasculated to working class men. In the seventies, Labour was all about worker's rights, Power to the People, Down tools and walk out! It was a very masculine message. Now it's seen as being a yoghurt weaving club. The vision of left-wing working class masculinity is Skint. In contrast, the Conservatives offer an image to working class men of reclaiming their sovereignty, taking back their country, etc. All of which is much more manly.

I still haven't quite collated these thoughts into proper form, but I hope you get the idea about the masculinity thing. Hopefully you can get the gist without my words being ideal.

I haven't visited London in a long time and am a bit scared to do so, honestly, just because it would be so sad to see the things I liked most about it lost.

One’s perceptions of London are heavily influenced by a personal notion of what London actually is as a place. This one may take a little explaining...

Academics talking about the urban experience often talk about the ”necessary city” and the “contingent city”. The necessary city is made up from iconic places; in London’s case this would be made up of locations such as the West End, Soho, landmarks like Tower Bridge or Hyde Park, and so on. The contingent city, meanwhile, are all the places which are required for the parts of the necessary city to function. This can include roads and railways, but also places in which people live.

People generally consider the necessary city more “real” than the contingent city. People don’t like change in the necessary city, but can actively welcome change to the contingent city, if they perceive it as being in their interest; it’s okay to knock down a hundred houses to build a relief road, providing it’s not your house being knocked down.

The idea of what constitutes necessary or contingent will vary, based upon whether you are an “anywhere” or a “somewhere”. If you grew up in Leytonstone, the local landscape is probably of some importance to you; if you grew up elsewhere, it’s probably just somewhere you sleep, whilst you live a life which is mostly focused around central London.

Because policy is created by “anywheres”, the quality of life in contingent London has markedly decreased, as resources have been concentrated on serving necessary London. In the aforementioned Leytonstone, the family homes of twenty years ago have been replaced by what are essesentially barracks, housing Eastern European workers, eight to a room. Meanwhile, central London, focus of the “anywheres”, is looking more opulent than ever before...

I don't know if I think that's quite such a universal attitude, that scroungers and working class people are the same. Or even that the poor and scroungers are the same, I don't think most middle class lefties think that.
I do think sometimes people can be a little naive, and sometimes in that discussion middle class and working class people talk past each other a bit.
My experience has been that when socialists seem blasé about scrounging, it is for a few reasons. They think there will always be a portion of dishonest people and while we might want to minimise that we won't prevent it; that it is better to have some of that then people in need going without; that sometimes it is difficult to tell for sure if someone is really being lazy and dishonest or if there are other issues.

And personally, I would agree with all of those things. Maybe most of all I agree though that scroungers are by no means the biggest parasites in our society so I am not inclined to demonise them more than the high-end variety who get on the covers of magazines and such.

But it's also true I think that the way you structure social supports affects things like values around work, people's attitudes to taking advantage, more broadly. And maybe that can undermine social values around hard work, saving, and so on. I also know, because there are a number of people in my extended family who are to some degree like that, that it is an insidious mindset. They are not out to bilk their fellow citizens, but they have few qualms about large faceless entities. For the most part they see it as what they are owed as citizens, these are programs and benefits that they have a right to. Those of us in the family though can see that they are not being quite honest perhaps, especially not with themselves.
And it's pretty maddening when you see it in front of you, when someone is doing very well by being dishonest, even just a little dishonest, while you are struggling. Values like independence and hard work really require a lot of community support in order to flourish.

I think “scrounger” is the wrong word, though, in that these are benefits to which people are entitled; the issue is more that the benefits system has created a set of perverse incentives which runs counter to a culture of financial independence and mutual self-support.

Some people ARE benefit scroungers. Middle class socialists don't seem to be able to distinguish between working class people and scroungers. Anyone who's lived in the rougher areas of town and is from a lower class background knows that there are people who'd rather do anything than work for a living in a minimum wage job and would rather doss about claiming benefits. Working class people take great pride in working hard and providing for their families, they occasionally become unemployed and have to claim benefits, and when the economy is on the downturn this may be for some time. Others couldn't give a shit about working hard and feel the state is there to provide for them, despite never contributing much to it themselves. It's not a sin to acknowledge that these people exist, it's just important not to demonize those who do want to work and don't have the opportunity. Working class people strive to distinguish themselves from benefit scroungers, they couldn't think of anything worse than to be seen as belonging to this category, it's shameful. Middle class socialists don't seem to get this and see us all as one and the same, in a very patronising, paternalistic manner.

Things like attitudes to social security recipients- the less income people have the harder they are towards who they perceive to be ‘scroungers’. Whereas my FB is full of ‘give to the most vulnerable’ dialogue.

I would expect that working-class people in general have a better idea of the inequities of the benefit system, and are thus more wary of benefits claimants. What exactly went wrong with the benefits system is a great long essay in itself, and I would not expect most working-class observers to understand all the specifics, but policy decisions, such as the benefit cap, make intuitive sense to people within working-class communities.

To take a concrete example; when I last lived in London (late 2012, or so) I was working for the government, with a professional salary exceeding the median household income. Had I resigned, and started working for 16 hours a week, at minimum wage, I would have been better off by around £100 per month, with an additional 20 hours of spare time. Of course, this example is specific to my then personal circumstances, and changes to tax credits in the last seven years means that this would no longer be true, but it speaks to the working-class objections; these are that the benefits system seems to be designed to give preferential treatment to those who do minimal work, and that government policy militates against working-class economic independence.

What bit are you worried about?. I’ve missed what you think might be gone.

Prodigal

“ I haven't visited London in a long time and am a bit scared to do so, honestly, just because it would be so sad to see the things I liked most about it lost.”

I have a friend who worked abroad and on her return, couldn’t see what I was whining about. So it might be worth a try for you.

Wow this is one of the best threads I’ve ever read on MN!

I’m an anywhere but work somewhere where everyone else is a somewhere.

I find the clash of cultures between my uni educated ‘friends’ on FB and WC colleagues interesting and disturbing.

The WC people I meet are much more socially conservative and social issues are more of a concern to them than economic issues than the liberal academic types I know.

Things like attitudes to social security recipients- the less income people have the harder they are towards who they perceive to be ‘scroungers’. Whereas my FB is full of ‘give to the most vulnerable’ dialogue.

Identity issues dont seem to have hit here yet at all- it’s not commutable to a uni. Even being gay is still seen as gossip worthy. This is poles apart from my MC uni friends who would find this unimaginable.

I think people exist in such small bubbles that they dont see how diverse attitudes are in the country as a whole.

I haven't visited London in a long time and am a bit scared to do so, honestly, just because it would be so sad to see the things I liked most about it lost.

I'm another one whose perceived ethnicity seems to vary depending on environment. It's usually people assuming I'm part of their ingroup rather than people being arseholes, but the rare occasions where it is someone who's actually of my own ethnicity assuming that I'm in the "foreign and can be bullied as a result of that" group have certainly been illuminating.

I get a sense that quite a few of us miss the 90s but I think that wonderful thread about london in the 90s is long gone.

Actually university was a big eye opener for me. I'm from an "underclass" kind of place. I went to a posh uni with one of my friends in my last post. It was a very different world.

I miss the 90s.

In my experience (what I've witnessed) people who ask where are you from...no where are you really from... Are usually the same skin colour as the people they're asking. I'm thinking of my two closest friends, one is black her parents Nigerian, and the other is Asian and her parents are from India. When out with both of them, it was always men (never saw a woman ask), of the same skin colour as them, who'd press them on where they are "really" from. (London was never accepted as an answer). Maybe because the area we are from is quite a mixed area racially, maybe in a high/predominantly white area it would be different?

well, none of this shit gets carrots peeled, does it?

Sorry....two different things that did not overlap.

Or white to be working class.

It came as a massive shock to me when I went to uni (even a long time ago, which it was) and discovered that posh people thought working class and not-white were two different things.

You don’t have to be white to be British.

I don’t think it’s a small minority. Anyone who asks me is clearly saying “You can’t be British because you’re not white”.

AutumnRose1, if I forgot myself and asked you, it’d because I could tell you were a fellow Londoner but suspected you of being from... north of the River.

In my part of London, it’s increasingly unusual for people of my age, who ‘look like me’, to be from here. It’s a surprising effect of gentrification.

FWIW, so much of what you’ve written on this thread resonates, and I share your dismay.