Why do the middle classes vote Labour?
Socialist governments… always run out of other people’s money.
There’s something suspicious about the incoming UK general election that appears to have already been announced as won by the Labour party. That’s not from winning the race, but rather the competitors evidently not even competing. The ‘Liberal’ party is hoping any lack of distinction between their policies and Labour might be obliterated by their leader Ed Davey falling off inflatables into rivers, while the Tories have been so busy laying the undercoat for leftist policies that they might as well go home and put their overalls in the wash.
The labour victory will of course be an answered prayer for the young, who believe political parties are the answer to all societal ills, rather than often contributing to them, while the middle class will be chinking their Waitrose Prosecco in salutation to the admittedly well-deserved demise of a Conservative party that lost its values down the back of a globalist summit sofa. Welcome to the red globalists rather than the blue ones.
The affluent middle class support of left wing politics is one of the more baffling phenomenons. That said the higher ‘classes’ have always enjoyed patronising the ‘lower’ ones: remember the Brexit smear of Little Englanders by those with university degrees in mostly-twoddle. Voting for a governmental system promising increased State intervention into their lives when they have expended a great deal of energy extraditing themselves from the nanny state feels like trampoline gymnasts campaigning for the banning of trampolines. We hate the Tories they say, while voting to pay higher tax; if you’re that bothered why not pay an additional 10% of your income to charity? It’s probable that the middle classes still buy and even read the Guardian without having noticed how insane it has become. Bad habits preclude thinking of better ones.
You’d have thought that having been locked in our houses to evade a coronavirus that was harmless to the majority of people would have been a red flag for the dangers of governmental powers, but apparently not. Labour, the longer and harder lockdown party - which reads like the sort of sticker you’d have found inside west end London phone boxes - are now the party of choice. The lockdowns contributed to the cost of living crisis which the Tories and Labour are now promising to solve despite having caused it. It’s like a garage offering a discount on repairing body work from the dent they made.
The UK’s Labour party traditionally represented the working class, so long as they behaved and adhered to the Labour metropolisim of not hanging England's national flag from their houses, which is likely as they are frequently patriotic, something the politician saps in Westminster deeply disapprove of. Keir Starmer was recently caught struggling to define who the working class even are. He sounded like a man who had been staring out the window - presumably imagining huge banners of his face hanging down Whitehall - during his pre-briefing session on whom he was supposed to be representing. He looked like a man blagging having done his home work when he clarified that the working class are people with ordinary goals who go out to, well, work.
There’s actually nothing the Labour party hates more than working class people who have worked hard enough to find themselves middle class and no longer have any need for state support and handouts. The Left prefer guaranteed supporters who rely upon their redistribution of wealth. There’s nothing Starmer likes more than to bang on about his working class roots and how he became a middle class success story, this of course occurred under the Thatcher Conservative government who came into power when he was 17 years old and left power when he was 29. Perhaps he blames the Tories for his belief that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis.
In many ways working class is one of these frequently used, yet meaningless phrases. It has been provided for us by politicians to aid them in their pursuit of ruling us. It’s similar to ‘key workers’ in the pandemic that elevated some professions above all others. Eulogised grinning NHS workers were encouraged to perform idiotic TicToc dance routines rather than doing any actual ‘key’ work. In fact, everyone is a key worker. When you’re working to provide for yourself, your family, to pay bills and hopefully giving your life purpose, then you’re a key worker. The middle class tend to believe that people’s lives are the government’s responsibility; other than their own of course.
Starmer has already stated that he chooses Davos over Westminster, which will appeal to the middle classes keen on supranational governing rather than being ruled over at a national level. After all, many middle classes are Remainers, and are likely to be voting for Labour to take us back into the jolly EU so they can buy villas in Spain again. However, it’s unclear if they’ve noticed European populations voting for more conservative right wing politicians as they grow slightly less enamoured with seemingly completely unregulated mass immigration. Certainly the London middle classes seem to love immigration and consider it a human right to enter the UK, so long as immigrants set up a diversity of restaurants. They are not competing with newcomers for homes or jobs, and turn a wilful blind eye to negatives of immigration while supporting the ban on stop & search by police despite the proliferation of machetes and zombie knives on the streets that are unlikely to end up up embedded in their sides. They can afford luxury beliefs that only affect others.
The middle class voting Labour in are perhaps hoping to offset the guilt they've been taught to feel for what they’ve achieved in life. However, I suspect that the middle class over the next 10 years are going to find the closeted reality enabling their luxury, performative beliefs is no longer going to protect them from the consequences of their 'liberal' ideas. By that time they might even understand that shovelling more billions into the insatiable NHS money furnace doesn’t improve outcomes; that the entire system its broken.
The middle class probably feel rather positive about Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas exploration, as it’s bad for our planet, and there’s no planet B they remind themselves while pouring glasses of mineral water from disposable plastic bottles. North sea gas is presumably far worser for the earth than the gas that we will subsequently have to import. The ban is also likely to mean a £4.5 billion tax revenue shortfall, although I’m confident the middle classes will happily to part with even more of their hard-earned cash to compensate.
If that isn’t alarming enough, Keir Starmer has described the Welsh Government as a “blueprint” for “what Labour can do across the U.K.” Using the success story of wales as inspiration for anything has all the advisability of using the blueprint of a breeze block to design an arrow. Welsh Labour have presided over the slowing down of transport to pre-1930s levels, the highest business rates of anywhere in Britain, and an economy that has shrunk by 1 per cent since 2018. Wales is even eyeing a four-day week pilot for the public sector, which frankly might be an improvement on services currently provided, and has already trialled universal basic income, where people are paid regardless of whether they do any work or not. The university of Salford, clearly gooey-eyed over the idea of people getting money from the State regardless as to how they spend it or their time, reports that ‘Wales contends with high and long-standing levels of poverty, with some areas having the highest in the UK. That has been exacerbated by the economic fallout of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.’ Yes, apparently it was the pandemic that caused societal collapse and deprivation. Covid might have given some people a rotten cold, and in very rare occasions killed very old people with co-morbidities, but it was authoritarian state intervention, of which Labour so keenly supported, that destroyed an economy that they are now proclaiming to save.
What we’re facing is the suspiciously deliberate lack of competition from oppositional parties. We have a Labour government committed to Agenda 2030 with five years to impose its aims. This of course carried out by new Labour MPs marinated in Net Zero, critical race theory, and gender ideology from schooling in which protecting feelings is more important than winning (which makes everyone a loser), most of whom will never have held down a job that you can draw or explain the purpose of in less than fifty words. These will be the people who like to be in control of how we live our lives. Do any of us really know what we’re voting for?
I think part of the reason is that many people have no idea how things work, they are over educated and clueless about real life. Try asking them basic questions and watch the blank looks. Of course they don't need to know as long as they can call someone who does when something needs fixing or replacing, but this lack of understanding makes them very susceptible to the conmen and women who pretend to govern us.
Brilliant! I think they do it because the Guardian tells them to.