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Maggie
Thatcher had it just right; she knew exactly the voter that she should appeal
to. He was dubbed ‘Mondeo man’, typified by the Essex diamond geezer who had
set up his own business, and did well
under the Tories. Another phenomenon was the ‘barrow boy’, the young guy from
East London, Basildon, Southend who became a dealer in the City after the
‘big-bang’ (another Maggie revolution) sent the 3-hour lunch traditional
city-types into history.
Their
standard tipple was champagne instead of lager. They drove Beemers. They were
working class, sons and daughters of dockers and Dagenham wage-slaves. But they
had ambition, drive, guts, and a risk-taking mentality.
Two
Thatcherite measures were revolutionary in that they created a new class of
proletarian capitalists, the ‘property owning democracy’.
The
first was the sale of council houses at heavily discounted prices. It brought
home-ownership to millions who earlier could only have dreamt of it. The
economic effect was immeasurable, giving a valuable asset to people who
formerly had none. It slashed the deficits on Councils’ housing revenue
accounts. Many sold expensive inner-city properties when the moratoria on
re-sale expired, and bought nicer houses in the suburbs; social mobility in
action!
Now
first-time buyers have been virtually forced out of the market by the failure
of Government housing policies leading to rapid price-inflation.
The
second was the opportunity for ordinary people to become small shareholders
when they got preferential treatment in the ‘Tell Sid’ privatisation of
nationalised industries. It’s a mystery why Cameron failed to do this with
Royal Mail.
1980
to 1990 was a golden, exciting age. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
but to be young was very heaven’.
But
more than 20 years ago I predicted that a political vacuum was being created
post-Maggie by the abandonment by all parties of the great mass of
predominantly white, working-class people. The emphasis switched to the rights
– real or imagined – of minorities ((a former Mayor of London vouchsafed that
if you bribed enough minorities with council grants you ended up with a
majority).
By
2000 or thereabouts politicians with working class backgrounds were becoming an
endangered species. The old sons-of-toil who had worked on the factory floor or
down the pit, and had served during the war, were the victims of change and
time and were mostly displaced by college boys. Middle-class Labour councillors
would prescribe all-in wrestling as the entertainment of choice at the local
theatre for ‘our people’, when actually the man from the Ford Tractor factory
wanted something rather more cerebral and his little daughter wanted the
ballet.
(Incidentally
the Essex Farmers Hunt was heavily biased towards second-hand car salesmen
made-good, people in ‘tyres’, small builders and so on. The wrong target for
the class-warriors).
Under
Brown, when regulation of the City was almost scrapped, the professional spivs
moved in from around the globe and we went into freefall in 2008.
Governments
have pursued causes fashionable amongst the Notting Hill elites, such as
banning fox hunting, and smoking just
about everywhere, gay ‘marriage’, whilst the economy went to hell in a
handcart, unemployment rose uncontrollably, retirees saw their investment
incomes collapse when interest rates went south, pitiful educational standards
produced a generation of illiterates, and the NHS veered between crisis and
scandal.
They
fostered the great myth of the ‘multicultural society’. We will long suffer the
consequences of that misguided price of social engineering.
And
involved Britain in a pointless war in Afghanistan, the longest continuous
conflict ever whilst slashing the defence budget to pay for a 37% increase in
foreign aid.
Immigration
has only recently become a respectable topic of conversation amongst the
chattering classes, who have belatedly woken up to the fact that it has become
a major political issue, especially amongst those who, unlike the elite, have
to live with the consequences of a flood of aliens.
The
Tories must appeal to ‘white van-man’.
Too
many politicians are recruited from people of the wrong sort. They represent a
class that has no means of understanding the concerns of what used to be known
as ‘People of the middling-sort’, the aspirational working-class family who
want to get on.
Today,
politicians of all stripes are almost wholly alienated from the people. They
have no idea whatsoever what it is like trying to bring up a family when jobs
are uncertain, education is questionable, law-and-order tends to fix on
criminalising ordinary folk with a whole spate of new offences that would have
been regarded as either risible or oppressive a decade earlier. Hate speech,
indeed. Smoking in the pub.
The
Westminster village where the political elite lives – not just politicians but
their camp-followers in the media, lobbyists, PR hacks and the rest - is like a
US ‘gated community’. Its denizens know little and care less about what happens
outside the gates.
But,
as the old cliché would have it, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. UKIP is filling it.
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