OPINION
One of the main differences between Tory parties and Socialist parties is their relative attitudes towards working class people. On the whole Tories quite like working class people and want them to get on in life; Socialists, by contrast, consider working class people voting fodder and a monolithic group who are not individuals.
The main difference between the two groups is that Tory ‘grandees’ (Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Sir Keith Holyoake, for example) understand the mindset – which is quite conservative – of working class people and can parlay this winning ‘hearts and minds’ into political success. Socialist politicians, generally speaking, do not understand how working class people think. Instead of looking in the mirror to find the sole reason for their lack of political success, they indulge in ludicrous fantasies as to why they always lose; “racism” being the most common excuse trotted out in modern times.
A story I always enjoy telling, because it’s the classic example of what I mean, is an area of Glasgow known as the Gorbals.
A century ago this was an appalling slum district: probably the poorest part of the entire British Empire. It is difficult to convey how people in the Gorbals lived although the novel No Mean City makes a good fist of doing so. Imagine if you will 90,000 people squashed into Auckland Domain living in slum tenements (many of which were deemed unfit for habitation) and you get the general idea.
The Gorbals had a sufficient number of people squashed into it to warrant its own constituency in the House of Commons – geographically the smallest constituency in Britain. Try to visualise an area the size of the Auckland Domain being its own electorate; the overcrowding is just mindboggling.
Between the end of World War I and November 1935 there were seven general elections in Britain. At each election the Labour party (and Communist party!) would do its predictable routine of stating the obvious about the poverty everyone in the Gorbals endured, then promised they would get this, that and the other from socialism (blah, blah, blah) – you know the sort of thing.
The Tory candidates at these elections were an aristocratic grandee Robert McClennan, the younger son of a Highlands earl; James Erskine Harper (old Etonian); and Maurice Bloch, a business tycoon. Their election campaigns focused on King, Country, Empire and the Tory party election policies. All were ‘demonised’ by their Labour and Commie opponents for their wealth and privilege.
One bizarre Labour election tactic in 1929 was to claim, “Maurice Bloch spends more each day on lunch than you earn in a month.” Whether this claim was true or not, you can see that pathetic ‘politics of envy’ by the left isn’t exactly a new thing.
On election day at these various elections the Tory candidates received between 8,000 and 11,000 votes – to the astonishment of the Labour party. The socialists simply couldn’t believe these voting figures: that so many of the poorest people imaginable would vote Tory time and time again. It’s my view these Gorbals folk were basically snobs – they absolutely loved the idea of voting for an aristocrat, or rich business tycoon driving about in a Rolls Royce! Even today I suspect Jacinda Ardern reading this essay (and I know she secretly reads all my BFD posts) simply won’t ‘get it’ – she will have no idea why so many people in the Gorbals always voted Tory.